Techne, the Visual Arts and Literary Genres: Fractal Epic of the Twenty-first Century

Even as genres are established, the question of genre is almost necessarily assessed as one of fluidity, or even of corruption and contamination (Derrida). Possibly, the twenty-first-century critical contribution to the discussion of literary genres lies in the way the fluidity is understood. Technology plays a major part in the creation as well as fruition of literary and artistic works in the present, and thanks to it planes that were imagined as distant become contiguous. The starting point for my reflection is therefore: what happens to genres when they migrate from the literary space to other media? How is poetics affected by techne? I propose that we continue asking ‘literary’ questions in our analyses of texts, even of visual texts, especially when they overtly engage with the literary space. In particular, I explore the way the classical genre of the epic returns in the digital visual arts, and assess its reinvention and actuality in two contemporary film essays by London-based artist John Akomfrah, The Nine Muses (2010) and Vertigo Sea (2015).