Susan Harrow – författare

Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation

The Art of the Text contributes to the fast-developing dialogue between textual studies and visual culture studies. It focuses on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually and, in essays by researchers in literature, screen and visual studies, the volume explores the visuality of the literary and non-literary text, with a sustained focus on French material of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here not as a state, but as a set of processes of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. By reading visually, the contributors here reactivate the visual-textual relations of canonical texts - from Romanticism to Naturalism, Surrealism to high Modernism; from film to fan literature, television to picture language.

Today's world of e-mails, text messages, and social media posts reminds us that letter-writing is an age-old practice that has continually re-invented itself culturally and contextually, connecting individuals and creating communities that may be local or global, personal or public, purposeful or playful, actual or virtual. Yet we have barely begun to explore why letter-writing matters: how it teaches us important lessons, across historical, cultural, and geographical boundaries, about being human. Letterworlds turns to the past - to the late nineteenth century - in order to explore questions of crucial relevance to our present: questions of subjectivity, solitude, and community, physical and mental wellbeing, ethics, and the everyday. Using a fresh holistic and thematic methodology, Susan Harrow examines how such issues suffuse and animate the letter-writing of a group of writers and artists whose contributions are seminal in the development of Western aesthetic modernity: Mallarmé, Morisot, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Zola.

Shortlisted for the R. Gapper Book Prize 2022How do modern writers write colour? How do today''s readers respond to the invitation to ''think colour'' as they read poetry and art writing, and explore paintings? To what extent can critical thought on colour in visual media illuminate the textual life of colour? These are some of the lines of enquiry pursued in this bold new study of modern poetry and art writing in French, where colour, Susan Harrow argues, is integral to the exploration of ethics, ekphrasis, objects, bodies, landscape and interiority.The question of colour, in a variety of disciplines and media, has provoked debate from Aristotle to Goethe, and from Baudelaire to Derek Jarman. If the past twenty years have witnessed a ''colour turn'' in contemporary cultural studies and screen research, colour values in literary and textual media are often elided or, simply, overlooked. Colourworks tackles this lacuna in the study of modern poetry and art writing in French, revealing the integral role of colour in the work of three iconic French writers in the modern tradition: Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Yves Bonnefoy. This book spans the broad modern period from the 1860s to the early twenty-first century in taking an exploratory approach to the visuality of the verbal medium through an adventurous reading of text and image. Harrow uncovers how colour moves and morphs in texts as it challenges the traditionalist containments of chromatic symbolism. Beyond its primary area of investigation in modern poetry and art writing in French, this richly colour-illustrated study has significant interdisciplinary implications-conceptual, methodological, and practical-for the study of visuality in humanities research, from literature studies to material and visual culture studies.

Shortlisted for the R. Gapper Book Prize 2022How do modern writers write colour? How do today''s readers respond to the invitation to ''think colour'' as they read poetry and art writing, and explore paintings? To what extent can critical thought on colour in visual media illuminate the textual life of colour? These are some of the lines of enquiry pursued in this bold new study of modern poetry and art writing in French, where colour, Susan Harrow argues, is integral to the exploration of ethics, ekphrasis, objects, bodies, landscape and interiority.The question of colour, in a variety of disciplines and media, has provoked debate from Aristotle to Goethe, and from Baudelaire to Derek Jarman. If the past twenty years have witnessed a ''colour turn'' in contemporary cultural studies and screen research, colour values in literary and textual media are often elided or, simply, overlooked. Colourworks tackles this lacuna in the study of modern poetry and art writing in French, revealing the integral role of colour in the work of three iconic French writers in the modern tradition: Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Yves Bonnefoy. This book spans the broad modern period from the 1860s to the early twenty-first century in taking an exploratory approach to the visuality of the verbal medium through an adventurous reading of text and image. Harrow uncovers how colour moves and morphs in texts as it challenges the traditionalist containments of chromatic symbolism. Beyond its primary area of investigation in modern poetry and art writing in French, this richly colour-illustrated study has significant interdisciplinary implications-conceptual, methodological, and practical-for the study of visuality in humanities research, from literature studies to material and visual culture studies.

Emile Zola''s reputation as a landmark European novelist is undisputed. His monumental achievement, the novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire sociale et naturelle d''une famille sous le Second Empire (1871-1893), fixed his status as a major writer in the naturalist tradition. Is there any more to be said? Susan Harrow answers boldly in the affirmative, challenging the commonplace view that Zola''s writing is predictable, prolix and transparent (what Barthes called ''readerly'', for which read ''tedious''). Harrow exposes the modernist and postmodernist strategies which surface in the Rougon-Macquart novels, and reveals Zola''s innovatory representation of the body captured here at work, at war, at play, at rest, and in arresting abstraction. Informed by critical thought from Barthes and Deleuze to Michel de Certeau and Anthony Giddens, Zola, the Body Modern offers a model for how we can revitalize our understanding of the canonical nineteenth-century European novel, and learn to travel more flexibly between parameters of century, style and aesthetics.

Emile Zola''s reputation as a landmark European novelist is undisputed. His monumental achievement, the novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire sociale et naturelle d''une famille sous le Second Empire (1871-1893), fixed his status as a major writer in the naturalist tradition. Is there any more to be said? Susan Harrow answers boldly in the affirmative, challenging the commonplace view that Zola''s writing is predictable, prolix and transparent (what Barthes called ''readerly'', for which read ''tedious''). Harrow exposes the modernist and postmodernist strategies which surface in the Rougon-Macquart novels, and reveals Zola''s innovatory representation of the body captured here at work, at war, at play, at rest, and in arresting abstraction. Informed by critical thought from Barthes and Deleuze to Michel de Certeau and Anthony Giddens, Zola, the Body Modern offers a model for how we can revitalize our understanding of the canonical nineteenth-century European novel, and learn to travel more flexibly between parameters of century, style and aesthetics.

In The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self, Susan Harrow explores the fascinating interrelation of subjectivity, materiality, and representation in the poetry and related texts of four modern French writers: Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge, and Jacques Réda. She demonstrates the richness and the relevance of modern French poetry for today's readers, putting contemporary thought to work on the fractured self emerging in the post-Baudelairian lyric.Harrow addresses the widely perceived marginalization of poetry in the writing/theory debate, demonstrating that the emergence of a self at once shaped by and straining against material, historical, subjective, and cultural impediments reveals fertile relations between theory and poetry. Where purer forms of postmodernist thinking have stressed the dissolution and dispersal of the human subject, new approaches informed by cultural studies, autobiography theory, and gender studies work to recover fictions of experience and retrieve submerged narratives of the self. Probing the activity of textual self-recovery among the debris of history and fantasy, visuality and desire, and culture and corporeality, The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self imparts something of the startling beauty and the raw urgency of poetry writing across the broad modern period.

As joint winner of the Gapper Book Prize, 2021, this new edition of Susan Harrow's award-winning study of modern French poetry and art writing offers a bold approach to studying the relationship between text and image. Exploring key questions such as how modern writers write colour, and to what extent critical thought on colour in visual media can illuminate the textual life of colour, Susan Harrow argues that colour is integral to the exploration of ethics, ekphrasis, objects, bodies, landscape and interiority in painting and poetry.The question of colour, in a variety of disciplines and media, has provoked debate from Aristotle to Goethe, and from Baudelaire to Derek Jarman. If the past twenty years have witnessed a ‘colour turn’ in contemporary cultural studies and screen research, colour values in literary and textual media are often elided or, simply, overlooked. Colourworks tackles this lacuna in the study of modern poetry and art writing in French, revealing the integral role of colour in the work of three iconic French writers in the modern tradition: Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Yves Bonnefoy. This book spans the broad modern period from the 1860s to the early twenty-first century in taking an exploratory approach to the visuality of the verbal medium through an adventurous reading of text and image. Harrow uncovers how colour moves and morphs in texts as it challenges the traditionalist containments of chromatic symbolism. Beyond its primary area of investigation in modern poetry and art writing in French, this richly colour-illustrated study has significant interdisciplinary implications—conceptual, methodological, and practical—for the study of visuality in humanities research, from literature studies to material and visual culture studies.

The Art of the Text contributes to the fast-developing dialogue between textual studies and visual culture studies. It focuses on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually and, in essays by researchers in literature, screen and visual studies, the volume explores the visuality of the literary and non-literary text, with a sustained focus on French material of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here not as a state, but as a set of processes of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. By reading visually, the contributors here reactivate the visual-textual relations of canonical texts - from Romanticism to Naturalism, Surrealism to high Modernism; from film to fan literature, television to picture language.

Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation

The apparent self-sufficiency of joie de vivre means that, despite the widespread use of the phrase since the late nineteenth century, the concept has rarely been explored critically. Joie de vivre does not readily surrender itself to examination, for it is in a sense too busy being what it is. However, as the essays in this collection reveal, joie de vivre can be as complex and variable a state as the more negative emotions or experiences that art and literature habitually evoke. This volume provides an urgently needed study of an intriguing and under-explored area of French literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era. While the range and content of contributions embraces linguistics, literature, art, sport and politics, the starting point is, like that of the term joie de vivre itself, in French language and culture.This volume will be of special interest to researchers across the full range of French studies, from literature and language to cultural studies. It will be of direct appeal to specialist readers, university libraries, graduate and undergraduate students, and general readers with a lively interest in French literature and culture of the medieval, early modern and broad modern periods. This book’s fresh perspectives on the theme of joie de vivre and its relation to questions of privacy, contemplation, voyeurism, feasting and nationhood will also be of relevance to researchers in comparative and cognate disciplines.