On the 5th session of the seventh edition of THELEME-Interarts & Intermedia Seminars (2024-2025), Holst Katsma will present a paper entitled “Words and Colors: Tinted Metaphors and the Readerly Imagination”.

Respondent: Georgina Kleege (UC Berkeley).

This online session will take place on the 19th of February, from 2.30 to 4pm (Lisbon time — ZOOM Link).


Abstract:
Words and Colors: Tinted Metaphors and the Readerly Imagination

One reader picks up a novel and sees pictures; another picks up the same book and sees nothing…and both are pleased. How can that be? It was with this question in mind that I first turned to color words – to words like “yellow” and “red” – for it seemed to me that these exclusively visual words ought to shed some light on the issue of visualization. Were color words simply extraneous to nonvisual readers, or were they deployed with a nonvisual purpose as well? This talk attempts to answer some of these questions by focusing on tinted metaphors like “the snow floated toward them in great flakes like white peonies” or “His fair skin was threaded with veins like ends of scarlet wool,” metaphors which account for a surprising number of color words in the modern novel.

Holst Katsma holds a PhD in English from Harvard and is the author of Morfologia del romanzo (2024). His recent and forthcoming work on literary language and the cognitive imagination can be found in Philosophy and Literature, Poetics Today, n+1, and the Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlets. He is currently fighting systemic injustice as a public defender in Contra Costa County.