Showing papers by "Mieke Bal published in 1990"

The point of narratology

Abstract: By the accidents of life, I started out in the literary profession as a narratologist, having French as my foreign language and structuralism as my training. By another accident, I started in Israel. As one of the young, unknown invitees of the Synopsis 2 Conference where an unusual number of established stars were mixed with a good number of beginners like myself, with the most fortunate result, I optimistically brought a formalist, quite technical paper written in French to a conference where most people tended to speak English and some to suspect formalism. My feeling awkwardly out of place was to be combatted by actively participating in the debates, and that this was possible, that within half a day I felt excited and encouraged while having completely revised my views of narratology, was due to the exceptional intellectual and humane qualities of this conference. I have been to a large number of conferences since, but just as childhood bliss is irretrievably lost in later life, so did I never feel the same deep satisfaction again. What was so special about this conference that it deserves memorialization? First of all, it was intellectually open and yet focused enough: a wide variety of topics and attitudes toward narratology and its assumptions made for lively and serious debates. In retrospect, the conference really gave an overview of narratology as a field, neither taking it for granted nor rejecting it a priori. It also marked a turning-point in the discipline. Looking at what the field is today, it seems hard to tell if the conference was at the vanguard or the core of the development; if it announced what was going to happen or demonstrated what was

De-Disciplining the Eye

Abstract: At the risk of reducing cultural history, in this paper I assume that in Western culture, at least since the Middle Ages, the two cultural activities of looking at images and reading texts have been disciplined through the promotion of realism as the basic mode of reading. Realism is, then, reading for a content that is modeled on reality at the expense of awareness of the signifying system of which the work is constructed. The problem with realism as the proper way of reading and looking is that it encourages ideological manipulation as it passes content off as natural. Yet realism has succeeded in becoming so "natural" a mode of reading that denying or ignoring its pervasiveness will not help us move beyond it. In this paper, I will discuss one way of countering realism's disciplining effects by opposing realistic to textual reading and by maintaining, rather than resolving, the tension between the two. I will do so through the analysis of a painting by Rembrandt and its literary pretext.

Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market

Abstract: Singularly interesting and stimulating. . . . A passionate and original work of scholarship.--Richard Wollheim, Times Literary Supplement With the publication [of Rembrandt's Enterprise], Svetlana Alpers has firmly established herself in the front ranks of art historians at work today. . . . The book is not a long one. Yet, there is more perceptive scholarship packed into its four chapters than is typically found in a whole shelf of the more common outpourings of academic writers. Rembrandt's Enterprise is less a book of archival discoveries than of fresh interpretation of the revered artist and his milieu. . . . Alpers makes us see how Rembrandt's complex and enormously popular art has embedded itself in our ways of thinking about who we are and how we live, even in the late 20th century.--Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Herald Examiner