Intermediality and interculturality in Jose Juan Tablada's poetry: East Asian culture and the 'visual turn'
Abstract
This thesis investigates two key themes in the Mexican writer José Juan Tablada’s (1871 -
1945) poetry: intermediality between poetic text and visual art, and interculturality between
cultures of East Asia and Mexico. As previous studies have noticed that many of Tablada’s
poems on visual art are also related to East Asian culture, the study finds this point worthy of
further discussion and investigates the potential correlation between interculturality and
intermediality in Tablada’s poetry.
This thesis explores the chronological evolution in Tablada’s poetry collections El florilegio
(1899, 1904), Al sol y bajo la luna (1918), Un día (1919), Li-Po y otros poemas (1920), and El
jarro de flores (1922) as regards their poetic texts, typographical arrangements, and
illustrations. In the early stage, Tablada’s poetry related to East Asian topics shows strong
orientalist influence from French translations. Starting from Al sol y bajo la luna, Tablada’s
poems of East Asian themes intertwine with East Asian visual art including prints and seals. In
Un día, Li-Po y otros poemas, and El jarro de flores, Tablada’s poems use visual presentation
such as illustrations and non-linear typographical arrangements to convey extra-textual
meaning. Chapter One and Two apply Liliane Louvel’s theory of ‘pictoriality’ and scheme of
polarities in ekphrasis to study the intermedial transposition between painting and poetry in
Tablada’s pictorial writing. Chapter Three and Four adopt approaches and conclusions of
cognitive research into the reader’s perception of non-linear poetic texts to discuss the verbal
visuality in Tablada’s visual poetry.
The thesis concludes that, through French and English translations, East Asian culture
influenced Tablada’s intermedial writing and inspired his ‘visual turn’ in poetic composition.
The poetry-painting hybrid form such as ehon, the visual-verbal signifying writing system
known as ideograms, as well as the painter-poet tradition in East Asian culture inspired
Tablada to pursue ‘graphical-lyrical simultaneity’ in poetry and prompted his experiment of
visual writing.
Through the investigation into Tablada’s poetry, this thesis finds that interculturality might lead
to the intermedial writing. This thesis contributes to the study of visual poetry with underlying
influence from East Asian culture.