16420

SoSe 21: Portrait Cultures: From Edgar Allan Poe to Martin Parr

Claudia Lillge

Additional information / Pre-requisites

Preparatory Reading: Shearer West: Portraiture (Oxford, 2004); Evi Zemanek: Das Gesicht im Gedicht: Studien zum poetischen Porträt (Köln, 2010); Ulla Haselstein: Gertrude Steins literarische Porträts (Konstanz, 2019). close

Comments

What is a portrait? – Most definitions, explains art historian Shearer West, describe portraiture as a "representation or delineation of a person, especially of the face, made from life, by drawing, painting, photography, engraving, etc." Portraits are ubiquitous and flourish (motivated and influenced by specific artistic fashions and favoured styles) where societies place a high value on the individual. Portraits are not just likenesses; in many ways, they represent a dialogue between an artist and a sitter, so to speak: 'a meeting of minds'. Therefore, they are full of tensions, ambiguities and much more than a 'snapshot' of someone in a particular moment at a particular time. How does a subject want to be seen, and how does an artist respond to these wishes of self-presentation? Thus, Max Kozloff calls portraiture a "theatre of the face" that invites its viewers to the challenging act of 'face reading' and also to enter into the opaque space of fact and fiction. Even this brief sketch of portraiture points to the diverse and multifaceted relationships between portraiture and literature: In western literary history, we find portraits as a subject, as prose and poetry genre, and as a 'translation' of a work of art from one aesthetic medium to the other (e.g. the 'ekphrastic face and body'). In this seminar, we will trace the 'intermedial' and 'inter-art' history of literary portraits from Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Oval Portrait" (1842), novels by Oscar Wilde ("The Picture of Dorian Gray", 1890) and Tracy Chevalier ("Girl with a Pearl Earring", 1999) up to poems by Dante, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Browning, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams. To sharpen our sense for media-specific aspects, we will compare these literary portraits with photographs by Martin Parr ("Autoportrait", 2000), a film by Céline Sciamma ("Portrait de la jeune fille en feu", 2019), and forms of self-representation ('selfies') in contemporary visual culture. The theoretical topics covered throughout the seminar include likeness and mimesis, realism and idealism, representations of face/body versus character/soul, as well as a variety of functional aspects and use-values of portraits. close