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Bal MiekeLooking in the art of viewingLondres ; New-York : Routledge, 2001, 1 vol. ( VIII-298 p.).Collection Critical voices in art.ISBN 90-5701-112-3Résumé : Mieke Bal is one of Europe’s foremost theorist and critics. Her work within feminist art history and cultural studies provides a fascinating alternative to prevailing thinking in these fields. In this remarkable collection she outlines a theory of visual experience as an ongoing struggle between cutlural modes that seek to determine and confine the visual subject. Ranging across an astonishing variety of objects and institutions of art - from the culture of the museum to the visual representation of rape, from the baroque of Carabaggio and the neo-baroque of David Reed to the visuality of the closet in Proust - Bal reveals the unsuspected capacities of the act of viewing to reshape and redirect the dominant cultural narratives. She brings a keen visual sense to these studies and an understanding of how literature represents visuality and how the aesthetics within museums affect the cultural artifacts displayed.In his engaging introduction, eminent art historian Norman Bryson has selected several of Bal’s essays, focusing on her extraordinarily rich and inventive work in visual culture. Bryson, who has had a significant effect on the contemporary practice of visual studies, conveys to the reader why the cumulative effect of Bal’s original approach to the interdisciplinary study of art and visual culture has had such wide-reaching influence.Mieke Bal is professor of the theory of literature at the University of Amsterdam, and a founding director of the Amsterdam School for Culture Analysis. Central to Bal’s thinking about narrative and semiotics is the question of the role of visual art in directing and contesting cultural authority, a subject explored in numerous articles, as well as in Reading Rembrandt : beyond the word/image opposition (1991) and in Quoting carabaggio : contemporary art, preposterous history (1999).Norman Bryson is chair, history and theory of art at the Slade School of Fine Art in London (UK). His books include Word and image : french painting of the Ancient Regime (1981) and Looking at the overlooked : four essays on still life painting (1990). He is general editor of Cambridge Studies in New Art history and Criticism.Axe de recherches :Axe transversal : Cultures visuelles