What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Through close readings of nineteenth-century portrait stories from different literary traditions, the book analyzes the way subjectivity is produced in relation to representations, focusing on the power to represent, especially its relation to gender, and on the act of seeing.
The analysis of each novel centers around the notion of transformation - or the "economy of change" - as it informs the text and our understanding of it, arguing that transformation is not only a basic category of narrative structure but also the key to the link between literary form and cultural context. Throughout, the book addresses topical issues in current literary theory and cultural studies, such as the cultural significance of narrative and its historical dimension, in a distinctly practical manner, showing how, in a number of determinate cases, narrative actually works.
The author's starting point for this study was the conviction that Flaubert's difficulty in sustaining a narrative, so evident in his early works, was not entirely overcome even in the works of his maturity. Flaubert seems to have a problem in generating his text and keeping it going. What is the difficulty in generating a text? How is it circumvented? And, most important, how does this problem and the strategies used to overcome it shape the narrative?
David Shahar (1926–1997), author of the seven-novel sequence The Palace of Shattered Vessels, occupies an ambiguous position in the Israeli literary canon. Often compared to Proust, Shahar produced a body of work that offers a fascinating poetic and ideological alternative to the dominant models of Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. This book, the first full-length study of this fascinating author, takes a fresh look at the uniqueness of his literary achievement in both poetic and ideological terms. In addition to situating Shahar within the European literary tradition, the book reads Shahar's representation of Jerusalem in his multi-volume novel as a "heterotopia"—an actual space where society's unconscious (what does not fit on its ideological map) is materially present—and argues for the relevance of Shahar's work to the critical discussion of the Arab question in Israeli culture.
David Shahar (1926–1997), author of the seven-novel sequence The Palace of Shattered Vessels, occupies an ambiguous position in the Israeli literary canon. Often compared to Proust, Shahar produced a body of work that offers a fascinating poetic and ideological alternative to the dominant models of Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. This book, the first full-length study of this fascinating author, takes a fresh look at the uniqueness of his literary achievement in both poetic and ideological terms. In addition to situating Shahar within the European literary tradition, the book reads Shahar's representation of Jerusalem in his multi-volume novel as a "heterotopia"—an actual space where society's unconscious (what does not fit on its ideological map) is materially present—and argues for the relevance of Shahar's work to the critical discussion of the Arab question in Israeli culture.
The analysis of each novel centers around the notion of transformation - or the "economy of change" - as it informs the text and our understanding of it, arguing that transformation is not only a basic category of narrative structure but also the key to the link between literary form and cultural context. Throughout, the book addresses topical issues in current literary theory and cultural studies, such as the cultural significance of narrative and its historical dimension, in a distinctly practical manner, showing how, in a number of determinate cases, narrative actually works.
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.
The author's starting point for this study was the conviction that Flaubert's difficulty in sustaining a narrative, so evident in his early works, was not entirely overcome even in the works of his maturity. Flaubert seems to have a problem in generating his text and keeping it going. What is the difficulty in generating a text? How is it circumvented? And, most important, how does this problem and the strategies used to overcome it shape the narrative?
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