SAIT (Society for the Study of Arts, Images and Texts in the English-Speaking World) is a learned society dedicated to the study of Literature and the Arts, notably in their intertextual and intermedial dimensions. It was founded in 1985 by researchers in the field of British and American literature who shared a strong interest in intertextuality and wanted to extend their research to the interactions between literature and the arts or between different art forms. A text can conjure up a painting, just as music can resonate with words. Texts interact with each other. Whether they be verbal, visual or musical, the signs used in all arts echo one another. A book may point to or hide other books. It may evoke paintings it cannot paint and music it cannot play.
Members of SAIT work in a cross-disciplinary perspective, focusing more particularly on modern and contemporary arts and literature in the English-speaking world. They seek to foster the study of art, intertextuality and intersemioticity:
- Art and inter-artistic relations
- Intertextuality
- Text and image
- Text and cinema
- Text and photography
- Text and music
- Text and sculpture…
Specialists in other fields (French and Italian literature, music, aesthetics) have often been invited to the many conferences exploring the relationships between the verbal and the visual, the verbal and the musical (e.g. “Color: Between Silence and Eloquence”, “Untimely Art”, “Ruins in Twentieth-Century Art and Literature”, “Point, Dot, Period”).