Abstract

The highly experimental character and radical stylistic innovations informing twentieth century literature and art brought about extant speculations on and questioning of traditional definitions and delimitations of artforms, media and genres. Joseph Frank's essay "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" , as it introduces in a seminal form a debate that took many directions, throughout the century, on the possibility and viability of narrative within the parameters of new literature, provided the ground for this thesis. Frank, claims that, in defiance of the long respected hetreronomy of signification inherent in verbal and visual mediums, established by G. E. Lessing, the new literature does not convey its meaning by means of a gradually unfolding temporal/causal continuum---traditionally, the foundation of narrative configuration---but, instead, requires a synchronic, spatial reading which, until the emergence of literary abstraction, was only suitable for the viewership of the visual arts. ;In reaction to the above, I am arguing, along with J. Dewey, that, despite the specifications of different mediums, all artworks are experienced in both spatial and temporal ways. If, as J-F. Lyotard contends, narrative form is the fundamental condition of all knowledge that pertains to the meaning of experience, then the spatial textual organization of literature and art does not eliminate the temporal, narrative mode in which their meaning is experienced. However, the temporal unity by which meaning is narrativized is not public quantitative temporality but psychic, private temporality . J-P. Sartre's Nausea is read as a case of overcoming spatial form of existence by narrativizing it on the basis of private temporality. A. Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy is read as an example of hermeneutic re-integration of spatial narrative on a phenomenological level as a temporal, causal continuum by means of Ricoeur's hermeneutic theory and methodology. Finally, as an example of hermeneutic narrative criticism of art, I explore the narrative capabilities of pictorial works representing diametrically opposed styles and pictorial principles, as realism and abstraction, with emphasis on the collages of W. S. Burroughs---a project that investigates the areas in which the confines separating pictorial space and narrative time recede