Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Projecting a More Habitable Globe: Hollywood's Yellow Peril and Its Refraction onto 1930s Shanghai National Cinema
- Chapter 2 Berlin – The City of Sound and Sensation in Fritz Lang's M and E. A. Dupont's Varieté
- Chapter 3 Bond's Body: Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale and the Future Anterior
- Chapter 4 Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
- Chapter 5 Imperial Gazes, Hollywood Predators: A Cinema of Molestation in Postcolonial Indian Literature
- Chapter 6 Linguistic Identity in Fruit Chan's 1997 Trilogy
- Chapter 7 The Postnational and the Aesthetics of the Spectral: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon
- Chapter 8 The Art Object as Text in the Practice of Comparative Visuality
- Chapter 9 Exploring In-humanity: Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and Still-Life Painting
- Chapter 10 Re-defining Art: Manuel Rivas' Mujer en el baño
- Chapter 11 Re-envisioning the Haunting Past: Kara Walker's Art and the Re-appropriation of the Visual Codes of the Antebellum South
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 8 - The Art Object as Text in the Practice of Comparative Visuality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Projecting a More Habitable Globe: Hollywood's Yellow Peril and Its Refraction onto 1930s Shanghai National Cinema
- Chapter 2 Berlin – The City of Sound and Sensation in Fritz Lang's M and E. A. Dupont's Varieté
- Chapter 3 Bond's Body: Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale and the Future Anterior
- Chapter 4 Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
- Chapter 5 Imperial Gazes, Hollywood Predators: A Cinema of Molestation in Postcolonial Indian Literature
- Chapter 6 Linguistic Identity in Fruit Chan's 1997 Trilogy
- Chapter 7 The Postnational and the Aesthetics of the Spectral: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon
- Chapter 8 The Art Object as Text in the Practice of Comparative Visuality
- Chapter 9 Exploring In-humanity: Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and Still-Life Painting
- Chapter 10 Re-defining Art: Manuel Rivas' Mujer en el baño
- Chapter 11 Re-envisioning the Haunting Past: Kara Walker's Art and the Re-appropriation of the Visual Codes of the Antebellum South
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘So long as the history of painting is difficult to dissociate in all rigor from the history of the cultural, linguistic, and even literary text, it is enough to ask literature and painting, comparatively, the question of mimesis or of the referent, etc., for the question of the relation between a still-life and a so-called real plant (a vegetable or a game animal) to no longer be simply foreign, a priori exterior, to the domain of comparative literature…. We must understand the structural temptation of this encyclopedic opening…the concept of comparative literature, the essential vocation [is] to be an encyclopedic, encyclopedistic destination.’
—Jacques DerridaThe classificatory order for the visual arts and art history has long been rigorous in its demand for juxtapositions and comparisons – notwithstanding the fact that there is really no such thing as a disciplinary domain called ‘comparative visuality’ that can parallel comparative literature. In regards to cultural comparisons, there is a vast difference between approaches to visual art and to literature when it comes to analysis of their objects of expression. Historically, the endeavour of comparing the visual arts was an enlightenment practice, established by historian-critics such as Johann Winckelmann who in 1764 made the case for judging the ‘highest beauty’ achieved by Classical Greek artists in contrast to the ‘arrested growth’ of the artistic development of Egyptian and Persian art. His politic of comparison simply extended the broader notions about cultures from Kantian ‘observations’ which were later incorporated with Hegelian philosophies of history.
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- Information
- World Cinema and the Visual Arts , pp. 109 - 128Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012