The political meaning of the refusal of form (the political meaning of the critique of the work’s “coherence”) is the indifference to those social structures that, not produced by how we see, cannot be overcome by seeing differently. It’s this refusal of form…
BY Todd Cronan
Poet and critic Paul Valéry held two strong and conflicting views of literary meaning. On the one hand, he affirmed his “verses have whatever meaning is given them.” And in a phrase that entered into the post-modern literary canon, he declared “Once a work is published its author’s interpretation of it has no more validity than anyone else’s.” On the other hand, he suggested that “One is led to a form by a desire to leave the smallest possible share to the reader.” Valéry’s career can be divided along these lines of anti-intentionality and intentionality. My larger claim is to show the primacy, or perhaps the invention of a dominant mode of twentieth- and twenty-first century thought.
W.G. Sebald’s long poem Nach der Natur (1988) contributed significantly to the swift recognition of his literary talent among fellow writers and poets, yet it received scant attention by the larger public and literary scholars alike.1 To the English-speaking world it was not even available until 2002, a year after its author’s death, when it appeared in Michael Hamburger’s excellent translation under the title After Nature. Like a triptych, it is divided into three untitled parts, each with a distinct thematic concern involving a specific historical period and a writer or artist: the first focuses on the Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, the second on the eighteenth-century naturalist, travel writer, and Arctic explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller, and the last on elements from Sebald’s own biography.2 As opposed to Sebald’s later practice, apart from the landscape photographs that are reproduced on the end sheets of the first edition of Nach der Natur, there are no visuals in the volume, although paintings play a prominent role, especially in the first and final sections of the poem. In what follows, I shall support my reading of Sebald’s poem with reproductions of Grünewald’s paintings. I do so, however, in an attempt to provide…
BY Éric Michaud
We should give ourselves up to the lies of art to deliver ourselves from the lies of myth: it is by this very paradoxical and singular way of absorption into the framework of one of the “great works” of the Occident that Picasso belongs to myth. For if it is true that he always sought to combat myth, making him even more dependent on it, he only succeeded by turning myth’s own arms onto itself—that is, the “lie.”
Picasso’s early work—his so-called Blue Period, in the present case—responds to a concern, widespread in the symbolist milieu from which the young Picasso emerged, with authority. By authority, this essay understands one’s ability to believe in and respond to a truth as one finds it represented. In this moment, the tasks of representing truth by art and by religion found themselves in dialogue, or even, as one might say, in a relation of mutual self-definition. Charles Morice’s explanations of Eugène Carrière’s works provide the background against which to understand some of Picasso’s Blue Period works, Morice’s remarks on them, and Apollinaire’s vindication of Picasso. Their exchange raises, furthermore, important problems for those of us who write histories and interpretations of art.
BY Todd Cronan
If the agency of color replaces the agency of the artist or the sitter, then what the portraits of Hortense show is a liveliness more animate than any mimetic representation could produce. Indeed, Sidlauskas’s account focuses in detail on Cézanne’s “metaphors of ingestion,” of his “physically absorbing” colors, and of the total identification between the painter and his subjects. Above all, Gasquet provides a vitalist language that best captures Cézanne’s affective forms…
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The Board
Bridget Alsdorf
Professor, Department of Art and Archaeology
Princeton University
Elise Archias
Associate Professor, Art History Department, UIC
Jennifer Ashton
Associate Professor, Department of English
University of Illinois, Chicago
Raquel Belden, Editorial Assistant
Nicholas Brown
Professor, Department of English
University of Illinois, Chicago
Todd Cronan
Professor, Art History Department
Emory University
Michael Fried
Professor Emeritus of the Humanities
Johns Hopkins University
Oren Izenberg
Associate Professor, UC Irvine, Department of English
Brian Kane
Associate Professor, Department of Music
Yale University
Ruth Leys
Academy Professor at Johns Hopkins University
Walter Benn Michaels
Professor, Department of English
University of Illinois, Chicago
Charles Palermo
Professor, Department of Art and Art History
William & Mary
Robert Pippin
Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought and Philosophy
Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago
Adolph Reed, Jr.
Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science
University of Pennsylvania
Lisa Siraganian
Professor, Department of Comparative Thought and Literature
Johns Hopkins University
Kenneth Warren
Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor
Department of English, University of Chicago
Marnin Young
Associate Professor, Department of Art History
Yeshiva University
Daniel Zamora
Professor of Sociology
Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
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For Authors
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Poetry: Submission Procedure
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