The Artistic Object and Its Worlds

Abstract

This issue of the Journal of World Literature seeks to bring together two fields of study that have much in common, but that have been largely separate in practice. Literary scholars rarely discuss films apart from occasional direct adaptations, and while world cinema has sometimes looked at the theoretical framing developed in world literature studies, neither discipline has thought more generally beyond its respective medium. Yet writers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers hardly ever think in terms of disciplinary boundaries, and they do not develop their art with a tunnel vision. Modern writers have all grown up in an expansive mediascape, while many filmmakers have had extensive literary training. The essays in this issue aim to move beyond adaptation studies and intermedial studies to lookmore closely at how ideas circulate betweenmedia, creating for literary and film studies something of the complexity andopenness to each other that the different media themselves have long enjoyed.