Mottled Screen

The clear-cut distinction between texts (literature) and images (art) has been challenged by a culture saturated with television and by an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary studies. From the viewpoint of our present culture, the author suggests, we can now see how some of the great writers and artists of the past overstepped the boundaries of the media in which they worked. The Mottled Screen studies as an example of this process a great literary work that cannot be confined to language alone, even though it consists exclusively of words: Proust s Remembrance of Things Past. The author of Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, a widely acclaimed study of Rembrandt s discursive, rhetorical, and narrative painting, now offers a symmetrical counterpart to that study with this sustained visual reading of Proust s masterpiece, pointing out its visual strategies of representation, fantasy, and poetic thought. She focuses on the narrative and descriptive passages, examining how they make us see, arguing that this visual writing is by no means a derivative writing that uses visual imagery as an inspiration or model. Instead, it is the writing of a true vision.