Matthew Beaumont

Adventures in Realism

Adventures in Realism offers an accessible introduction to realism as it has evolved since the 19th century. Though focused on literature and literary theory, the significance of technology and the visual arts is also addressed. Comprises 16 newly-commissioned essays written by a distinguished group of contributors, including Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson. Provides the historical, cultural, intellectual, and literary contexts necessary to understand developments in realism. Addresses the artistic mediums and technologies such as painting and film that have helped shape the way we perceive reality. Explores literary and pictorial sub-genres, such as naturalism and socialist realism. Includes a brief bibliography and suggestions for further reading at the end of each section

Cutting Up the Corpse: Agatha Christie, Max Ernst, and Neo-Victorianism in the 1930s

This article offers a sketch of attitudes to Victorianism between World War I and World War II, in the form of a diptych. Specifically, it compares two superficially unconnected texts that appeared in 1934—a year in which, as Samuel Hynes once put it, history ‘‘had taken on a new and terrible momentum’’ in the aftermath of Hitler’s accession to power the previous year (Hynes 140). The article reconstructs a relationship between these books in order to demonstrate that, at this time, opposing variants of neo-Victorianism— variants that might be identified as the iconographic (or conservative) on the one hand and the iconoclastic (or avant-gardist) on the other—continued to be locked in a conflict, one enacted in the sphere of culture, about the ideological inheritance of the nineteenth century. The texts are Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de bonté. Although Ernst and Christie were almost exact contemporaries—the latter was born in 1890 and the former in 1891—they are, at first sight, implausible companions. Ernst, who was central to the development of both dadaism and surrealism, is a representative of the European avant-garde; and Christie, at least in the popular imagination, is the embodiment of a quintessentially English cultural conservatism. Furthermore, the texts on which I focus exemplify distinct and even antagonistic artistic tendencies characteristic of the first half of the last century. Murder on the Orient Express is, of course, a detective fiction produced for the expanding mass market in popular literature; and Une Semaine de bonté is a collection of surrealist collages published in a series of five pamphlets, each of less than one thousand copies.

In the beginning was the big toe: Bataille, base materialism, bipedalism

This article goes back to Georges Batailles ruminations on the big toe, published in Documents in 1929, in order to make a materialist case for the claim that this digit is, above all for evolutionary reasons, definitive of human beings’ humanity. It explores the contradiction whereby the big toe, in spite of its anatomical importance in distinguishing human beings from their ancestors and their genetic cousins, that is, from other hominids and other primates, has been systematically demeaned or denigrated in representations of the body. Following an introduction, the argument unfolds in two main sections. The first of these is anthropological or palaeo-anatomical in focus, and reconstructs the determining role of the big toe in the evolution of human beings as bipedal as opposed to quadrupedal creatures. The second shifts attention to the iconography of the big toe, and uses the Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda to propose a reorganisation of the history of representations of the human body in terms of this digit; it looks at several Renaissance paintings in this light. Finally, in a polemical concluding section, this article returns to Batailles reflections on the big toe and argues again for its central importance for a materialist philosophy.

The Politics of the Visor: Looking at Buildings Looking at Us

Do we feel at home in the cities we inhabit? There are of course innumerable ways in which people, and especially the poor and those from marginalized social groups, experience an almost permanent sense of displacement in the urban environments in which they live. The built environment, of course, actively contributes to this condition of unease; and in the early 21st century, an epoch in which metropolitan centres are increasingly dense with privatized, covertly surveilled public spaces, architecture and urban design is probably more aggressive in prosecuting or reinforcing this politics of exclusion than ever before. But there is also a chronic and pervasive sense of disquiet that, whoever we are, and from wherever we have come, is virtually constitutive of our experiences of living in cities. In this article, I explore some aspects of the role that buildings play in reinforcing both the concrete and more abstract forms of this uncanny feeling of not being at home in the urban environment. What I have to say about architecture concerns both how we look at buildings and, more significantly still, how buildings look at us. I first examine the ways in which buildings in general reinforce a sense of the city’s unhomeliness, its uncanniness, in part by applying Slavoj Zizek’s fertile notion of the ‘architectural parallax’. I then detail the ways in which a specific type of contemporary architecture, which I characterize in terms of its ‘visored’ facades, dramatizes the intrusive, even offensive, relation to the individual outlined in the preceding section. Finally, in a brief conclusion, I playfully propose a response to the hostile relation in which these buildings, indeed urban buildings in general, situate us. What Alejandro Zaera Polo has pursued in the shape of a ‘politics of the envelope’ lies behind my reflections here on the politics of what I call the visor. They are offered in part as a contribution to ongoing debates about the ‘right to the city’, since it seems to me that this slogan should among other things entail the right to feel at home in the built environment in which we live. Belonging in the city should be a necessary corollary of being in the city.

Review of Renew Marxist Art History

tions and practices. For a study that considers aspects of photography’s materiality, the size and quality of some of the illustrations in the book are rather disappointing. A number of the images fall within the narrow outer margins of the text boxes, thereby depriving the reader of an opportunity to fully engage with these rarely published visuals. For example, a low-resolution black-and-white reproduction of a painting by Daoud Corm (fig. 21) appears larger than higher-resolution images by photographer Garabed Krikorian (for example, fig. 39), a central figure in the book. Some of the images are pixelated and have reproduced poorly (such as fig. 62), leading one to question the need for their inclusion if high-quality versions were not available. Additionally, while the highly nuanced and complex framework that the author sets up is commendable and original, it could be argued that the dedication to constructing this theoretical apparatus detracted from the analysis of the photographs themselves (in both their materiality and circulation). The book could also have benefited from a theoretical consideration of other contemporaneous visual practices, specifically, painting, which continued to be popular during this period and, in fact, served as an extension of photographic practice. The designation al-musawwirun, or “the imagemakers,” often referred to pre-twentiethcentury artists who could have been painters or photographers (a point also noted by the author). In fact, many almusawwirun were trained in both fields, and they made no clear distinctions between the two professions. The idea that the photographic practice in general, and the tradition of portraiture in particular, “emerged as the first global visual cultural phenomenon” (p. 12) or exists independently of other artistic traditions is thus easily problematized. The author, in chapter 2, discusses portrait paintings by artists like the Syrian Daoud Corm. However, he describes such works as images that were based on photographs, which implies that they are not necessarily substantial works in or of themselves. Similarly, in Sheehi’s discussion of Ottoman imperial portraiture in chapter 1, he makes no allusion to similar long-held traditions among court painters (who produced portraits well into the nineteenth century). Although The Arab Imago does not set out to explore painting, an argument could be made that during the nineteenth century painting and photography were often inextricably linked. Islamic art historian David Roxburgh, for instance, has maintained that in the context of Qajar Iran, painting was engaged “in a practice of remediation” with the emergence of local photographic traditions. It would have been interesting to consider whether similar developments could be seen in the context of Ottoman and Arab photography. Nevertheless, The Arab Imagomakes a significant contribution to the social history of photography in the Ottoman center and periphery, through an analysis of broad transformations from the uneven imperial Tanzimat to the ideologically motivated nahdah. Sheehi helps the reader understand the people both behind and in front of the camera’s lens by fleshing out the complex social codes informing the most banal of portraits and their production. To illustrate, Sheehi opens almost every chapter with a description of an anecdote, photograph, or individual from which he expands to an exploration of an alternative reading of photographs or their producers. He then proceeds to connect it to his theoretical vision of photography’s history in the Ottoman provinces. The Arab Imago paves the way to a much-needed social history of Ottoman Arab photography, one that has long been shrouded behind a textual, discursive study of Arab modernity.

Beginnings, endings, births, deaths: Sterne, Dickens, and Bleak House

This article explores Dickenss attempt to think through the narrative problem of beginning and ending, with particular reference to Bleak House. Dickens is acutely conscious, it argues, of the ways in which beginnings and endings are mutually entangled, though this has not been reflected in the extensive scholarship on his fiction. The article suggests that Dickens uses the example of Sterne and, in particular, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, to reflect critically on the problem of representing beginnings and endings. In Bleak House, Sternes metaphors for birth are effectively transmuted into metaphors for death. In his treatment of birth and death, beginnings and endings, Dickens dramatises the proximity of being and non-being, and the difficulty of affirming identity in the face of what Edward Said, in his book on beginnings, called the ‘anonymity of pure negation’.