The focus of this interdisciplinary volume, which I co-edited with William N. Goetzmann and K. Ge... more The focus of this interdisciplinary volume, which I co-edited with William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst, both affiliated with Yale University's International Center for Finance, and with Timothy Young, curator at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, is Het groote Tafereel der dwaasheid (The Great Mirror of Folly), a splendid Dutch compilation of texts and images that was published shortly after the first international stock market crash of 1720. The Tafereel lays bare an imaginary that wavered between an increasingly refined appreciation of the social, economic and cultural benefits of commerce and a growing awareness of the dangers associated with modern economies, particularly with respect to global trade and new financial instruments. In my own chapter I compare the ways in which the Dutch, English and French made sense of the events of 1720 and contend that eighteenth-century writers and artists created the textual and visual language we still rely on to make sense of – and to a certain extent construct – financial crises.
This book deals with the epistemological foundations that authorized the well known eighteenth-ce... more This book deals with the epistemological foundations that authorized the well known eighteenth-century obsession with origins (of ideas, languages, nations, the universe, etc.). I submit that it must be understood within the context of the birth of aesthetics as a master discourse. In particular, I argue that once knowledge came to be defined as knowledge of things made by human beings, originality became valued not only as novelty, but as a guarantee of epistemological certainty, an aestheticization of knowledge that allowed thinkers to address issues ostensibly unrelated to the arts. In order to make this case, I drew on writers as diverse as Locke, Pope, Vico, Condillac, Rousseau, Edward Young, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant and on such fields as geometry, historiography, literary criticism, and political economy.
An interdisciplinary collection of essays on the relationship between memory, identity, and cultu... more An interdisciplinary collection of essays on the relationship between memory, identity, and culture in a country that was federalized along intricate regional and ethno-linguistic lines in the early 1990’s.
This article provides an account of the ties that have been binding literary studies and Smithian... more This article provides an account of the ties that have been binding literary studies and Smithian criticism for the past twenty-five years or so. More specifically, I survey the work done by literary scholars and by scholars from other disciplines, who are either working on traditionally literary topics, such as rhetoric or the novel, or who have brought literary methods to bear on their work. This paper is divided into two parts: 1) preliminary remarks on key features of the recent literary turn in Smithian scholarship, and 2) a survey of the research that has been done in the following four categories: rhetoric, literature, aesthetics, and cultural studies.
Bart Beaty, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (Toronto: Univer... more Bart Beaty, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). ix+303 pp.; cloth: ISBN 978-0-8020-9133-9 (US $65, £42); paper: ISBN 978-0-8020-9412-4 (US $30.95; £20) As Bart Beaty notes in his acknowledgments (vii), 'inadequate library collections, a dearth of secondary sources, and a lack of institutional support' have long hampered the academic study of comics. Indeed, not only does the morose assessment of the state of bande dessinee (BD) research issued by Philippe Marion in 1993 still ring true, it can even be extended to the study of comics in general: 'When it comes to BD, one struggles to find twenty books offering a genuine analysis of the medium. One finds lots of monographs, lots of complacent and redundant compilations, but only a handful of essays worthy of the name'.3 Bart Beaty's Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s may not mark the definitive end of th...
in Nature's Mirror: Reality and Symbol in Belgian Landscape, ed. Jeffery Howe, exh. cat. (Chestnu... more in Nature's Mirror: Reality and Symbol in Belgian Landscape, ed. Jeffery Howe, exh. cat. (Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College, McMullen Museum of Art, 2017), 49–61. Exhibit is on view at the McMullen Museum of Art from September 10 to December 10, 2017. Catalogue ISBN: 978-1892850294
A theoretical exploration of the ‘architectural unconscious of the page’, namely, the structural ... more A theoretical exploration of the ‘architectural unconscious of the page’, namely, the structural similarities that obtain between the façades of residential buildings and the classic page layouts of American comics, Franco-Belgian bande dessinée, and Japanese manga.
Argues against using the term “graphic novel” as a sign-post for a whole genre, for the retention... more Argues against using the term “graphic novel” as a sign-post for a whole genre, for the retention of the earlier, makeshift terminology, and for the adoption of a multidisciplinary perspective to the budding field of comics studies.
Oxford Handbooks Online, Oxford University Press, 2013
A survey of Smith's entire body of works from the perspective of Smith's contributions to the fie... more A survey of Smith's entire body of works from the perspective of Smith's contributions to the field of aesthetics. In particular, I argue that Smith laid the groundwork for a socially based critique of aesthetic judgment by calling attention to the role played by a viewer’s status and economic interest in determining the value of a work of art.
This article provides an account of the ties that have been binding literary studies and Smithian... more This article provides an account of the ties that have been binding literary studies and Smithian criticism for the past twenty-five years or so. More specifically, I survey the work done by literary scholars and by scholars from other disciplines, who are either working on traditionally literary topics, such as rhetoric or the novel, or who have brought literary methods to bear on their work. This paper is divided into two parts: 1) preliminary remarks on key features of the recent literary turn in Smithian scholarship, and 2) a survey of the research that has been done in the following four categories: rhetoric, literature, aesthetics, and cultural studies.
In 1802 a monumental gold and black mantel clock representing a scene from Paul et Virginie was o... more In 1802 a monumental gold and black mantel clock representing a scene from Paul et Virginie was ordered from the man who was to become Napoleon’s appointed supplier, bronze caster and engraver Pierre-Philippe Thomire. It was, it has been plausibly argued, meant as a gift from the premier consul to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
A close examination of the iconography of the clock reveals some startling departures from the story first published in 1788. These in turn, draw our attention to a number of important variations in the different editions of the novel that were published during Bernardin’s lifetime. This is particularly true of paratextual variants, which, unlike the slight changes brought to the main body of the tale, displace, overwhelm, and eventually drown the critique of slavery built into Bernardin’s original work.
This article studies Thomire’s reordering of Paul et Virginie against the text and paratext of the 1806 edition as well as against the earlier Voyage à l’Ile de France, to which Bernardin had initially thought of appending his fictional narrative. Studying these separate moments in the history of Paul et Virginie shows us how a work published during the Ancien Régime could be recast as an imperial icon. More specifically, it enables us to see Bernardin’s “work in progress” as a barometer of changing attitudes towards slavery in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. Finally, it also allows us to appreciate to what extent Bernardin’s own revisions were influenced by the reception of his tale and the abundant iconography it was generating.
The focus of this interdisciplinary volume, which I co-edited with William N. Goetzmann and K. Ge... more The focus of this interdisciplinary volume, which I co-edited with William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst, both affiliated with Yale University's International Center for Finance, and with Timothy Young, curator at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, is Het groote Tafereel der dwaasheid (The Great Mirror of Folly), a splendid Dutch compilation of texts and images that was published shortly after the first international stock market crash of 1720. The Tafereel lays bare an imaginary that wavered between an increasingly refined appreciation of the social, economic and cultural benefits of commerce and a growing awareness of the dangers associated with modern economies, particularly with respect to global trade and new financial instruments. In my own chapter I compare the ways in which the Dutch, English and French made sense of the events of 1720 and contend that eighteenth-century writers and artists created the textual and visual language we still rely on to make sense of – and to a certain extent construct – financial crises.
This book deals with the epistemological foundations that authorized the well known eighteenth-ce... more This book deals with the epistemological foundations that authorized the well known eighteenth-century obsession with origins (of ideas, languages, nations, the universe, etc.). I submit that it must be understood within the context of the birth of aesthetics as a master discourse. In particular, I argue that once knowledge came to be defined as knowledge of things made by human beings, originality became valued not only as novelty, but as a guarantee of epistemological certainty, an aestheticization of knowledge that allowed thinkers to address issues ostensibly unrelated to the arts. In order to make this case, I drew on writers as diverse as Locke, Pope, Vico, Condillac, Rousseau, Edward Young, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant and on such fields as geometry, historiography, literary criticism, and political economy.
An interdisciplinary collection of essays on the relationship between memory, identity, and cultu... more An interdisciplinary collection of essays on the relationship between memory, identity, and culture in a country that was federalized along intricate regional and ethno-linguistic lines in the early 1990’s.
This article provides an account of the ties that have been binding literary studies and Smithian... more This article provides an account of the ties that have been binding literary studies and Smithian criticism for the past twenty-five years or so. More specifically, I survey the work done by literary scholars and by scholars from other disciplines, who are either working on traditionally literary topics, such as rhetoric or the novel, or who have brought literary methods to bear on their work. This paper is divided into two parts: 1) preliminary remarks on key features of the recent literary turn in Smithian scholarship, and 2) a survey of the research that has been done in the following four categories: rhetoric, literature, aesthetics, and cultural studies.
Bart Beaty, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (Toronto: Univer... more Bart Beaty, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). ix+303 pp.; cloth: ISBN 978-0-8020-9133-9 (US $65, £42); paper: ISBN 978-0-8020-9412-4 (US $30.95; £20) As Bart Beaty notes in his acknowledgments (vii), 'inadequate library collections, a dearth of secondary sources, and a lack of institutional support' have long hampered the academic study of comics. Indeed, not only does the morose assessment of the state of bande dessinee (BD) research issued by Philippe Marion in 1993 still ring true, it can even be extended to the study of comics in general: 'When it comes to BD, one struggles to find twenty books offering a genuine analysis of the medium. One finds lots of monographs, lots of complacent and redundant compilations, but only a handful of essays worthy of the name'.3 Bart Beaty's Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s may not mark the definitive end of th...
in Nature's Mirror: Reality and Symbol in Belgian Landscape, ed. Jeffery Howe, exh. cat. (Chestnu... more in Nature's Mirror: Reality and Symbol in Belgian Landscape, ed. Jeffery Howe, exh. cat. (Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College, McMullen Museum of Art, 2017), 49–61. Exhibit is on view at the McMullen Museum of Art from September 10 to December 10, 2017. Catalogue ISBN: 978-1892850294
A theoretical exploration of the ‘architectural unconscious of the page’, namely, the structural ... more A theoretical exploration of the ‘architectural unconscious of the page’, namely, the structural similarities that obtain between the façades of residential buildings and the classic page layouts of American comics, Franco-Belgian bande dessinée, and Japanese manga.
Argues against using the term “graphic novel” as a sign-post for a whole genre, for the retention... more Argues against using the term “graphic novel” as a sign-post for a whole genre, for the retention of the earlier, makeshift terminology, and for the adoption of a multidisciplinary perspective to the budding field of comics studies.
Oxford Handbooks Online, Oxford University Press, 2013
A survey of Smith's entire body of works from the perspective of Smith's contributions to the fie... more A survey of Smith's entire body of works from the perspective of Smith's contributions to the field of aesthetics. In particular, I argue that Smith laid the groundwork for a socially based critique of aesthetic judgment by calling attention to the role played by a viewer’s status and economic interest in determining the value of a work of art.
This article provides an account of the ties that have been binding literary studies and Smithian... more This article provides an account of the ties that have been binding literary studies and Smithian criticism for the past twenty-five years or so. More specifically, I survey the work done by literary scholars and by scholars from other disciplines, who are either working on traditionally literary topics, such as rhetoric or the novel, or who have brought literary methods to bear on their work. This paper is divided into two parts: 1) preliminary remarks on key features of the recent literary turn in Smithian scholarship, and 2) a survey of the research that has been done in the following four categories: rhetoric, literature, aesthetics, and cultural studies.
In 1802 a monumental gold and black mantel clock representing a scene from Paul et Virginie was o... more In 1802 a monumental gold and black mantel clock representing a scene from Paul et Virginie was ordered from the man who was to become Napoleon’s appointed supplier, bronze caster and engraver Pierre-Philippe Thomire. It was, it has been plausibly argued, meant as a gift from the premier consul to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
A close examination of the iconography of the clock reveals some startling departures from the story first published in 1788. These in turn, draw our attention to a number of important variations in the different editions of the novel that were published during Bernardin’s lifetime. This is particularly true of paratextual variants, which, unlike the slight changes brought to the main body of the tale, displace, overwhelm, and eventually drown the critique of slavery built into Bernardin’s original work.
This article studies Thomire’s reordering of Paul et Virginie against the text and paratext of the 1806 edition as well as against the earlier Voyage à l’Ile de France, to which Bernardin had initially thought of appending his fictional narrative. Studying these separate moments in the history of Paul et Virginie shows us how a work published during the Ancien Régime could be recast as an imperial icon. More specifically, it enables us to see Bernardin’s “work in progress” as a barometer of changing attitudes towards slavery in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. Finally, it also allows us to appreciate to what extent Bernardin’s own revisions were influenced by the reception of his tale and the abundant iconography it was generating.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1998
I argue that Aphra Behn and Mme de la Fayette helped set the stage for the novel’s success becaus... more I argue that Aphra Behn and Mme de la Fayette helped set the stage for the novel’s success because they were willing to fashion as well as respond to the respective market forces at play in the dissemination of their fictional prose narratives, especially the demand for novelty common to both the English and French markets. I further contend that this history illustrates some of the pitfalls of histories of the English novel that couple its rise with that of the bourgeoisie.
SVEC – Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century , Jun 2002
L’histoire du roman a tendance à faire l’impasse sur le rôle clé de la question du savoir dans le... more L’histoire du roman a tendance à faire l’impasse sur le rôle clé de la question du savoir dans le roman moderne et sur la façon dont le roman et la littératures modernes se sont constitués en se distinguant de la philosophie, division du travail qui fit du probable une catégorie philosophique et de la vraisemblance une préoccupation littéraire. Pourtant, c’est au coeur même de la question du savoir que le roman moderne s’est constitué une identité propre et distincte. Le roman épistolaire, dont la critique moderne a souligné les carences épistémologiques, n’est à cet égard qu’un cas limite du roman. D’où le détour qu’emprunte cet article, qui traite de la question du savoir et de l’épistolarité par le biais de considérations sur les apparences, l’évidence, et la feinte dans La Princesse de Clèves et dans l’oeuvre de Descartes avant de traiter de la confrontation du narratif et de l’épistémologique dans Les Lettres d’une péruvienne et dans La Nouvelle Héloïse.
Short article that focuses on the letter as visual object and compare its handling in La Princess... more Short article that focuses on the letter as visual object and compare its handling in La Princesse de Clèves with the six works by Vermeer that focus on a woman reading, writing, or receiving a letter. The comparison brings into relief a cross-disciplinary understanding of the letter as privileged marker of remarkably similar preoccupations with and answers to questions of legibility, representation, and perspective. The silence of a letter whose contents are not accessible, or the letter as visual object, demands a multiplicity of perspectives, at once intimate and voyeuristic, private and theatrical, that keeps its interpreters guessing.
The main goal of “From Bande Dessinée to Artist’s Book: Testing the Limits of Franco-Belgian Comi... more The main goal of “From Bande Dessinée to Artist’s Book: Testing the Limits of Franco-Belgian Comics” is to show how adopting the book has shaped the history of bande dessinée, from its early standardization into a set format to contemporary explorations into the possibilities offered by the book as three-dimensional object. These explorations are remarkable in part for having brought into question the very definition of bande dessinée. As the exhibition demonstrates, however, creators associated with the Franco-Belgian tradition have always tested the limits of the genre.
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A close examination of the iconography of the clock reveals some startling departures from the story first published in 1788. These in turn, draw our attention to a number of important variations in the different editions of the novel that were published during Bernardin’s lifetime. This is particularly true of paratextual variants, which, unlike the slight changes brought to the main body of the tale, displace, overwhelm, and eventually drown the critique of slavery built into Bernardin’s original work.
This article studies Thomire’s reordering of Paul et Virginie against the text and paratext of the 1806 edition as well as against the earlier Voyage à l’Ile de France, to which Bernardin had initially thought of appending his fictional narrative. Studying these separate moments in the history of Paul et Virginie shows us how a work published during the Ancien Régime could be recast as an imperial icon. More specifically, it enables us to see Bernardin’s “work in progress” as a barometer of changing attitudes towards slavery in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. Finally, it also allows us to appreciate to what extent Bernardin’s own revisions were influenced by the reception of his tale and the abundant iconography it was generating.
A close examination of the iconography of the clock reveals some startling departures from the story first published in 1788. These in turn, draw our attention to a number of important variations in the different editions of the novel that were published during Bernardin’s lifetime. This is particularly true of paratextual variants, which, unlike the slight changes brought to the main body of the tale, displace, overwhelm, and eventually drown the critique of slavery built into Bernardin’s original work.
This article studies Thomire’s reordering of Paul et Virginie against the text and paratext of the 1806 edition as well as against the earlier Voyage à l’Ile de France, to which Bernardin had initially thought of appending his fictional narrative. Studying these separate moments in the history of Paul et Virginie shows us how a work published during the Ancien Régime could be recast as an imperial icon. More specifically, it enables us to see Bernardin’s “work in progress” as a barometer of changing attitudes towards slavery in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. Finally, it also allows us to appreciate to what extent Bernardin’s own revisions were influenced by the reception of his tale and the abundant iconography it was generating.