Between visual art and visual text. Intermediality and hypertext: A possible combination for twenty-first century philology

Abstract

The birth of digital writing, characterized by a process of correction that implies the omission of the preparatory editorial phases of a literary text, has brought about an epochal change in the author-text relationship, now characterized, for the first time in literary history, by the disappearance of autograph documentation. This evident loss would seem to threaten the survival of twenty-first century philology, destined to operate despite the absence of the author’s handwritten documents. But the genetic reconstruction of the text, if taken as a speculative habitus and common research practice, can constitute a valid answer and a new possibility for future philological inquiry which combines literature, music and art in a new Hypermedia.

The compositional history of the work and that of its dissemination can be exemplified by an exhibition of typologically diverse materials, such as images, sounds, videos, which allow us to contextualize the literary text through a multidisciplinary creative process and to reconnect it to the very important and popular field of intermediality studies. This article proposes a few samples of this new research approach regarding Giovanni Boccaccio and his literary masterpiece Decameron.