Moving deftly among literary and visual arts, as well as the modern critical canon, Christopher Prendergast’s book explores the meaning and value of representation as both a philosophical challenge (What does it mean to create an image that ‘stands for’ something absent?) and a political issue (Who has the right to represent whom?).
The Triangle of Representation raises a range of theoretical, historical, and aesthetic questions, and offers subtle readings of such cultural critics as Raymond Williams, Paul de Man, Edward Said, Walter Benjamin, and Hélène Cixous, in addition to penetrating investigations of visual artists like Gros, Ingres, and Matisse and significant insights into Proust and the onus of translating him. Above all, Prendergast’s work is a striking display of how a firm grounding in theory is essential for the exploration of art and literature.
Table of Content
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. The Triangle of Representation
2. Blurred Identities: Representing Modern Life
3. Foundations and Beginnings: Raymond Williams and the Grounds of Cultural Theory
4. Circulating Representations: New Historicism and the Poetics of Culture
5. Representing (Forgetting) the Past: Paul de Man, Fascism and Deconstruction
6. Representing Other Cultures: Edward Said
7. Representation or Embodiment? Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Correspondances
8. God’s Secret: Reflections on Realism
9. Visuality and Narrative: The Moment of History Painting
10. Literature, Painting, Metaphor: Matisse/Proust
11. English Proust
Notes
Index
About the author
Christopher Prendergast is professor of French literature at Cambridge University and a fellow of the British Academy. His six previous books include
The Order of Mimesis and
Writing the City: Paris and the Nineteenth Century.
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