Magritte and Literature

Elective Affinities

Ben Stoltzfus (Author),

Paperback

Category: Art, Media and Visual Culture

Language: English

ISBN: 9789058679604

Publication date: January 13, 2014

€45.00 (including 6% VAT)

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Number of pages: 288

Size: 285 x 190 x 20 mm

Stock item: 83972

Standard delivery time for print books:

For Belgium: 5 to 8 working days

For EU: 2 to 3 weeks

For other countries: 4 to 5 weeks

Summary
Contents
About the Author
Reviews

Magritte’s interarts dialog with literature
The Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte (1898–1967) is well known for his thought-provoking and witty images that challenge the observer’s preconditioned perceptions of reality.

Magritte and Literature examines some of the artist’s major paintings whose titles were influenced by and related to works of literature. Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Goethe’s Elective Affinities, and Poe’s The Domain of Arnheim are representative examples of Magritte’s interarts dialog with literary figures. Despite these convergences the titles subvert the images in his paintings. It is the two images together, the image in the painting and the image in the title, that expresses the aesthetics of Surrealism — sparked by the juxtaposition of unrelated objects. Magritte’s challenge to representation compares with metafiction’s challenge to classic realism, Les Chants de Maldoror for example, and the intersecting space between art and writing, sometimes referred to as the iconotext, manifests itself whenever Magritte borrows a literary title for a painting. His strategy is to paint visible thought, and this reverse ekphrasis, the opposite of a rhetorical description of a painting, undermines the written text. When he succeeds, the effect is poetry.

This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Contents List of illustrations Foreword Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction
1 Magritte’s Painterly Language: Reading, Writing, and Art-Magic 2 Toward Surrealism: Baudelaire and Poe 3 Lautréamont and Les Chants de Maldoror 4 Magritte and Jules Verne: Voyages extraordinaires to the Center of Art 5 Laclos and Les Liaisons dangereuses: Woman, Mirrors, and Robbe-Grillet 6 Cladel and The Tomb of the Wrestlers: Roses, Daggers, and Love in Interarts Discourse 7 The Glass Key—an Interarts Dialogue: Magritte and Dashiell Hammett 8 Dialectical Affinities: Hegel, Sade, and Goethe 9 Time Transfixed: Bergson, Proust, Einstein, and the Fourth Dimension 10 Magritte and Sheherazade: The Enchanted Domain
Conclusion Bibliography Index Gallery with color plates

Ben Stoltzfus

Ben Stoltzfus, Edward A. Dickson Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside, is an internationally recognized scholar of Chennevière, Gide, Robbe-Grillet, Hemingway, Lacan, Magritte, and Jasper Johns.

What a fantastic book! A real treasure--it brings to it all of the author's inimitable skill with language, poetry, and visual aesthetics [...] handsomely printed and so well illustrated - Professor MacCannell, University of California, Irvine

It is a masterpiece that not only just full justice to Magritte as a great artist but also reveals his intellectual powers. - Professor Emeritus Judd Hubert, University of California, Irvine

The relationships uncovered with Lautréamont, Jules Verne, and even Hegel and Goethe is amazing. It's a really fascinating book. - Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita from Stanford University, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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