Startseite Literaturwissenschaften “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
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“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

  • Stefan Horlacher EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 13. November 2018
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Aus der Zeitschrift Anglia Band 136 Heft 4

Abstract

On 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.[1]

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Published Online: 2018-11-13
Published in Print: 2018-11-09

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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  2. Frontmatter
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  21. Books Received
https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2018-0069

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Scytel: A New Old English Word for ‘Penis’
  4. Zelotes and elnvnges: The Extension of Genitive Singular ‑es in the Gloss to the Durham Collectar
  5. The Cambridge and the Exeter Book Physiologi: Associative Imagery, Allegorical Circularity, and Isidorean Organization
  6. Framing the Romantic Artist: Goethe’s Torquato Tasso and James’s Roderick Hudson
  7. “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
  8. Reviews
  9. Judith Huber. Motion and the English Verb: A Diachronic Study. Oxford Studies in the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, xvi + 363 pp., £ 64.00.
  10. Review
  11. Rebecca Shapiro (ed.). Foreword by Jack Lynch. Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied English Lexicography. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017, xl + 608 pp., $ 150.00/£ 100.00.
  12. Tristan Major. Undoing Babel: The Tower of Babel in Anglo-Saxon Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018, xiv + 292 pp., $ 70.00.
  13. Elise Louviot. Direct Speech in Beowulf and Other Old English Narrative Poems. Anglo-Saxon Studies 30. Cambridge: Brewer, 2016, vii + 285 pp., 5 figures, £ 65.00.
  14. Joshua Byron Smith. Walter Map and the Matter of Britain. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, xi + 254 pp., $ 69.95/£ 58.00.
  15. Ian Cornelius. Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, x + 219 pp., 6 tables, £ 75.00.
  16. Frank Wilker. Cultural Memories of Origin: Trauma, Memory and Imagery in African American Narratives of the Middle Passage. American Studies: A Monograph Series 241. Heidelberg: Winter, 2017, 302 pp., 12 illustr., € 42.00.
  17. Carsten Junker. Patterns of Positioning: On the Poetics of Early Abolition. American Studies – A Monograph Series 271. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016, 515 pp., 9 illustr., € 48.00.
  18. Gero Guttzeit. The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric. Anglia Book Series 56. Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter, 2017, 256 pp., 99.95 €.
  19. Andrew S. Gross. The Pound Reaction: Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015, 262 pp., € 36.00.
  20. John Parham and Louise Westling (eds.). A Global History of Literature and Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 459 pp., £ 78.99.
  21. Books Received
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