Timespace for Emotions: Anachronism in Flaubert, Bal/Williams Gamaker, Munch and Knausgård

Authors

  • Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro University of Murcia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/texmat-2017-0006

Keywords:

timespace, anachronism, autobiography, exhibitions, intimacy

Abstract

Quoting Flaubert through time, Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker’s Madame B brings Madame Bovary’s reflections on love and emotions to the present day, in a productive anachronism. Their work produces an intertemporal space where the past is relevant for the present, and the present enables us to understand the past. Intimacy and routine are central in their exploration of Flaubert’s contemporaneity. Those issues are precisely one of the keys in Karl Ove Knausgård’s project of literary autobiography, where he expands narration foreclosing the ellipsis and giving visibility to small things and emotions; a project with some resonances with Munch’s crude-obscene uses of intimacy. This essay explores how both proposals, Bal and Williams Gamaker in film, and Knausgård in literature, can serve us to connect present and past sensibilities and, more than that, demonstrate resistances to the hegemonic discourses of temporality.

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Author Biography

Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro, University of Murcia

Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Murcia, Spain, and deputy director of the VISUM (Center of Visual Studies University of Murcia). He is the author of several books on art and visual culture including Materializar el pasado. El artista como historiador benjaminiano (2012), Robert Morris (2010), 2Move: Video Art Migration (2008, with Mieke Bal), La so(m) bra de lo real (2006) and co-editor of Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture (2011, with Mieke Bal). He is also a fiction writer, author of the acclaimed novels El instante de peligro (Finalist Herralde Prize, 2015) and Intento de escapada (2013, translated into German, French, English and Italian).

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Published

2017-10-16

How to Cite

Hernández Navarro, M. Ángel. (2017). Timespace for Emotions: Anachronism in Flaubert, Bal/Williams Gamaker, Munch and Knausgård. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, (7), 98–113. https://doi.org/10.1515/texmat-2017-0006

Issue

No. 7 (2017): Drama, Performance, Media / Emma & Edvard

Section

Articles

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Copyright (c) 2017 A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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