In Odd Man Out, Carol Armstrong offers an important study of Edgar Degas's work and reputation. Armstrong grapples with contradictory portrayals of Degas as odd man out within the modernist canon: he was a realist whom realists rejected; he was a storyteller in pictures who did not satisfy novelist-critics; he painted modern life yet was no modernist; he belonged to the impressionist group yet was no impressionist. She confronts these and other contradictions by analyzing the critical vocabularies used to describe Degas's work. By reading several groups of the artist's images through the lens of a sequence of critical texts, Armstrong shows how our critical and popular expectations of Degas are overturned and subverted. Each of these groups of images is matched to different interpretive moves, each highlighting distinct themes: economics and vocation; narrative and semiotics; gender and corporeality; and the author and self. Armstrong's provocative analysis celebrates the tantalizing qualities of the artist's elusive career: the pluralism of his work, its conflation of positivistic and negational tactics, the modern and the traditional, the abstract and the representational. "A lucid and searching study. . . . Armstrong has produced one of the most elegant and persuasive examples of the historian's use of 19th-century art criticism. In the process, she has achieved a reading of the artist which makes a difference to the way we understand the difference of Degas himself."—Neil McWilliam, Times Higher Education Supplement "This is a brilliant, original, and beautifully articulated study. Carol Armstrong's scholarship is impressive in its richness, ambition, and sophistication: Degas's works have rarely been given such detailed, penetrating, and suggestive readings as those offered in this book."—Linda Nochlin, Yale University "With brilliant insight and incisive analytical intelligence, Carol Armstrong introduces new ways to conceptualize the structural ambiguities of Degas's work. Her subtle and probing readings clarify the fundamental contrariness of Degas's images—their disturbing negativity, their anti-modern modernism. Odd Man Out catapults the criticism of Degas from the hinterlands of traditional art history to the foreground of contemporary critical theory in both literature and the visual arts."—Charles Bernheimer, University of Pennsylvania

Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas

Armstrong, Carol M.

Biographies & Memoirs

University of Chicago Press

Today we are so accustomed to seeing photographs wedded to text—whether in the family album or daily newspaper—that the verbal framing of the photograph has become invisible. The text is internalized within the image, and the meaning of the photograph becomes clear and self-evident, as if by the evidence of the photograph itself. In Scenes in a Library, Carol Armstrong explores the experimental moment, at the inception of the new medium, when the word came to haunt the photographic image, and the forty or so years—roughly from the 1840s to the 1880s—during which the photographic image alternately resisted and became assimilated to the printed page. Armstrong's emphasis is on British books. Not only was it in an English book that the paper photograph was first described and published, but the range of subject matter of nineteenth-century British photographically illustrated books prior to the 1880s was as rich as it was peculiar and sometimes recalcitrant. Armstrong focuses on one book about photography (Talbot's The Pencil of Nature); one "scientific" book (Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae); two travel narratives, one factual and one fictional (Francis Frith's Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Observed and his illustrated edition of Longfellow's novel Hyperion: A Romance); and one book of poetry (Julia Margaret Cameron's Illustrations to Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King); as well as some miscellaneous books from the 1870s. According to Armstrong, art history has tended to remove the historic photograph from its printed and published context. Moving back and forth between close looking and equally close reading, she reinserts the photograph into the book from which it was taken.

Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875 (October Books)

History

Mit Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Armstrong, Carol M.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Armstrong, Carol M.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Armstrong, Carol M.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas

Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875 (October Books)