Please join us next Friday, November 15, at 4 p.m. in LC 101 for a panel on Word and Image Studies in the 19th Century, co-sponsored by the 18th and 19th Century and the Theory and Media Studies Colloquia. We’re delighted to be featuring Deborah Nord (Princeton), Jonah Siegel (Rutgers), and Rachel Teukolsky (Vanderbilt) as our panelists and to be hosting Gavriella Levy Haskell (Yale History of Art) as our moderator.
Rachel Teukolsky: “Orients of the Self: World-Making in the Victorian Illustrated Bible” Nineteenth-century religious illustration is relatively understudied. Yet the illustrated Bible was likely the most popular illustrated book of the Victorian era, serving as a central object in the respectable middle-class parlor. This talk will use the illustrated Bible as an avenue to theorize Victorian illustration more broadly. Pictures in a Bible signify differently from pictures in a novel: instead of interpreting a suspense-driven product, an illustrated Bible—where readers already know the story and the outcome—finds suspense and desire in the images themselves, in the choices for world-formation and imaginative projection. The appeal of the book lies in the way that it visually constructs and animates the world of ancient Jews and Christians. Bible illustrations ultimately challenged Western assumptions about the otherness of ‘the East’: they created what I call ‘orients of the self,’ depicting destabilizing scenes that hovered somewhere between East and West, ancient and modern, Jewish and gentile, patriarchal and democratic, and magical and rational.
Deborah Nord: “Bleak House in Word and Image: Falling Women, Faceless Women”
What happens when we read a novel with equal emphasis on text and illustration? In this paper I explore the partnership of Dickens and his illustrator, Hablot Browne, and argue that Browne draws out elements only obliquely present in the prose, offering not a counter-narrative but accentuating a partly submerged one. In a line stretching from Dombey and Copperfield to Bleak House, a prominent cluster of illustrations highlights themes of fallen sexuality, feminine transgression, and the problematic identity of woman. In Bleak House, Browne’s pattern of distinct visual emphasis or supplement, aided by the striking use of dark plates, extended not merely to the representation of scandalous material and what we might call the woman question, but also, I propose, to the gender of authorship.
Jonah Siegel: “Damage, or the Tradition of Vandalism and the Modernity of Ruins”
How might the history of vandalism contribute to our understanding of the vandalism of history? The destruction of prized antiquities can seem a barbaric practice utterly opposed to the possibility of reflection. It has never been more urgent, however, to reflect on the place of loss in the history of culture, and especially on those losses that may be attributed to violent aggression on the one hand and willful neglect on the other. My presentation takes as its focus the particular case of damage to admired art objects.
In 1793, as the revolutionary priest, Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire produces a series of reports on the destruction of works of art for the National Convention and begins to agitate for the preservation of materials associated with the very elements the revolution was in fact attempting to leave behind, he finds a term for that against which he is writing. He creates the word “vandalism,” he would famously write a friend, “to kill the thing” it names. My talk puts the relationship to history written into the concept of vandalism described by the Abbé Grégoire at the height of the Revolution into conversation with what the great Austrian art historian Alois Riegl described in his seminal 1903 study as “The Modern Cult of Monuments.” If, in Riegl’s treatment of the emergence of the fascination with decaying old things we find a new theorization of the value of preserving the past that allows us to recognize the drives implicit in the formulations of the Abbé, the revolutionary sources of the topic suggest an uncomfortable relationship between damage and admiration.
Thank you to the Dean’s Fund for Research Workshops, Seminars, and Colloquia and The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund at Yale University for supporting this event.