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What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Portrait Stories argues that it is the ways they problematize the relation between subjectivity and representation. Through close readings of short stories and novellas by Poe, James, Hoffmann, Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Kleist, Hardy, Wilde, Storm, Sand, and Gogol, the author shows how the subjectivities of sitter, painter, and viewer are produced in relation to representations shaped by particular interests and power relations, often determined by gender as well as by class. She focuses on the power that can accrue to the painter from the act of representation (often at the expense of the portrait’s subject), while also exploring how and why this act may threaten the portrait painter’s sense of self. Analyzing the viewer’s relation to the portrait, she demonstrates how portrait stories problematize the very act of seeing and with it the way subjectivity is constructed in the field of vision.
Price: $55.00
Pages: 224
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Imprint: Fordham University Press
Publication Date:
15 December 2014
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780823262601
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
LITERARY CRITICISM / European / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / German, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, LITERARY CRITICISM / Russian & Soviet, ART / Subjects & Themes / Portraits, ART / Movements / Modernism, ART / Criticism & Theory, LITERARY CRITICISM / Comparative Literature
“With its broad international reach, its canny and often remarkable choices, its solid scholarship and linguistic grounding, and its theoretical engagement, Portrait Stories opens up significant new perspectives on the literature of a century.”---—Marshall Brown, University of Washington
Ginsburg makes an engaging and significant contribution by identifying portraits and portraiture as an important topos in nineteenth-century European narrative literature.---—Ross Chambers, University of Michigan
Mixing well-known work such as The Picture of Dorian Gray with relatively undiscussed examples by Honore de Balzac and George Sand, Ginsburg defines a new corpus and isolates the multiple ways in which subject and representation are entangled with each other and the act of readerly interpretation .
Ginsburg makes an engaging and significant contribution by identifying portraits and portraiture as an important topos in nineteenth-century European narrative literature.---—Ross Chambers, University of Michigan
Mixing well-known work such as The Picture of Dorian Gray with relatively undiscussed examples by Honore de Balzac and George Sand, Ginsburg defines a new corpus and isolates the multiple ways in which subject and representation are entangled with each other and the act of readerly interpretation .
Michal Peled Ginsburg is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of Flaubert Writing: A Study in Narrative Strategies and Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel as well as the co-author of a book on the Israeli novelist David Shahar.