Silent Poetry (Princeton Legacy Library)

Mirzoeff, Nicholas

ISBN 10: 0691037892 / ISBN 13: 9780691037899

Published by Princeton University Press, 1995

About this Item

**NOTE: First printing with black dust jacket.** Crisp, unread, unmarked copy. The binding is clean and tight. The dust jacket shows light shelf rubbing, in a mylar cover. Seller Inventory # NOWmirSIL

Bibliographic Details

Title: Silent Poetry (Princeton Legacy Library)

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Publication Date: 1995

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

Edition: First Edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

This book explores the dynamic interaction between art and the sign language of the deaf in France from the philosophes to the introduction of the sound motion picture. Nicholas Mirzoeff shows how the French Revolution transformed the ancien régime metaphor of painting as silent poetry into a nineteenth-century school of over one hundred deaf artists. Painters, sculptors, photographers, and graphic artists all emanated from the Institute for the Deaf in Paris, playing a central role in the vibrant deaf culture of the period. With the rise of Darwinism, eugenics, and race science, however, the deaf found themselves categorized as "savages," excluded and ignored by the hearing. This book is concerned with the process and history of that marginalization, the constitution of a "center" from which the abnormal could be excluded, and the vital role of visual culture within this discourse.

Based on groundbreaking archival and pictorial research, Mirzoeff's exciting and intertextual analysis of what he terms the "silent screen of deafness" produces an alternative history of nineteenth-century art that challenges canonical views of the history of art, the inheritance of the Enlightenment, and the functions, status, and meanings of visual culture itself. Fusing methodologies from cultural studies, poststructuralism and art history, his study will be important for students and scholars of art history, cultural and deaf studies, and the history of medicine, and will interest a general audience concerned with the relationship of the deaf and the larger society.

Review:

"Nicholas Mirzoeff's remarkable Silent Poetry... is in large part a classic ideological and political account. But Mirzoeff's true originality is to consider his theme from an art-historical perspective.... A very interesting book on an important subject.... Its implications are numerous and rich. It has a message about the dignity of the deaf. It is a sensitive essay on the interweaving of high art and politics. It also says a great deal about the strength and the weaknesses of the Republican idea in France since the Revolution and perhaps today.... [A] learned, humane and touching book."--The Times Literary Supplement