Narrativity

Presentation

In both Europe and Asia, artists and their patrons often produced series of images "telling a story". The images may be distinct and successive, or arranged in scenes within a larger scroll or panel: the idea is always that by going through the whole, you can understand the story. But most of the time, you have to be quite clever and astute to recognize a story you already know, listen to a guide's explanations or read the references in the painting! The final conclusion is therefore rather measured: very often, the images are not enough - and there remains an exciting gap between the images and the story. This book offers several detailed investigations, from Europe to China via the Himalayan and Tibetan worlds, about Lives of Buddha or Lives of Jesus, Kings of the Underworld and visits to Imperial Parks - and even an investigation after a catastrophic flood!

.

Directors

François Jacquesson is a linguist and semiotician at the CNRS. He works on the languages of Northeast India and on images and color systems. He runs the "Caramel" blog on Hypothèses.

Vincent Durand-Dastès is professor of premodern Chinese literature at Inalco and lecturer at the University of Geneva. He devotes his work to the study of the relationship to religion and the supernatural in narrative literature of the late imperial age.

590 pages
16 x 24 cm
Publication: 13/09/2022
ISBN: 9782858314027