Dr Fan Jing Hua

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Abstract

One assumption of comparative studies in literature is language diversity under which cross-cultural interlingual communication takes place, and it may be argued that comparative studies has from its onset trapped in the post-Babel cultural politics of language. With the rise of cultural studies, the boundaries of comparative literature are again made blurred before they were merely defined. One of the most forceful trespassers is visual culture or the visualized culture emerging in the age of internet. The paper demonstrates that the visualized culture has challenged comparative studies in at least the following three areas: 1) cultural national consciousness intrinsic to the consciousness of language, 2) the aesthetic features of language, and 3) the non-real-time nature of interlingual communication in culture and literature. The paper proceeds to take as its starting point the question of "what about pre-Babel," and investigates the semiotic interaction between language and image in the literary genre of ekphrasis. From this perspective, the paper discusses the deficiencies of language-based comparative studies and cross-cultural interlingual communication in the age of visual culture, and proposes an approach for cross-cultural studies from the perspective of interaction between image discourse and verbal discourse.

Keyword(s) :   Cross-cultural interlingual communication; visual(ized) culture; consciousness of language; ekphrasis; image discourse; verbal discourse