{"product_id":"the-mottled-screen-9780804728072","title":"The Mottled Screen","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe clear-cut distinction between texts (literature) and images (art) has been challenged by a culture saturated with television and by an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary studies. From the viewpoint of our present culture, the author suggests, we can now see how some of the great writers and artists of the past overstepped the boundaries of the media in which they worked. \u003ci\u003eThe Mottled Screen\u003c\/i\u003e studies as an example of this process a great literary work that cannot be confined to language alone, even though it consists exclusively of words: Proust's \u003ci\u003eRemembrance of Things Past.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe author of \u003ci\u003eReading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition\u003c\/i\u003e, a widely acclaimed study of Rembrandt's discursive, rhetorical, and narrative painting, now offers a symmetrical counterpart to that study with this sustained \"visual\" reading of Proust's masterpiece, pointing out its visual strategies of representation, fantasy, and poetic thought. She focuses on the narrative and descriptive passages, examining how they make us \"see,\" arguing that this visual writing is by no means a derivative writing that uses visual imagery as an inspiration or model. Instead, it is the writing of a true vision.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBeginning with the attempts to emulate painting, the book develops a Proust à la Chardin, working around Chardin's painting \u003ci\u003eThe Skate\u003c\/i\u003e, but only after first reading Chardin through Proust. Viewing a Chardin with anxieties and emulation, Proust writes in Chardin's mood when he sets up the mottled screen as the metaphor of reading. Chardin's appeal to a wavering, roving eye is matched by Proust's uncertain perceptions, and the nervous quality of \u003ci\u003eThe Skate\u003c\/i\u003e is matched by the famous passages recording Proust's disgust at the debris of the breakfast table.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe second part of the book is devoted to Proust's use of optical instruments—such as the magnifying glass, the eyeglass, the telescope—to produce or enhance the visions that constitute the raw material of his poetic imagination.  These optical instruments guide the probing of the paradoxes of seeing close-up or at a distance, the latter flattening out, the former blinding.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe final part reads the specifically \"photographic\" writing that permeates \u003ci\u003eRemembrance\u003c\/i\u003e as a highly original and astonishing contemporary, almost postmodern, poetics.  The photographic shows in the way Proust's narrator frames what he sees, contrasts light and dark, zooms in and out, and represents \"contact sheets\" of snapshots rapidly taken so as to capture the most fleeting sensations and visions.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mieke Bal","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48294789021947,"sku":"9780804728072","price":140.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/3917\/9771\/files\/9780804728072_f30b008c-3f51-4939-8097-258862dc544b.jpg?v=1772482399","url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/the-mottled-screen-9780804728072","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}