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This innovative interdisciplinary study compares the uses of painting in literary texts and films. In developing a framework of four types of ekphrasis, the author argues for the expansion of the concept of ekphrasis by demonstrating its applicability as interpretive tool to films about the visual arts and artists. Analyzing selected works of art by Goya, Rembrandt, and Vermeer and their ekphrastic treatment in various texts and films, this book examines how the medium of ekphrasis affects the representation of the visual arts in order to show what the differences imply about issues such as gender roles and the function of art for the construction of a personal or social identity. Because of...
Fiction is fascinating. All it provides us with is black letters on white pages, yet while we read we do not have the impression that we are merely perceiving abstract characters. Instead, we see the protagonists before our inner eye and hear their voices. Descriptions of sumptuous meals make our mouths water, we feel physically repelled by depictions of violence or are aroused by the erotic details of sexual conquests. We submerge ourselves in the fictional world that no longer stays on the paper but comes to life in our imagination. Reading turns into an out-of-the-body experience or, rather, an in-another-body experience, for we perceive the portrayed world not only through the protagonis...
What is aesthetics? How is it related to other disciplines? The chapters of this book examine the history, theoretical conditions and connection points between aesthetics and other disciplines. At the same time, the authors are also interested in practical clashes of methodology and agenda, especially when it is not merely about the securing of the position of one or the other discipline, but is used, in a dialogical manner, as the form of understanding better the nature of both as well as the benefits of their collaboration. The authors work on the border of aesthetics and at least one other academic field. Through their regular scholarly activities, the contributors constantly benefit from cross- and interdisciplinary practice, and this makes them ideal interpreters of these methodological questions. Contributors include: Mami Aota, Karl Axelsson, Paul Duncum, Lisa Giombini, Oiva Kuisma, Jacob Lund, Tyrus Miller, Max Ryynänen, Mateusz Salwa, Zoltán Somhegyi, Wendy Steiner, and Joseph Tanke.
Comparative Criticism is an annual journal of comparative literature and cultural studies that has gained an international reputation since its inception in 1979. It contains major articles on literary theory and criticism; on a wide range of comparative topics; and on interdisciplinary debates. It includes translations of literary, scholarly and critical works; substantial reviews of important books in the field; and bibliographies on specialist themes for the year, on individual writers, and on comparative literary studies in Britain and Ireland.
In The Beauty of Choice, the renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women’s taste as the engine of liberal values. Steiner reframes long-standing questions surrounding desire, art, sexual assault, and beauty in light of #MeToo. Beginning with an opera she wrote based on Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” she presents women’s sexual choices as fundamentally aesthetic in nature—expressions of their taste—and artworks as stagings of choice in courtship, coquetry, consent, marriage, and liberation. A merger of ...
Whereas previous eras had celebrated beauty as the central aim of art, the modernist avant-garde were deeply suspicious of beauty and its perennial symbols, woman and ornament, preferring instead the thrill and alienation of the sublime. They rejected harmony, empathy, and femininity in a denial still reverberating through art and social relations today. Exploring this casting of Venus, with all her charms, into exile, Wendy Steiner's brilliant, ambitious, and provocative analysis explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty. Tracing this strange and damaging history, starting from Kant's aesthetics and Mary Shelley's horrified response in Frankenstein, Steiner untangle...
"Examines the implications of conflating texts with people in a broad range of texts: Art Spiegelman's Maus, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Binjamin Wilkomirski's fake Holocaust memoir Fragments, and the fiction of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Don Delillo."--Jacket.
The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism examines the extent to which poetry intertwines with painting and the visual at large, and studies the singular relationship established between language and image, observesing the modalities and workings of what is termed ‘intermedial transposition‘. By following a critical method of the close analysis of texts, the book examines to what extent the "pictorial" tool may be of help to analyze literary texts and thus enlarge and enrich literary criticism. Examining the technical notions typical of the medium and its history, including perspective, framing, colour, anamorphosis, trompe-l’œil, Veronica veil, still life, portrait, fi...
From 1928 until his death in 1989, Virgil Thomson, Dean of American Composers, distinguished critic and author, composed musical portraits of people. Though he was not the first composer to do so, the seriousness of his working methods and the quantity of his output (140 in all) make Thomson's practice of musical portraiture unique. Anthony Tommasini's book is based on his extensive interviews with Virgil Thomson, his examination of Thomson's manuscripts and documents, and his correspondences with over sixty subjects of Thomson portraits (the "still-available sitters," as Thomson called them). Earlier examples of musical portraits are examined, as well as the literary portraits of Gertrude Stein, works which inspired Thomson to experiment with portraiture in music.
Doss (fine arts and American studies, U. of Colorado-Boulder) examines the image of Elvis from a number of perspectives, including as a religious icon honored in household shrines, as a sexual fantasy for women and men, as an inspiration for impersonators, as a not- altogether positive emblem of whiteness for many blacks, and as a commodity to be protected by Elvis Presley Enterprises. Bandw illustrations. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR