Reading pictures, viewing texts

by Claude Gandelman

How and what do we see and know when we look at a painting? Conversely, how do we visualize the literary text? These questions are the focus of Claude Gandelman's virtuoso essays on reading and the visual arts. Gandelman's subjects range from the Egyptians to Franz Kafka, from Las Meninas to concrete poetry. His methodology is semiotic. He reads pictures as signs and tries to understand the significance of a wide variety of pictorial and textual signs and gestures. Kafks's caricature of the skeletal "hunger artist," for example, is read against the similarly distorted images of Expressionist painting and film. Another chapter, - on doors as thresholds, as visual rites of passage - studies the "optics of liminality" in art and literature from seventeenth-century realist Flemish painting to Madame Bovary. Two key chapters deal with the body images all of us bear within ourselves, the implicit image of oneself that is inscribed as a sort of imprint in the cortex and that has been visualiz