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The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
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Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century
Art. New York: The Free Press, 2001.
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Paperback: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
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U. K. edition: The Trouble with Beauty. London: Heinemann, 2001.
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Postmodern
Fictions; 1960-1990 in Cambridge History of American
Literature, vol. 7 (London/New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
This study of late 20th-century U.S. fiction is one of
25 book-length contributions that constitute the new Cambridge
History of American Literature (ed. Sacvan Bercovitch).
The Journal of American Studies has declared it without
doubt and without any serious rival, the scholarly history
for our generation. Postmodern Fictions explores the
genres of the novel as laid out in 1960s criticism: the
experimentalism of Pynchon, Barth, and Hawkes; the traditional
fiction of Mailer, Roth, and Vonnegut; the womens
writing of Morrison, Robinson, and Walker. Steiners
conclusion is that what looked like separate trends in 1960
or 1970 had become so overlapping and interconnected in
works of the 1980s that the map of American fiction needed
to be totally redrawn.
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The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age
of Fundamentalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995.
Paperback: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
This book counters the rise of fundamentalist
thinking about the arts with a liberal aesthetic for our
times. A report from the battleground of late 20th-century
culture, it surveys a series of dismaying controversies:
the Mapplethorpe affair and the death sentence against Salman
Rushdie; the crusade to equate pornography with rape; political
correctness and the scholar scoundrels Anthony
Blunt, Paul de Man, and Martin Heidegger. Steiner argues
that these cases rest on a dangerous literalism that erases
the distinction between the virtual and the real.
[Listed among the New York Times 100 Best
Books of 1996]
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Pictures of Romance: Form Against
Context in Painting and Literature. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Paperback: Chicago UP, 1991.
Pictures from the Renaissance to modernism
freeze narratives in an a-temporal moment. The aim is visual
realism, a suspended moment of perception with an unnatural
clarity and compression of meaning. Those images turn up
regularly in literary romances, where, paradoxically, they
convey the anti-realism of this genre. An exploration of
temporal suspension and narrativity, this book reveals an
intricate exchange between the visual arts and romance literature.
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The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the
Relations between Modern Literature and Painting. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Paperback: Chicago UP, 1986.
The ancient notion of the sister
arts crops up in the history of aesthetics whenever
the fortunes of literature and painting cross. This book
transforms the analogy from a matter of intuition to a matter
of philosophy, examining the connections and barriers between
visual and verbal art, particularly with reference to twentieth-century
modernism. A pioneering contribution to interartistic studies
since the 1980s, The Colors of Rhetoric provided
a theoretical and historical context for the emerging field.
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Exact
Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture
of Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.
This study is one of the earliest scholarly
treatments of Gertrude Steins writing. The focus is
her literary portraits, a genre serving through most of
her career as a laboratory for her inquiries into language,
representation, and identity. Apart from discussing Steins
theory of portraiture and providing readings of several
of her challenging texts, this book explores the history
of the literary portrait, its relation to visual portraiture,
and the connection of Steins writing to Cubist painting.
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Literature
as Meaning: A Thematic Anthology. New York: Pearson/Longman,
Penguin Academic, 2005 (paperback).
This anthology organizes its poems, plays, short stories,
and nonfiction under themes of urgent contemporary interest,
exposing readers to the complex ways in which literature
both is and is not a statement about reality. Among the
selections in Literature as Meaning are traditional
and contemporary works that cover a diversity of ethnic,
racial, and gender viewpoints. Thought-provoking questions
accompany each section, introducing readers to basic concepts
and approaches in literary criticism, from textual close
reading to the aesthetic treatment of social issues such
as gender, identity, ecology, and war. The pedagogical introduction
lays out the discipline of literary study through discussions
of genre, canon, and rhetorical figures. Part of the Penguin
Academics series, this compact, economical anthology provides
an ideal introduction to the study of literature.
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Painting and
Literature, Poetics Today, vol. 10, no. 1 (spring, 1989).
Essays by noted scholars on topics in the connection between
visual and verbal art.
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Painting and Literature, Poetics Today, vol. 10,
no. 2 (summer, 1989). Essays by noted scholars on topics
in the connection between visual and verbal art.
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The Sign in Music and Literature. Austin:
Texas University Press, 1981. Essays by noted scholars in
semiotic approaches to music and literature.
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Image
and Code. Ann Arbor: Michigan Studies in the Humanities,
1981. Essays by noted scholars in semiotic approaches to painting
and literature. |
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