Showing papers by "Mieke Bal published in 2003"

Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture

Abstract: The double question whether visual culture studies is a discipline or an interdisciplinary movement, and which methods are most suited to practice in this field, can only be addressed by way of the object. This article probes the difficulty of defining or delimiting the object of study without the reassuring and widespread visual essentialism that, in the end, can only be tautological.

Meanwhile: literature in an expanded field

Abstract: Meanwhile: Literature in an Expanded FieldThere is an analogy between the borders that separate nations and those that separate disciplines. In this contribution, I examine that analogy. The result is a revisioning of my obligation to earn “expertise” as a literary scholar. Instead, I ask questions to the literary text that, by virtue of my Western training, I cannot understand. The novel that guides my reflections on nation(alism) and literature as an epistemological and philosophical tool is Ces fruits si doux de l’arbre a pain by the Congolese author Tchicaya U Tam’si. This novel, written in a French I know but with inflections I don’t know, raises issues of justice and our presumption to judge. The yielding and pulling between the novel and me as reader constitutes the fluctuating terrain of Benedict Anderson’s conjunction “meanwhile” that creates nations by means of simultaneity. Today, this conjunction, particularly relevant because of electronic communications, creates new communities, on which the nation-state has no bearing. Or does it?