& --- All dies ist eine kleine Blütenlese oftmals gravierender Irrtümer oder auch ärgerlicher, durchweg vermeidbarer Schlampereien, die - in den Augen des Rezensenten - den Gesamteindruck und -wert der Publikation deutlich schmälern und die Lektüre über weite Strecken unnötig mühsam, nicht selten nervtötend machen, was die Studie gerade mit Blick auf den internationalen Markt nicht eben als Aushängeschild deutscher Anglistik empfiehlt. Schade, denn ein so spannendes, anregendes Thema wie die Millers’ Tales hätte es wahrhaftig verdient, auch in Durchführung und Detail mit der nötigen Sorgfalt und Kompetenz präsentiert zu werden. So bleibt leider ein höchst zwiespältiger Eindruck, zerrissen zwischen den zweifellos wertvollen Informationen, inklusive der durchaus nützlichen Anthologie, die uns der Band bietet, und der im Einzelnen doch dürftigen Darbietung und Kommentierung der Materie. # 3 + $ - # 3 45 4. / D ++ > # +& + E$ - $ * ' 2 % ! 5 ( * 4 & E , ) A" > E, & We have been inundated by a flood of studies on visual culture and on the relationship between words and images in particular in recent years. For this reason one approaches a book with this title warily. However, Horst’s study has circumscribed its domain to a very specific relationship. It aims to analyse works of art “that are realized in two core media - language and the visual” (8). Further criteria for the selection of its set of case studies are firstly, “conscious intermediality”, i.e. deliberate use of different media according to Horst, secondly, meta-mediality, i.e. reflection of the use of media within the work of art, and thirdly, a political message (10). Although the first parameter for selection seems almost repetitive and unnecessary given the title of the study, it turns out to be the least explicit. The structure of the book is based on the author’s heuristic assumption about successive stages in the development of intermedial art in the 20 th century - modernism, conceptualism and new media art. These are doubtless major artistic currents. But the artists and works examined represent quite a narrow spectrum for the author’s wideranging conclusions about the progressive modification in visual-verbalrelationships in the 20 th century (179). By and large, we are currently seeing advances in communication technology which result in ever more complex and inextricable fusions of medial and representational systems; as a result, the category “intermediality” may & well prove inadequate. Moreover, the study of art in all its different and various manifestations has recently corrected its former emphasis on structures and semantics and paid more attention to experiential factors, attempting to include the impact of art works in terms of individual effect and social function. Terms that rely exclusively on the properties of a work can no longer do justice to the complicated phenomena we are dealing with. Horst’s book contributes little towards the development of theory in this respect. It introduces some terminological distinctions which are initially confusing and later discarded (24).Admittedly, the field of intermedial studies itself is fraught with controversies over definitions, and in view of unresolved terminological vagueness, the book opts for Friedrich Block’s conceptualization of “language art” as the common denominator of its diverse examples, i.e. a concept of art works in which the poetic language is integrated into visual media to such an extent that a new genre is constituted (24). Unsurprisingly then, the main argument put forward by this study is that the last century has seen an increasing interplay of linguistic and visual elements which merge in some art works to the point of inseparability. For Horst, this argument invalidates the idea of the pictorial turn, a concept which he has evidently misunderstood to mean a shift from primarily verbal to visual modes of representation. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the conclusion that a successive increase in media-fusion has taken place. But the assumption of a progression in three successive stages from a dominant mediality to a balanced intermediality and finally to an inseparable mixture of media seems a constraint on the discussion. By limiting observation to certain works within the three art movements, the trajectory can be demonstrated quite neatly with regard to the selected works. As soon as one speculates outside the framework, however, counterexamples as well as instances from outside the stipulated periods come to mind. The book is divided into three sections, which deal with the movements modernism, concept art and new media art separately, each defining not only different periods of production but also different concepts and modes of creation. In treating modernist art, it treads well-worn paths, discussing canonical art works such as Duchamp’s readymades as examples of art that “incorporated the verbal and the visual” (102). The chapter includes these installations on the grounds that conceptual art is not about forms and materials but about ideas and meanings, and therefore according to Horst “language art”. Subsequently, a longish discussion of poems by William Carlos Williams (65-101) claims that Williams’s poetry “creates in the field of literature what Marcel Duchamp had done for art” (92). By way of these case studies, which necessitate a very liberal interpretation of the initial proposition to investigate works in two core media, modernist art can be perceived to remain “fixed” in its mediality (102) in spite of a great influence of visual on verbal art and vice versa. As the study progresses through the periods its arguments grow more convincing. Conceptual Art is the subject of the second part, which ranges from Jenny Holzer’s language games in public urban spaces to Susan Howe’s spatial poems. This section presents some incisive readings of both literature & and the visual arts. At any rate, these examples do not require a revision of what was initially claimed to be the scope of the investigation. They serve to demonstrate that conceptual art integrates visual and verbal media without hierarchy, thus conforming to the criteria of selection stipulated earlier. In the case of Susan Howe’s visual poetry this alleged lack of hierarchy is somewhat dubious and poems with a signifying surface layout have been produced by poets quite removed from conceptualism, such as Gerald Manley Hopkins, for instance. The most interesting discussion is that of new media art in the last section. In presenting an emergent art form which is not readily accessible, though available on the internet, it covers new ground and presents truly avant-garde work. The radically new aspect of digital or code poems created by net artists such as Jaromil or Florian Cramer is their means of signifying in two codes: on the one hand, they work as written poetry complicated by signs that are not normally intelligible to the general reader; on the other, they function as algorithmic codes which will prompt the computer to generate further text, i.e. this ‘net art’ works as both software and text. The complete sign system of the poem will have meaning only for a reader conversant with computer programming languages such as “perl”. For the general reader the poem will consist of visual and verbal signs which can be altered on screen according to instructions. Thus this type of language art is genuinely participatory and performative, generating in its interactive work with the reader a new form of text/ poem. In coming to terms with this processual art, where the reader has to execute simple programming in order to set the automatic text production in motion, the study acknowledges the need to investigate the singularity of the aesthetic experience in terms of receptive effect. Its observations on the current state of web literacy and its speculations on future developments on the growth of digital articulations and the adaptation of readerships are intriguing and instructive (172-73). I wish the study had been confined to its most contemporary subject matter, since its treatment of earlier art movements is derivative, too limited and vague to add much to our understanding of either modernism or conceptualism. The author seems uncertain about the intended audience of his book, most of the time addressing cultural beginners, e.g. when concepts like “gender” (36) and “imagism” (66) are explained, but sometimes also demanding a lot of prior knowledge for its rather generalized theoretical discussions. & $ - # . / ( #