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Product Description: A readable and absorbing volume of annotated essays illustrating the approach of Mieke Bal to story-telling. Essays include reflections and background on methodology, theory of narrative, and examples of how narratology unmasks the meaning behind texts from the world's great story-teller...read more

Product Description: Reading Rembrandt questions the traditional boundaries between literary and visual analysis with close, side-by-side readings of some of the Dutch master’s works alongside paintings of the same era whose attribution is still debated...read more

Product Description: "... an important contribution to current literary concerns with the ideologies of texts... " —Society of Old Testament Study Book List"... she points the way into as yet little-explored territory, broadly engaging literary theory as well as ideological criticism...read more

Product Description: Bal (theory of literature, U. of Amsterdam) addresses basic questions in semiotics, the theory of signs, in this companion piece to her earlier book, On Story Telling . She explores the continuity between semiotics and narratology, the semioticized subject and its link with visual art, semiotic iss...read more

A feminist literary theorist, specialist in Rembrandt, and a scholar with a knack for reading Old Testament stories, Mieke Bal weaves a tapestry of signs and meanings that enrich our senses. Her subject is the act of showing, the gesture of exposing to view. In a museum, for example, the object is on display, made visually available. "That's how it is," the display proclaims. But who says so?Bal's subjects are displays from the American Museum of Natural History, paintings by such figures as Courbet, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Rembrandt, as well as works by twentieth-century artists, and such literary texts as Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The 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...read more

Product Description: Acts of Memory presents 15 tightly integrated essays that illustrate the active role of individual and cultural memory in rying the past to the present. Their essays coalesce around three topics: the need for memory and testimonial facilitation of memory, primarily in the case of historical and individual trauma; the site-specific nature of acts of memory, especially in geopolitically conflicted situations; and the potential contributions of acts of memory when facing the difficulties and needs of the present...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This volume presents an interdisciplinary approach to humanistic scholarship, one that can be situated somewhere between cultural studies and cultural history while being more specific than either. Cultural analysis as a critical practice is based on a keen awareness of the critic's situatedness in the present―the social and cultural present from which we look, and look back, at objects that are already of the past, objects that we take to define our present culture...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: As period, as style, as sensibility, the Baroque remains elusive, its definition subject to dispute. Perhaps this is so in part because baroque vision resists separation of mind and body, form and matter, line and color, image and discourse...read more

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Product Description: What is the point of bringing reflexive discourse called theory to bear on such diverse subjects as the Statue of Liberty, the dTcor of Freud's study, a fifteenth-century triptych and contemporary science, on Kant and postmodern literature, Indian traditions and the voice of a soprano? The Point of Theory works to reintegrate theory and theorizing into a culture disturbed by "anti-theorism" and political "in-correctness...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Whether by recreating, in a gallery space, the façade and interior of a check-cashing establishment, the office of the director of a major museum, or the very street outside, Glen Seator breaks down the boundaries between the unseen and the visible, inside and outside, space and its representation...read more

Product Description: The work of four emerging artists using video, hi- tech plastic resins and DVD are showcased through- out this book. The materials they use are as natural to them as paint and brushes were to earlier generations.

One of the first female artists to achieve recognition in her own time, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) became instantly popular in the 1970s when feminist art historians "discovered" her and argued vehemently for a place for her in the canon of Italian baroque painters. Featured alongside her father, Orazio Gentileschi, in a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artemisia has continued to stir interest though her position in the canon remains precarious, in part because her sensationalized life history has overshadowed her art.In The Artemisia Files, Mieke Bal and her coauthors look squarely at this early icon of feminist art history and the question of her status as an artist. Considering the events that shaped her life and reputation—her relationship to her father and her role as the victim in a highly publicized rape case during which she was tortured into giving evidence—the authors make the case that Artemisia's importance is due to more than her role as a poster child in the feminist attack on traditional art history; here, Artemisia emerges more fully as a highly original artist whose work is greater than the sum of the events that have traditionally defined her.The fresh, engaging discourse in The Artemisia Files will help to both renew the reputation of this artist on the merit of her work and establish her rightful place in the history of art.“Over the last generation Artemisia has been transformed from a talented curiosity . . . into a standard bearer of early feminist consciousness. This book offers a fascinating glimpse into the critical frame of mind underlying this transformation.”—Keith Christiansen, Jayne Wrightsman Curator of Italian Painting, The MetropolitanMuseum of Art

Mieke Bal has had a significant impact on every field she has touched, from Old Testament scholarship and narratology to critical methods and visual culture. This brilliant and controversial intellectual invariably performs a high-wire act at the point where critical issues and methods intersect—or collide. She is deeply interested in the problems of cultural analysis across a range of disciplines. A Mieke Bal Reader brings together for the first time a representative collection of her work that distills her broad interests and areas of expertise.This Reader is organized into four parts, reflecting the fields that Bal has most profoundly influenced: literary study, interdisciplinary methodology, visual analysis, and postmodern theology. The essays include some of Bal’s most characteristic and provocative work, capturing her at the top of her form. “Narration and Focalization,” for example, provides the groundwork for Bal’s ideas on narrative, while “Reading Art?” clearly outlines her concept of reading images. “Religious Canon and Literary Identity” reenvisions Bal’s own work at the intersection of theology and cultural analysis, while “Enfolding Feminism” argues for a new feminist rallying cry that is not a position but a metaphor. More than a dozen other essays round out the four sections, each of which is interdisciplinary in its own right: the section devoted to literature, for instance, ranges widely over psychoanalysis, theology, photography, and even autobiography.A Mieke Bal Reader is the product of a capacious intellect and a sustained commitment to critical thinking. It will prove to be instructive, maddening,  and groundbreaking—in short, all the hallmarks of intellectual inquiry at its best.

Product Description: Table of Contents: List of Figures Editors Preface Introduction Part I: The Function of Boundaries 1. The World Beyond my Window: Nomads, Travelling Theories and the Function of Boundaries 2. Public Violence Hits Home: Civil War and the Destruction of Privacy 3...read more