Abstract
What happens to the objects that make up a ‘literary and visual culture’ when we try to imagine them not only through our minds, but also through our bodies and our senses? When we ‘re-member’ their different materialities? In his Italian Journey Johann Wolfgang von Goethe remembers his experience of Rome through the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, ‘the living woman’ emerging from ‘sculptured stone’. Encountering Rome ‘in the flesh’ gives a new life to the city which had so long been an object of the imagination, yet also felt already so familiar through etchings, drawings, paintings, or three-dimensional models in cork, woodcut, and plaster.1 Through the physical pleasure implicit in the overlap between the experience of the city and the erotic discovery of the woman in the flesh, Goethe’s Pygmalion stands for a multisensorial model of cultural encounter in which images are given a body and enlivened through touch.
I think and compare, See with an eye that can feel, feel with a hand that can see.
(Goethe, Erotica Romana)
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Notes
Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, The Complete Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. by E.H. Super, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77), III, 258.
Walter Pater, ‘Preface’, The Renaissance (1873; London: Macmillan, 1910), pp. viii, x.
Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (1988; Thrupp, Glos: Sutton, 2003).
Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 3, drawing on Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 5 7–60.
Recent books that have covered these themes without the multisensorial material aesthetic that informs this collection (and, in some cases, a more literary or mid nineteenth-century focus) include Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004);
Gerard Curtis, Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002);
Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, eds, Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1995).
Fred Ghilett, ‘The Camera Medusa’, Cycling (5 Dec 1896), 432; for a more recent example of a camera-medusa see
Kobina Mercer, ‘Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe’, in Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 307–29: 312.
Jonah Siegel, Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward and Jeremy Aynsley, eds, Material Memories: Design and Evocation (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999).
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 33.
Margaret Atherton, ‘How to Write the History of Vision: Understanding the Relationship between Berkeley and Descartes’, in David Michael Levin, ed., Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 139–66;
John Plunkett, ‘Touching Sight, Feeling Seeing: the Stereoscope and the History of the Senses 1830–1870’, unpublished conference paper presented at the British Association for Victorian Studies, Leicester, 2008. We are grateful to Plunkett for letting us cite the manuscript.
See also Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2000), p. 3.
Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: Bretschneider, 1985), pp. 21–4.
For a social and historical geography of these coteries in London and some of its Europe-wide ramifications, see Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ (1935), Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era o fHigh Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), pp. 155–76: 169.
Patrizia Di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007).
M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 52–3
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 247.
On the third person as the mode of the ‘non person’, see Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 198, 200, 217, 221–2.
On the tradition of the blind man’s staff, from Descartes’ Dioptrique through Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, see Atherton and also Alenca Zupančič, ‘Philosophers’ Blind Man’s Buff’, in Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek, eds, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 32–58.
W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 6.
Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography: Allegories (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).
Constance Classen, ‘Touch in the Museum’, in Constance Classen, ed., The Book of Touch (London and New York: Berg, 2005), pp. 275–86: 278–9.
This argument is developed in Patrizia Di Bello, ‘Photography and Sculpture: A “Light” Touch’, in Patrizia Di Bello and Gabriel Koureas, eds, Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present (Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973), pp. 219–53: 225.
Thus complicating ideas of indexicality that are still prevalent in theorising photography’s relationship with its referent; see for example Helen Groth’s Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: the Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999). On photography’s indexicality,
see Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Part 1 and Part 2’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 196–219.
David Howes, ‘Empires of the Senses’, in David Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), pp. 1–24; Howes, ‘Charting the Sensorial Revolution’, Senses and Society, 1 (2006), 113–28.
Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, ‘Photographs as Objects’, in Edwards and Hart, eds, Photographs, Objects, Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 1–15: 1–2;
see also Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).
Henry James, ‘Preface’, The Golden Bowl, ed. by Virginia Llewellyn Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xlvi, hereafter in text.
Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Medium is the Message’, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 1964, repr. 2002), p. 8.
Murray Krieger, ‘Appendix: Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön revisited (1967)’, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 263–88: 285.
James Heffernan, Museum of Words (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 191 and 118–19 for his discussion of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ and Medusa.
On the difference between ekphrastic writing and its object, see W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 154; on writing as a’self-consuming artifact’,
see Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: the Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
Daniel Miller, The Com fort of Things (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), pp. 6–7.
Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), pp. 167, 165.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, trans. C.J. Arthur (London: Lawrence, 1974), p. 42.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), p. 71.
Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 5.
Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28:1 (Autumn 2001), 1–22: 5, 7, 10.
William Morris, The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book, ed. by William S. Peterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 2, 1, hereafter in text.
For a fuller and more carefully nuanced account, see Michael Twyman, Printing 1770–1970: An Illustrated History of its Development and Uses in England (1970; London: The British Library, 1998).
Michael Mason, ‘The Way We Look Now: Millais’ Illustrations to Trollope’, Art History, 1:3 (1978), 309–40.
See also Richard Maxwell, ed., The Victorian Illustrated Book (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2002).
Clive Ashwin, ‘Graphic Imagery 1837–1901: A Victorian Revolution’, Art History, 1:3 (1978), 360–70: 362.
John Ruskin, ‘Appendix. Article I. Notes on the Present State of Engraving in England’, Ariadne Florentina: Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving, with Appendix, Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term 1872 (London: George Allen, 1890), Dv. 256–78: 267.
Ashwin, ‘Graphic Imagery’, p. 369. See also Trevor Fawcett, ‘Graphic Versus Photographic in the Nineteenth-Century Reproduction’, Art History, 9:2 (1986), 185–212.
For a Marxist take on Morris’s practice, see Caroline Arscott, ‘William Morris: Decoration and Materialism’, in Andrew Hemingway, ed., Marxism and the History of Art: from William Morris to the New Left (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 9–27.
Objects can also embody, and at once reveal and keep, the secrets that are essential to the ‘Epistemology of the Closet’, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), in particular pp. 67–90.
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© 2010 Luisa Calè and Patrizia Di Bello
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Calè, L., Di Bello, P. (2010). Introduction: Nineteenth-Century Objects and Beholders. In: Calè, L., Di Bello, P. (eds) Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297395_1
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