Silent Poetry: Deafness, Sign, and Visual Culture in Modern France - Rilegato

Mirzoeff, Nicholas

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691037892 ISBN 13: 9780691037899

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 1995

Riassunto

This book explores the dynamic interaction between art and the sign language of the deaf in France from the philosophes to the introduction of the sound motion picture. Nicholas Mirzoeff shows how the French Revolution transformed the ancien regime metaphor of painting as silent poetry into a nineteenth-century school of over one hundred deaf artists. Painters, sculptors, photographers, and graphic artists all emanated from the Institute for the Deaf in Paris, playing a central role in the vibrant deaf culture of the period. With the rise of Darwinism, eugenics, and race science, however, the deaf found themselves categorized as "savages," excluded and ignored by the hearing. So this book is not concerned simply with recovering forgotten art, or the claims of a minority, but with the process and history of marginalization, the constitution of a "center" from which the abnormal could be excluded, and the vital role of visual culture within this discourse.
Based on groundbreaking archival and pictorial research, Mirzoeff's exciting and intertextual analysis of what he terms the "silent screen of deafness" produces an alternative history of nineteenth-century art that challenges canonical views of the history of art, the inheritance of the Enlightenment, and the functions, status, and meanings of visual culture itself. Fusing methodologies from cultural studies, poststructuralism, and art history, this book will be important for students and scholars of art history, cultural and deaf studies, and the history of medicine.

Su questo libro

Recensione

"Nicholas Mirzoeff's remarkable Silent Poetry... is in large part a classic ideological and political account. But Mirzoeff's true originality is to consider his theme from an art-historical perspective.... A very interesting book on an important subject.... Its implications are numerous and rich. It has a message about the dignity of the deaf. It is a sensitive essay on the interweaving of high art and politics. It also says a great deal about the strength and the weaknesses of the Republican idea in France since the Revolution and perhaps today.... [A] learned, humane and touching book."--The Times Literary Supplement

L'autore

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0691037892
• ISBN 13: 9780691037899
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 320