Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

“The sad, proud old man stared eternally out of his canvas...”: Media Criticism, Scopic Regimes and the Function of Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait with Two Circles” in John Fowles’s Novel Daniel Martin

“The sad, proud old man stared eternally out of his canvas...”: Media Criticism, Scopic Regimes... AbstractOn the surface level, Fowles’s novel sets the trust in the timelessness of art and the possibility of a recourse to some kind of ‘true self’ against American hyperreality. Though the novel’s verdict on the American scopic regime of simulacra is devastating, England’s morbid theatricality does not represent an alternative. However, a novel which criticizes visuality only to accord Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait” a place of utmost importance necessarily runs into problems of self-contradiction: Rembrandt’s self-portrait refuses any one-dimensional functionalization and contains self-reflexive/revocative elements pertaining to its capitalist dimension and to the dangers of commodification/narcissism/serialization. Moreover, Rembrandt’s portrait is located at the centre of a whole series of mises en abyme and contains significant autotelic elements which link it with the criticized American scopic regime, question its representational dimension by stressing the pure materiality of the work of paint and revoke Fowles’s novel and its didactic media-theoretical underpinnings.I would like to thank Bryan Knowlton, Simon Loesch, Keith Hollingsworth and Bettina Jansen for their constructive help at various stages of work on this article. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Anglia de Gruyter

“The sad, proud old man stared eternally out of his canvas...”: Media Criticism, Scopic Regimes and the Function of Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait with Two Circles” in John Fowles’s Novel Daniel Martin

Horlacher, Stefan
Anglia , Volume 136 (4): 28 – Nov 9, 2018
Download PDF
28 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/the-sad-proud-old-man-stared-eternally-out-of-his-canvas-media-y5GbHlIdMG

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
1865-8938
eISSN
1865-8938
DOI
10.1515/ang-2018-0069
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractOn the surface level, Fowles’s novel sets the trust in the timelessness of art and the possibility of a recourse to some kind of ‘true self’ against American hyperreality. Though the novel’s verdict on the American scopic regime of simulacra is devastating, England’s morbid theatricality does not represent an alternative. However, a novel which criticizes visuality only to accord Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait” a place of utmost importance necessarily runs into problems of self-contradiction: Rembrandt’s self-portrait refuses any one-dimensional functionalization and contains self-reflexive/revocative elements pertaining to its capitalist dimension and to the dangers of commodification/narcissism/serialization. Moreover, Rembrandt’s portrait is located at the centre of a whole series of mises en abyme and contains significant autotelic elements which link it with the criticized American scopic regime, question its representational dimension by stressing the pure materiality of the work of paint and revoke Fowles’s novel and its didactic media-theoretical underpinnings.I would like to thank Bryan Knowlton, Simon Loesch, Keith Hollingsworth and Bettina Jansen for their constructive help at various stages of work on this article.

Journal

Anglia – de Gruyter

Published: Nov 9, 2018

References

  • Zur Bedeutung der Internationalen Gotik für John Fowles’ Novelle ‘The Ebony Tower’: Pisanello, Uccello und die Darstellung der Natur