Portrait Stories

by Michal Peled Ginsburg

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823262618
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	513 KB

About the Author

Michal Peled Ginsburg is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of Flaubert Writing: A Study in Narrative Strategies and Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel as well as the co-author of a book on the Israeli novelist David Shahar.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Poe's "Oval Portrait"

2 The Portrait's Two Faces: James's "The Special Type" and "The Tone of Time"

3 The Portrait Painter and His Doubles: Hoffmann's "Die Doppeltg nger," Gautier's "La Cafeti re," and Nerval's "Portrait du diable"

4 On Portraits, Painters, and Women: Balzac's La Maison du chat-qui-pelote and James's "Glasses"

5 Portraits of the Male Body: Kleist's "Der Findling," Hardy's "Barbara of the House of Grebe," and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

6 Portraits, Parents, and Children: Storm's "Aquis submersus" and Sand's "Le Ch teau de Pictordu"

7 Gogol: "The Portrait"

Afterword: Reading Portrait Stories

Works Cited

Editorial Reviews

"Ginsburg makes an engaging and significant contribution by identifying portraits and portraiture as an important topos in nineteenth-century European narrative literature."—Ross Chambers, University of Michigan

With its broad international reach, its canny and often remarkable choices, its solid scholarship and linguistic grounding, and its theoretical engagement, Portrait Stories opens up significant new perspectives on the literature of a century. —Marshall Brown, University of Washington

"Mixing well-known work such as The Picture of Dorian Gray with relatively undiscussed examples by Honore de Balzac and George Sand, Ginsburg defines a new corpus and isolates the multiple ways in which subject and representation are entangled with each other and the act of readerly interpretation ."-SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

From the Publisher

Mixing well-known work such as The Picture of Dorian Gray with relatively undiscussed examples by Honore de Balzac and George Sand, Ginsburg defines a new corpus and isolates the multiple ways in which subject and representation are entangled with each other and the act of readerly interpretation .

1500-1900 SEL: Studies in English Literature

“With its broad international reach, its canny and often remarkable choices, its solid scholarship and linguistic grounding, and its theoretical engagement, Portrait Stories opens up significant new perspectives on the literature of a century.

University of Washington - Marshall Brown

Ginsburg makes an engaging and significant contribution by identifying portraits and portraiture as an important topos in nineteenth-century European narrative literature.

University of Michigan - Ross Chambers