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Representations
Interdisciplinarity for the 21st century

Archive of all online content

February 01, 1983 - November 01, 2019

An international engine of innovative scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences

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1989

October
  • Vol. 28
    Special Issue: Essays in Memory of Joel Fineman
July
  • Vol. 27
April
  • Vol. 26
    Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory
January
  • Vol. 25

A Short History of the Picture as Box 

(Representations 141)

Art historian Amy Knight Powell details the genealogy of the box as a frame, a window, and a container in art. She writes:

In “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” (1948), Clement Greenberg compares the easel picture, disparagingly, to a box-like cavity cut into the wall. In this essay, I argue that late medieval panel paintings—which indeed often took the form of boxes—show Greenberg to be justified in making this comparison, if not in doing so disparagingly. But what Greenberg failed to fully acknowledge is that the easel picture had already long tried to escape this condition through the opening of the metaphor of the window. Failing to recognize this earlier effort to escape the material conditions of the box, many modernists and postmodernists, like Greenberg, attempting to move beyond the easel picture in the name of an art undivided from life, have unintentionally upheld the easel picture’s own escapist ideology.

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Representations: 148 (1)

Vol. 148 No. 1, Fall 2019
Table of Contents

ISSN: 0734-6018
eISSN: 1533-855X
Impact Factor: .589
Frequency: Quarterly
Published: February, May, August, November
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"Do we have a problem with time?" ask the editors of the 2016 special issue Time Zones: Durational Art and Its Contexts. The issue explores "time-based art" across several disciplinary formations, including performance and visual media, sound, dance, and political resistance.

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Read the editors' introduction to the special issue "Language-in-Use and Literary Fieldwork" by Michael Lucey and Tom McEnaney
 
Literary critics and theorists often shy away from talking about writers and readers as people who put language to use. Instrumentalized reason, positivism, and other watchwords warn against turning a literary artifact into mere data or information, or making it part of an exchange of language that is not exclusively aesthetic in nature. At the same time, when critics seek praxis in literature, speak about the performative attributes of a text, or discuss how to do things with words, they usually treat whatever text they are considering as a stable object. The contributors to this special issue of Representations are all interested in language-in-use as it applies to different kinds of linguistic artifacts and to text understood as the dynamic product of an interactive process. Continue reading . . .
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  • Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film
  • Law, Boundaries, and the Bounded Self
  • Staring into the Abyss of Time
  • Cloud Physiognomy
  • Visual History: The Past in Pictures
More...

In her essay in number 139, Debarati Sanyal analyzes practices of resistance as seen through film and photography set in the Calais's “jungle” refugee encampments, which were razed in 2016 by the French government. She discusses the interplay of humanitarian compassion and securitarian repression in the destruction of the camps, nuancing the view of borderscapes as sites of total biopolitical capture, and of refugees as “bare life.” Making a profound case for both art and resistance, "Calais’s 'Jungle': Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance" is a compelling and visually stunning read.

Still from Qu’Ils reposent en révolte: Des figure de guerres I, by Sylvain George (2010) 

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