A new book offers insight on the interrelationships among some of modern art and literature's most important and influential figures, while shedding significant light on the influence of African, Asian and Pacific cultures on European modernism and suggesting how we "read" paintings as narratives.

In Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship Between Modern Art and Modern Literature, published by St. Martin's Press, Cornell Professor Daniel R. Schwarz proposes relationships among artists as varied as Edouard Manet and Henry James, Paul Eugéne Henri Gauguin and Joseph Conrad, Paul Cézanne and T.S. Eliot, as well as among Pablo Picasso, Wallace Stevens and James Joyce. In doing so, Schwarz suggests innovative directions for studying the relationship between modern art and modern literature that erase the boundaries between visual and written texts.

Arguing for enlarging the perspective of cultural studies beyond socioeconomic, and often Marxist, explanations for artistic creation, Schwarz suggests how a more humanistic version of cultural studies might work.

He strikingly argues that works by Manet, most noticeably his scandalously bold Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, and Henry James' mysterious The Turn of the Screw have much in common.

In Manet's Le dejeuner sure l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), completed in 1863, two males--probably students as indicated by their tasseled caps -- are picnicking with a naked woman; while in the background a woman emerges from a stream. Neither woman pays attention to the men.

"The naked woman unselfconsciously looks away from her companions, perhaps to catch the attention of other men or women who are not within the scene," Schwarz notes. "In a sense we the audience are engaged frankly by her as voyeurs in a libidinal interchange in which she both looks and is looked at.

"If we think of The Turn of the Screw, the middle-grounded woman is the governess' suppressed libidinal self, while the self-absorbed and mysterious woman in the background is the embodiment of the governess' conscious level," Schwarz concludes.

Schwarz cites other Manet works -- The Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1881), The Plum (1878), Olympia and Nana (1877) -- as narratives of voyeurism that anticipate James' preoccupation in The Turn of the Screw (1898) with seeing and being seen.

"In a world controlled by males, Manet understands that the way women are looked at and how they look at others creates their identity," Schwarz writes. "Like James' governess, these women are often in their own space -- on their own psychic island -- and dependent on others to give them identity."

The influence of Gauguin on Conrad's Heart of Darkness is linked to Conrad's reading of Gauguin's journal Noa Noa, in which the painter recounted his stay in Tahiti from 1891 to 1893, as well as the artist's Tahitian paintings. Heart of Darkness was written in 1898. "In all likelihood, Conrad knew Gauguin's Noa Noa when he wrote Heart of Darkness and that his characterization of Kurtz's reversion to savagery and Marlow's temptation to abandon Eurocentric values is in part a response to Gauguin," Schwarz notes.

Schwarz provides information to suggest that Eliot and Cézanne shared similar influences: "Both Cézanne and Eliot insisted that the function of art was to look at the world with fresh eyes and to cast aside assumptions about how the world was supposed to look."

He holds up Picasso's huge seminal Cubist canvas Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) as a pivotal moment for Modernism, noting that its theme of multiple perspective, multiculturalism and open sexuality was the subject of literary Modernism.

Schwarz also connects the piece to Joyce's Ulysses. Recalling that Joyce was a medical student in Paris at about this time and that the original version of the Picasso painting included a medical student and sailor, Schwarz notes: "We think of the sexual explicitness of the 'Circe' section of Ulysses when Stephen visits the brothel."

He continues: "Juxtaposing Picasso with Conrad is instructive. The artist's still lifes recall the heightened graphic mélange of death heads (including shrunken heads set on posts), carcasses and enslaved humans in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. From one perspective, Heart of Darkness is a sequence of still lifes -- fully realized objects against a dark background -- that reflect Marlow's feelings."

As part of his focus on multicultural perspectives, he also discusses the Japanese influence on Wallace Stevens: "Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird not only varies the haiku form, but is also indebted to Japanese ink drawings."

The 241-page book is illustrated with photos of many of the works discussed in the book, which helps readers visualize the connection Schwarz makes from painter to writer.

In short, Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship Between Modern Art and Modern Literature breaks new ground on how to "read" both classic art works and texts.

Schwarz, a member of the Cornell faculty since 1968, has taught and written on modernism and literary theory. He is the author of numerous books, including Conrad: Almayers Folly to Under Western Eyes (Cornell University Press, 1980), The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller (University of Pennsylvania, 1986; revised 1989), and from St. Martin's Press,The Transformation of the English Novel 1890-1930 (1989; revised 1994) and Reading Joyce's Ulysses (1987). He has also lectured widely in this country and abroad and directed nine summer seminars for the National Endowment for the Humanities.