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http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/145110

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Electronic images for the prayer: Semiotic and archaeology of the ‘Notre Dame du Web’ website

Abstract

The ‘Our Dame du Web’ website, a portal linked to Jésuite spirituality, offers, among other things, the possibility of praising, meditating and contemplating artistic images. This article analyses this site, in particular as regards the relationship between prayer (in its various forms, including meditation and contemplation) and visual image, in particular artistic image, in a specific context, that of electronic textuality. Jesuit spirituality has since its inception (the spiritual exercises of Ignace de Loyola in the 16th century) a profound intertwining between image and spiritual life. The legs of the first centuries have offered highly developed theories and applications of this relationship, which is expressed in prayer from visual images and scenes (e.g. Christ life) seen or imagined. A series of artistic works, illustrated books and engravings have contributed over time to feeding these forms of highly “iconised” prayer, at least in some phases: it is enough to think of Evangelicae Historiae imagines (1593), a complete illustration of the Evangiles in the form of engravings. This tradition is the historical subset of contemporary devices, such as the French-speaking site ‘Notre Dame du Web’, which offers a spiritual experience in the web media environment. Our analysis has two phases. A first phase is the application of a semiotic look to certain pages of the site, including attention to the pragmatic dimension (the construction of a relationship with the reader-speaker). The analysis focuses in particular on three dimensions: the relationship between verbal text (which ‘guide’ and ‘introduced’) and image (which allows for a ‘deep’ and ‘intimate’ experience), by critically retrieving R. Barthes’s proposals; narrative construction of prayer experience; the narrative dimension of managing the relationship with the viewer; the pragmatic and narrative dimension of the construction of a sequence, an active prayer experience, which is reflected in the textual forms that must support it. The second phase, based on the previous one, is the identification of the links between the Semiotic device identified in the pages of the site offering images for prayer and mediter and instructions for doing so, on the one hand, and the Jesatian and Jesuit tradition of prayer in image (or image) on the other. We can thus implement a kind of ‘archaeology’, not very far from Mr Foucault’s approach, to identify the historical substrates of the contemporary verbo-visual sermiotic system. In this way, the images and verbal texts of the site will show their quality as ‘theoretical objects’, allowing for reflection on the presence of prayer in contemporary electronic media.

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