How does the novel give voice to art in other media? What does it take to render as text what has never existed textually? In this panel, we will be responding to this year’s SNS conference theme of “novel languages” by thinking through the ekphrastic act in its broadest sense, asking and answering questions about what it means to “translate” art or experience from one medium to another, what it might mean for representations of other media in the novel to constitute a language of its own.

Introducing Epiphanies, Brent Hayes Edwards quotes Raymond Williams while discussing the potential music has to capture “something hovering ‘at the very edge of semantic availability.’” He goes on to say that “the resulting music in turn can provoke or compel an attempt to stretch or expand the capacity of literary language to make meaning on the page.” This constant exchange and actualization, “the ongoing, self-conscious, continually recalibrated, and (not least) sensuous work of testing and stretching and redefining the frontiers of articulacy,” is precisely what the novel thrives upon—and precisely what is often underestimated in the novel as form. 

In one way or another, the novel is always using language to a transfigurative end—whether in an ekphrastic moment in a canonical text, in the proferring of prose narrative in a poetic mode, in the irruption of theory or philosophy taken from other contexts, or in perspectives that evade traditional verbalization. As such, we welcome a wide range of papers concerning novels as they relate to other media: presentations applying theoretical paradigms from other media study to the novel, analyzing the influences the novel has had on the history of other media, addressing the representation of other art forms in the novel, or otherwise creatively approaching the subject at hand will all be considered for the panel. 

Taken together, our hope is for these papers to offer an opportunity to investigate the possibilities for translation the language of the novel (and the novel languages it incorporates) allows. 

Abstracts of 250-500 words accompanied by a short professional bio should be submitted via email to brenj@unc.edu by 11:59pm on November 10, 2024. Please reach out to Brennan Jones (brenj@unc.edu) or Joelle Troiano (jft21@duke.edu) with any questions. SNS conference information can be found at https://sites.duke.edu/sns2025/.