Mieke Bal

Teoria de La Narrativa (Critica y Estudios Literarios)

Bice Curiger

In the 21st century we have witnessed a significant expansion in the field of transhistorical exhibition practice. A range of curatorial efforts have emerged in which objects and artefacts from various periods and art historical and cultural contexts are combined in display, in an effort to question and expand traditional museological notions such as chronology, context, and category. Such experiments in transcending art historical boundaries can result in fresh insights into the workings of entrenched historical presumptions, providing a space to reassess interpretations of individual objects. With contributions by Mieke Bal, Hendrik Folkerts, Nicola Setari, Maria Iñigo Clavo, and others.

Mapping the Field

The Transhistorical Museum

Kulturanalyse

Frida Kahlo

Laura Gonzales Matute

A major proponent of the Mexican Renaissance, wife of Diego Rivera, communist, and pioneer of emancipation-the colourful life and work of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) are inextricably interwoven, and at times staged like a play. The daughter of a German-born photographer, she was used to posing, and Kahlo began controlling the perception of her person early on. In her paintings and pain-filled self-portraits she dissected her innermost being, treading a new artistic path in the process. In portraits by friends and photographers such as Tina Modotti and Edward Weston she wears traditional clothing, turning her "Mexicanidad" into a trademark. Based on numerous paintings and photographs and with articles by acclaimed theorists such as Griselda Pollock and Mieke Bal, this book traces the stations of this unique artist's life.0Exhibition: ARKEN - Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark (7.9.2013-12.1.2014).

A Life in Art

The author's primary object of investigation in this text is not the Caravaggio, but rather the issue of temporality in art. She analyzes the productives relationship between Caravaggio and a number of late-20th century artists who "quote" the baroque master in their own works.

Contemporary Art, Preposterous History

Quoting Caravaggio

Christine van Boheemen

Índice abreviado: 1. Text: words and other signs 2. Story: aspects 3. Fabula: elements. Afterword: theses on the use of narratology for cultural analysis.

Introduction to the Theory of Narrative

Narratology

Charles Gohy

Serendipity

Ann Veronica Janssens

Femmes Imaginaires. Anglais

Doris Salcedo, a Colombian-born artist, addresses the politics of memory and forgetting in work that embraces fraught situations in dangerous places. Noted critic and theorist Mieke Bal narrates between the disciplines of contemporary culture in order to boldly reimagine the role of the visual arts. Both women are pathbreaking figures, globally renowned and widely respected. Doris Salcedo, meet Mieke Bal. In Of What One Cannot Speak, Bal leads us into intimate encounters with Salcedo’s art, encouraging us to consider each work as a “theoretical object” that invites—and demands—certain kinds of considerations about history, death, erasure, and grief. Bal ranges widely through Salcedo’s work, from Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios series—in which the artist uses worn shoes to retrace los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) from nations like Argentina, Chile, and Colombia—to Shibboleth, Salcedo’s once-in-a-lifetime commission by the Tate Modern, for which she created a rupture, as if by earthquake, that stretched the length of the museum hall’s concrete floor. In each instance, Salcedo’s installations speak for themselves, utilizing household items, human bones, and common domestic architecture to explore the silent spaces between violence, trauma, and identity. Yet Bal draws out even deeper responses to the work, questioning the nature of political art altogether and introducing concepts of metaphor, time, and space in order to contend with Salcedo’s powerful sculptures and installations. An unforgettable fusion of art and essay, Of What One Cannot Speak takes us to the very core of events we are capable of remembering—yet still uncomfortably cannot speak aloud.

Doris Salcedo's Political Art

Of What One Cannot Speak

Maria Gertrudis Bal

Chicago studies in the history of Judaism.

The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges

Death and Dissymmetry

In The Mottled Screen, the author challenges the view that literary texts cannot be examined by words alone, arguing that images also play a role in the interpretation process.

Reading Proust Visually

The Mottled Screen

Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro

This book explores the idea that art can enact small-scale resistances against the status quo in the social domain. These acts, which we call “little resistances,” determine the limited yet potentially powerful political impact of art. From different angles, seventeen authors consider the spaces where art events occur as “political spaces,” and explore how such spaces host events of disagreements in migratory culture. The newly coined word “migratory” refers to the sensate traces of the movements of migration that characterize contemporary culture. In other words, movement is not an exceptional occurrence in an otherwise stable world, but a normal, generalized process in a world that cannot be grasped in terms of any given notion of stability. Thus the book offers fresh reflections on art’s power to move people, in the double sense of that verb, and shows how it helps to illuminate migratory culture’s contributions to this process.

Conflict, Resistance, and Agency

Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture

When Mieke Bal reread the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife as an adult, she was struck by differences between her childhood memories of a moral tale and what she read today. In Loving Yusuf ̧ Bal seeks to resolve this clash between memory and text, using the same story, in which Joseph spurns the advance of his master’s wife who then falsely accuses him of rape, as her point of departure. She juxtaposes the Genesis tale to the rather different version told in the Qur’an and the depictions of it by Rembrandt and explores how Thomas Mann’s great retelling in Joseph and His Brothers reworks these versions. Through this inquiry she develops concepts for the analysis of texts that are both strange and overly familiar—culturally remote yet constantly retold. As she puts personal memories in dialogue with scholarly exegesis, Bal asks how all of these different versions complicate her own and others’ experience of the story, and how the different truths of these texts in their respective traditions illuminate the process of canonization.

Conceptual Travels from Present to Past

Loving Yusuf

Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories

Lethal Love

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.

A Mieke Bal Reader

This book aims to address the basic questions in semiotics, the theory of signs. What is semiotics? How is it used? how is it taught?

Essays in Semiotics

On Meaning-making

Narratology in Practice opens up the well-known theory of narrative to various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Written as a companion to Mieke Bal’s international classic Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, in which the examples focus almost exclusively on literary studies, this new book offers more elaborate analyses of visual media, especially visual art and film. Read independently or in parallel with its companion, Narratology in Practice enables readers to use the suggested concepts as tools to assist them in practising narrative analysis.

Narratology in Practice

Attempting to bridge the gap between specialised scholarship in the humanistic disciplines and an interdisciplinary project of cultural analysis, Mieke Bal has written an intellectual travel guide that charts the course 'beyond' cultural studies. As with any guide, it can be used in a number of ways and the reader can follow or willfully ignore any of the paths it maps or signposts. Bal's focus for this book is the idea that interdisciplinarity in the humanities - necessary, exciting, serious - must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than its methods. Concepts are not grids to put over an object. The counterpart of any given concept is the cultural text or work or 'thing' that constitutes the object of analysis. No concept is meaningful for cultural analysis unless it helps us to understand the object better on its own terms. Bal offers the reader a sustained theoretical reflection on how to 'do' cultural analysis through a tentative practice of doing just that. This offers a concrete practice to theoretical constructs, and allows the proposed method more accessibility. Please note: illustrations have been removed from the ebook at the request of the rightsholder.

A Rough Guide

Travelling Concepts in the Humanities

"... 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... she moves beyond both narrowly historical and exclusively text-centered criticism... " -- Theology Today "... Bal has given us both a coruscating feminist critique of biblical scholarship and a fund of provocative exegetical insights... required reading for anyone who wants to know where serious biblical scholarship is heading." -- Shofar

Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera's Death

Murder and Difference

Norman Bryson

In Across the Great Divide, some of our leading historians look to both the history of masculinity in the West and to the ways that this experience has been represented in movies, popular music, dimestore novels, and folklore.

Mieke Bal

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