This book draws on literature, painting, and a never-before-seen cache of photographs to explore the representation of catastrophe and the targeting of civilians in war. Focusing on images of Nazi Germany's bombed-out cities, the author connects the fraught aesthetics of ruins with the problem of how to acknowledge German suffering."--Provided by publisher.
How does literature imagine its own powers of representation? Francoise Meltzer attempts to answer this question by looking at how the portrait--the painted portrait, framed--appears in various literary texts. Alien to the verbal system of the text yet mimetic of the gesture of writing, the textual portrait becomes a telling measure of literature's views on itself, on the politics of representation, and on the power of writing. Meltzer's readi...
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction 1: Freud and Descartes: Dreaming On 2: Paul Celan and the Death of the Book 3: Disappropriating Colette 4: Walter Benjamin and the Right to Acedia Conclusion Index
Why are contemporary secular theorists so frequently drawn to saints, martyrs, and questions of religion? Why has Joan of Arc fascinated some of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century? In a book that faces crucial issues in both critical and gender inquiry, Francoise Meltzer uses the story of Joan as a guide for reading the postmodern nostalgia for a body that is intact and transparent. She argues that critics who place excessive...
