Reading Rembrandt

Beyond the Word-Image Opposition

Mieke Bal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040791288
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition explores the potential for an interdisciplinary methodology between visual art and literature. In a series of close analyses of works by Rembrandt, works as we see them today, through all the ways of seeing and commenting that precede, and texts related to those works, Mieke Bal questions the traditional boundaries between literary and visual analysis. Bal also studies Rembrandt's complex handling of gender and the representation of women in Rembrandt's painting. The methods used in this study come from both in- and outside the history of art. They demonstrate the author's sensitivity to the visual aspects of Rembrandt's work as meaningful. The works by Rembrandt gain in depth and interest, but an original perspective of the role of visuality in our culture also emerges, which ultimately has consequences for our views of gender, the artists, and the act of reading.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface for the AAA-Edition
• Dedication
• Reading “Rembrandt”
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Beyond the Word-Image Opposition
• Chapter 2 Visual Rhetoric: The Semiotics of Rape
• Chapter 3 Visual Storytelling: Fathers and Sons and the Problem of Myth
• Chapter 4 Between Focalization and Voyeurism: The Representation of Vision
• Chapter 5 Recognition: Reading Icons, Seeing Stories
• Chapter 6 Textuality And Realism
• Chapter 7 Self-Reflection as A Mode of Reading
• Chapter 8 Blindness or Insight? Psychoanalysis and Visual Art
• Chapter 9 Blindness as Insight: The Powers of Horror
• Chapter 10 Dead Flesh, or the Smell of Painting
• Notes
• References
• Index of Names and Titles
• Index of Terms
• Acknowledgments