Books by Mieke Bal

Mieke Bal has had a significant impact on every field she has touched. This work reflects the fields that Bal has most profoundly influenced: literary study, interdisciplinary methodology, visual analysis, and postmodern theology. This work brings together a collection of her work that distills her broad interests and areas of expertise.

One of the first female artists to achieve recognition in her own time, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) became instantly popular in the 1970s when feminist art historians "discovered" her and argued vehemently for a place for her in the canon of Italian baroque painters. Featured alongside her father, Orazio Gentileschi, in a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artemisia has continued to stir interest--though her position in the canon remains precarious, in part because her sensationalized life history has overshadowed her art.In The Artemisia Files, Mieke Bal and a distinguished group of contributors look squarely at this early icon of feminist art history and the question of her status as an artist. Here, Artemisia emerges more fully as a highly original artist whose work is greater than the sum of the events that have traditionally defined her life and reputation, such as her relationship to her father and her role as the victim in a highly publicized rape case during which she was tortured into giving evidence. The six essays in The Artemisia Files offer a new critical assessment of Artemisia's work by devising a variety of approaches that amend past injustices and reconsider the artist and her work from many different angles, including the question of attribution, critical judgment, personal confrontation, Artemisia's historical context, the exhibition of her work, and popular recastings of her story. The fresh, engaging discourse in The Artemisia Files will help to both revive the reputation of this artist on the merit of her work and establish her rightful place in the history of art.

Doris Salcedo, a Colombian-born artist, addresses the politics of memory and forgetting in work that embraces fraught situations in dangerous places. This title leads us into intimate encounters with Salcedo's art, encouraging us to consider each work as a 'theoretical object' that invites certain kinds of considerations about history and grief.

Sets the "Genesis" tale to the different version told in the Qur'an and the depictions of it by Rembrandt, and explores how Thomas Mann's retelling in "Joseph and His Brothers" reworks these versions.

Sketching the history, breadth and applicability of narrative theory, thus demonstrating its value as an analytical instrument, this collection includes articles from Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov and Jean-Francois Lyotard.

The author challenges the view that literary texts cannot be examined by words alone, arguing that images also play a role in the interpretation process.

Feminist literary theorist, specialist in Rembrandt, and a scholar of the Old Testament stories, Mieke Bal considers the signs and meanings that enrich our senses. Her subject is the act of showing, the gesture of exposing to view, especially in the context of the museum.

A theoretically grounded interdisciplinary study of "cultural memory" in sites ranging from Chile, Bolivia, and South Africa to Germany and the US.

Bal's focus for this book is the idea that interdisciplinarity in the humanities - necessary, exciting, serious - must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than its methods.