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In the Mind's Eye
The Visual Impulse in Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin
Series: - Faux Titre, Volume: 236
Author:
This comparative, interdisciplinary study investigates the relationship between literature and the visual arts in France and Britain from 1750-1900. Through a close examination of the prose writings of Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin, read against the background of contemporary philosophy, aesthetics and theories of language, In the Mind’s Eye proposes a new interpretation of the influence and rivalries underlying the development of art criticism as a genre during this period. The visual impulse – the desire to transcend the limitations of language and make the reader see – is located within the historical traditions of ekphrasis, enargeia and the paragone, while in each chapter, the individual author’s theories of the mind, memory and imagination provide a critical framework for his stylistic experiments. In the Mind’s Eye presents an in-depth analysis of the cultural, theoretical and aesthetic implications of artistic border crossings, and by contextualizing the movement toward visual/verbal hybridity in the fiction and criticism of Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin, brings new perspectives to nineteenth-century studies in art and literature.
Alexandra Wettlaufer is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. The author of Pen vs. Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac and the Myth of Pygmalion, she specializes in nineteenth-century literature and the visual arts.
Acknowledgments
Introduction The Visual Impulse in Prose: Border Crossings and the Anxieties of Interdisciplinarity
Chapter 1 Towards a Visual Discourse: Theories of the Origin of Language, Enargeia, Ekphrasis and Associationism
Chapter 2 Diderot’s Visual Prose: Gesture, Hieroglyph and the Visual Imagination
Chapter 3 Baudelaire and the Salons: The Critic as Artist
Chapter 4 Les Paradis Artificiels, Le Surnaturel and the Prose Poem : The Aesthetics of Psychological Flânerie
Chapter 5 Ruskin and the Language of Images
Chapter 6 Ruskin’s Moving Images: The Politics and the Poetics of the Paragone
Conclusion Diderot, Baudelaire, Ruskin: Envisioning Visionaries
Bibliography
Introduction The Visual Impulse in Prose: Border Crossings and the Anxieties of Interdisciplinarity
Chapter 1 Towards a Visual Discourse: Theories of the Origin of Language, Enargeia, Ekphrasis and Associationism
Chapter 2 Diderot’s Visual Prose: Gesture, Hieroglyph and the Visual Imagination
Chapter 3 Baudelaire and the Salons: The Critic as Artist
Chapter 4 Les Paradis Artificiels, Le Surnaturel and the Prose Poem : The Aesthetics of Psychological Flânerie
Chapter 5 Ruskin and the Language of Images
Chapter 6 Ruskin’s Moving Images: The Politics and the Poetics of the Paragone
Conclusion Diderot, Baudelaire, Ruskin: Envisioning Visionaries
Bibliography