Mieke Bal Knihy

Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word Image Opposition explores the potential for interdisciplinary methodology between literature and visual art. In a series of close analyses of works by Rembrandt works whose attribution is still challenged, but can still be considered within the context of this study-and texts related to those works, Mieke Bal questions the traditional boundaries between literary and visual analysis. Bal also studies Rembrandt's complex handling of gender and the representation of women in Rembrandt's painting. Although Reading Rembrandt's methods originate outside the history of art, it demonstrates nonetheless the author's sensitivity to the visual aspect of Rembrandt's work. The works by Rembrandt gain in depth and interest, but an original perspective of the role of visuality in our culture emerges, which ultimately has consequences for our views of gender, the artist, and the act of reading.

Since its first publication in English in 1985, Mieke Bal's Narratology has become a classic introduction to the major elements comprising a comprehensive theory of narrative texts. In this second edition, Professor Bal broadens the spectrum of her theoretical model, updating the chapters on literary narrative and adding new examples from outside the field of literary studies. Some specific additions include discussions on dialogue in narrative, translation as transformation (including intermedia translation), intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and the place of the subject in narratology. Two new chapters, one on visualization and visual narrative with examples from art and film and the other an examination of anthropological views of narrative, lead Bal to conclude with a re-evaluation of narratology in light of its applications outside the realm of the literary.

What is the point of bringing reflexive discourse called theory to bear on such diverse subjects as the Statue of Liberty, the dTcor of Freud's study, a fifteenth-century triptych and contemporary science, on Kant and postmodern literature, Indian traditions and the voice of a soprano? The Point of Theory works to reintegrate theory and theorizing into a culture disturbed by "anti-theorism" and political "in-correctness." In this book, twenty-two cultural theorists seek to make the workings of culture understandable.

Narratology in Practice draws on various cultural domains to explain the ways in which theory illuminates the presence of narrative.

"Up into the unknown" is the phrase the architects Colin Fournier and Peter Cook came up with for the futuristic architecture of the Kunsthaus Graz. To this day, this is to be understood as an invitation to explore the limits of the imagination and to test alternative ideas and utopias in a laboratory for art. Since 2003, the Kunsthaus has been an institution without a collection. Today it claims to be a museum. With its architecture of hybrid spaces, site-specific invitations to confrontation and the mission to be a production site for contemporary art, the Kunsthaus Graz is a space and place of potentiality and otherness. Blueprint for a Museum is to be understood as a draft for a museum, a blueprint that simultaneously reflects abstract categories of the institution and resonates with concrete programme concepts. The publication thus follows the idea of experimentation that the Kunsthaus Graz has embodied since its foundation.

Album/Tracks A+B is a comprehensive catalogue on the Belgian artist Ana Torfs, published on the occasion of her solo exhibitions in K21, Düsseldorf and Generali Foundation, Vienna. Its title refers to the idea of a photo album that starts out empty and slowly comes to tell a story as it is filled with pictures. Ana Torfs' oeuvre pays homage to characters and events in history, literature and film, pursuing the traces they have left behind-their "tracks"-in order to breathe new life into them. Her subjects include Ludwig van Beethoven's conversation books (for Zyklus von Kleinigkeiten [ Cycle of Trifles ], 1998), a play by Maurice Maeterlinck (for The Intruder , 2004) and the court records surrounding the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (for Anatomy , 2006). Torfs' media range from film, video, slide installation and photographic series to xerography and silkscreen. This monograph, designed by Jurgen Persijn, comprehensively documents Torfs' œuvre between 1993 and 2010, with brief remarks on each individual work from critics Mieke Bal, Michael Glasmeier, Sabine Folie, Anselm Franke, Doris Krystof, Steven Jacobs, Gabriele Mackert, Friedrich Meschede and Catherine Robberechts. An introductory essay by Kassandra Nakas and an extensive correspondence between Gabriele Mackert and the artist complete this wide spectrum of perspectives on Torfs' work.

Auch wenn die Kulturwissenschaften gemeinhin als neue Leitwissenschaft innerhalb der Geisteswissenschaften ausgerufen werden, so fehlt es ihnen doch nach wie vor an einer klaren theoretischen Profilierung und an einem fest umrissenen Forschungsfeld. Mieke Bal sucht mit ihrer an dekonstruktivistische wie an ideologiekritische Positionen anschließenden Kulturanalyse dieses Dilemma der cultural studies zu überwinden. Sie schlägt einen entscheidenden Wechsel in der Orientierung vor: den Einsatz von Konzepten als Theorien en miniature, die sie jeweils in enger Verzahnung mit den zu analysierenden Gegenständen entwickelt und klar definiert. Der vorliegende Band, der von Mieke Bal zusammengestellt worden ist, versammelt, neben grundlegenden theoretischen überlegungen, eine Reihe ebenso prägnanter wie weitreichender Einzelanalysen. Sie spannen den Bogen von einer Narratologie des Sammelns über die Semiotik des Ausstellens als eines Exponierens von Argumenten bis zu einer photographischen Lektüre Prousts oder einer ›widersinnigen‹ Geschichte des Barock. Gemeinsam ist diesen Aufsätzen, die hier zum Teil erstmals veröffentlicht werden, nicht nur der Anspruch, die strikte Trennung zwischen Wort und Bild aufzuheben, sondern auch das Plädoyer für eine Erneuerung der Geisteswissenschaften.

Kulturanalyse heißt für Mieke Bal, einem weiten Kulturbegriff zu folgen und theoretische Kategorien, Kunstwerke und gesellschaftliche Praxen gleichermaßen als kulturelle Objekte zu lesen. In diesem Wörterbuch kann man sie nun – Buchstabe für Buchstabe – bei der Arbeit beobachten. Zwischen A wie Anachronismus und Z wie Zapping führen die kurzen Essays in die Kulturanalyse und das interdisziplinäre Denken Mieke Bals ein.