Mieke Bal
Biographic Data
| ID | 3587364 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mieke Bal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mieke |
| FAMILY NAME | Bal |
| SIGNATURE | BAL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0009-0007-5483-3218 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 85 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 173 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 84 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Introduction. The Dynamics of Symbiosis: From Emergence to Dissolution
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory is an open-access, peer-review, online publication for academic research, published twice a year by the Faculty of Letters, Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania.
Moments of Meaning-Making VI: P–s
Inter-lures: The performance of capitalism and/as the lure of love
This article is based on Miele Bal’s second session after her inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 2023. She reflects on the relationship between textual and audio-visual images. She argues that filmmaking has two advantages as a research method, an integration central to this article: an intensity of looking and collaboration : working with, rather than looking at, other people. She reflects on the relationship between textual and audio…
Memorias de cómo me convertí en feminista
A war of words and a feast of books
Although this article deals with literature more than with visuality, its relevance for visual art is the opposition between hostility and what we call ‘beauty’. The core ‘object’ is the literary festival. There, people can learn about, and enjoy, the meanings of these two opposed attitudes in the semiotic practice of the use of language. This is what that use has in common with visual culture. There, the images that are shown also harbour the po…
The State of Cultural Studies Today – Challenges and Opportunities
Short articles with no abstracts
Inter-Ships: Metaphors as Encounters
Moments of Meaning-Making V: M–o
The three short pieces below are part of an alphabetically ordered series of entries, which, together, will constitute a non-subject-centered autobiography. Professional memories are merged with personal ones. To underline the fragmentary nature of memory, I call them "vignettes."
Making and Breaking Borders
The concept of border or boundary has two ambiguities to deal with, if it is to serve a useful intellectual purpose in art and art history. One is to decide whether a border is a line, one that divides, separates, and thus can lead to competition, even to animosity; or whether it constitutes a space within which negotiating can happen. The other ambiguity concerns the differences, in style, period, national background, religious or sexual orienta…
Two Inter-s: Interdisciplinarity and Internationality
In this article I argue for a form of identity with an expectation and a promise of relationality. Europe needs such a commitment if it wants to be a union. The mode of living in what I call ‘being in-between’ entails a relationship with others, persons, groups, and cultures, even in cases where linguistic difference makes communication difficult. Here I continue that reflection considering different usages of that preposition inter- in its usual…
Long live the hyphen and the exclamation mark! On the trait-d’union as inter-ship
This first session after the inaugural lecture establishes the concept of ‘semiosphere’ through a discussion of the minimal signs in the European semiosphere that facilitate understanding without knowledge of the languages concerned as well as the integration of writing with the tones of spoken language. The author also discusses the short film that makes use of such signs, It’s About Time! Reflections on Urgency , with the exclamation mark in th…
Ambiguity in meaning-making: Filmmaking, curating, and interpreting
Both the semiosphere we live in and the curating we practice are constantly changing. Hence, the meanings these practices produce are unstable. In this essay, I attempt to join semiotics, the theory of signs and sign use for communication, with its ‘sphere,’ and curatorial practice, as a mode of making art active, inter-active; to make it work. In my latest book, currently in press, I argue, through invoking life experiences of the most diverse k…
The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998-2007
This book brings together nearly all of the author's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, revealing a lesser-known side: that of the public intellectual. From modern patriotism and European identity to Hannah Arendt's writings on totalitarianism, from the idea of the historical museum and the theme of melancholy in art history to trenchant readings of Leo Tolstoy and Primo Levi, the first volume of the book shows the author a…
Chapter 6 On Empathy and Migratory Relationalities: A Conversation with Mieke Bal
Moments of Meaning-Making IV: J–l
The three short pieces below are part of an alphabetically ordered series of entries, which, together, will constitute a non-subject-centered autobiography. Professional memories are merged with personal ones. To underline the fragmentary nature of memory, I call them “vignettes.”
Psychopoetic Encounters: Figurations of Difficulty
While going through some cultural expressions in texts and images, this article proposes reflections on ways in which the practice of poetics, in the sense of creative making, needs to encounter, address, and overcome difficulty in order to facilitate the contribution of the imagination and the acts of “imaging” it allows, to the figuration of the new. Encounter is the key word, indicating plurality and process. Nothing is fixed; hence, not “iden…
A cultural dream: Europe in the plural
This article is the English translation of the ‘inaugural lesson’ that began Professor Mieke Bal’s year as professor of the ‘European Chair’ at the Collège de France. How, asks Bal, to overcome Europe as Babel (where no one understands the other), Europe as nostalgia (regretting lost time and idealizing the past), the pessimism close to despair of Europe as apocalypse? While she refuses to offer a positive, practical answer, Bal does propose an a…
Meaning-making in the European semiosphere
The aim of the paper is to examine how to bring together the general, large area of “semiosphere” (Lotman), the detailed (“close”) analysis of cultural objects, and the point of the flexible methodology we call interdisciplinary. The semiosphere I address is the (uncertain) one we call “Europe”. The starting point is the semiotic status of the exclamation mark as I have used it to connect two preoccupations in the title of a film I made in 2020. …
Memoir: Moments of Meaning-Making III
The three short pieces below are the third set of vignettes in an alphabetically ordered series of entries, which, together, will constitute a non-subject-centered autobiography. Professional memories are merged with personal ones. I call them “vignettes” to underline the fragmentary nature of memory
Refugees and Representation: An Impossible Necessity
Staging a (fictional) encounter between two artworks, a work on paper by Indian artist Nalini Malani and the novel No Friend but the Mountains by Iranian-Kuridsh writer Behrouz Boochani, the text—an essay, rather than a traditional scholarly article—peruses the paradoxes of representing what cannot but must be (re-)presented. Issues such as the required modesty in the face of the suffering of others, the irrepresentability of trauma and intermedi…
Light Writing: Portraiture in a Post-Traumatic Age
This essay explores the portrait, not as memory of the disappeared, but as both a record and an appeal, both recognition and validation, of subjects who are themselves traumatized. It confronts figurative portraits with works that retain the trace as basis of meaningfulness
Moments of Meaning-Making I: A–c
The three short pieces below are the beginning of an alphabetically ordered series of entries which, together, will constitute a non-subject-centered autobiography. Professional memories are merged with personal ones. To underline the fragmentary nature of memory I call them “vignettes.”
Moments of Meaning-Making II: D–f
These three short pieces are the second offerings in an alphabetically ordered series of entries that together will constitute a non-subject-centered autobiography. Professional memoires are merged with personal ones. To underline the fragmentary nature of memory, I call these pieces "vignettes."
How the Concept of Performativity Travels: Between People and Media / Kuidas performatiivsuse mõiste rändab: inimeste ja meedia vahel
This article examines how the concepts of performance and performativity can neither be merged nor firmly distinguished. The author calls on her own practice as a video-maker and academic thinker, establishing a dialogue between the two activities. She borrows extensively from the work of a colleague, with examples from photography, considering collegiality also a form of performativity. The conceptualisation helps argue for a shift from activist…
Martyrdom: Canonisation, Contestation and Afterlives
Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture
The double question whether visual culture studies is a discipline or an interdisciplinary movement, and which methods are most suited to practice in this field, can only be addressed by way of the object. This article probes the difficulty of defining or delimiting the object of study without the reassuring and widespread visual essentialism that, in the end, can only be tautological
Telling, Showing, Showing off
Outlines how New York City sets an image, using nature as a sign. Its very layout demonstrates the importance of a balanced intercourse between background and figure, between plan and details, between chaos and organization. Central Park, the domesticated preserve of nature-within-culture; Exhibits; Floor plans; Demonstrations; Conclusions
The Point of Narratology
By the accidents of life, I started out in the literary profession as a narratologist, having French as my foreign language and structuralism as my training. By another accident, I started in Israel. As one of the young, unknown invitees of the Synopsis 2 Conference where an unusual number of established stars were mixed with a good number of beginners like myself, with the most fortunate result, I optimistically brought a formalist, quite techni…
Mise en abyme et iconicité
Deconcertante, car elle met en question la linearite du texte; seduisante, car elle suscite la reflexion sur la narrativite du recit, et provoque ainsi une prise de conscience de son fonctionnement; mal definie, car elle n'a pas ete incorporee dans une theorie coherente de la litterature : la mise en abyme est sujet depuis un quart de siecle a une veritable proliferation, tant dans les (nouveaux) romans que dans les ecrits theoriques et critiques…
First Person, Second Person, Same Person: Narrative as Epistemology
Rapports entre narratologie et paradigmes de la connaissance analyses par la presentation de trois etudes dans les domaines de l'anthropologie, l'histoire de l'art et la theorie feministe: narration et epistemologie, semiotique de la pratique pronominale (1 e , 2 e , 3 e personnes), seduction du mimetisme
De-Disciplining the Eye
The Rhetoric of Subjectivity
In this article, I will approach the problem of reality in fiction within the framework of the basic subjectivity of all discourse. The notion of subjectivity, both as the opposite of (illusory) objectivity, and as subject-dependency, but in the first place considered as activity of subjects, will be amply discussed. First I will briefly present the rather commonplace view that all discourse is subjective. As far as the relation between reality a…
Notes on Narrative Embedding
First, the notion of metadiscourse as proposed by Genette (1972:239 e.s.). This notion has given rise to some interesting discussions. Many researchers have been of the opinion that Genette was wrong to use the term to mean the opposite of what it traditionally means. For if in the logico-linguistic tradition the prefix meta-indicates an activity having for its object an activity of the same class, the term metadiscourse should signify: discourse…
A cultural dream: Europe in the plural
This article is the English translation of the ‘inaugural lesson’ that began Professor Mieke Bal’s year as professor of the ‘European Chair’ at the Collège de France. How, asks Bal, to overcome Europe as Babel (where no one understands the other), Europe as nostalgia (regretting lost time and idealizing the past), the pessimism close to despair of Europe as apocalypse? While she refuses to offer a positive, practical answer, Bal does propose an a…
El esencialismo visual y el objeto de los estudios visuales
Por todas partes aparecen programas de estudio que llevan el sobrenombre de "cultura visual" pero, que yo conozca, ningún departamento.¿Se puede ello deber a que la "cultura visual" es un campo interdisciplinar?Denominar "cultura visual" a un campo de estudio es tratarlo como podríamos hacer con la religión: la religión es el campo, la teología su circunscripción dogmática intelectual, y los "estudios religiosos", o mejor dicho, los "estudios de …
Meanwhile: Literature in an Expanded Field
Meanwhile: Literature in an Expanded FieldThere is an analogy between the borders that separate nations and those that separate disciplines. In this contribution, I examine that analogy. The result is a revisioning of my obligation to earn “expertise” as a literary scholar. Instead, I ask questions to the literary text that, by virtue of my Western training, I cannot understand. The novel that guides my reflections on nation(alism) and literature…
Poetics, Today
Taking up the time of my encounter with Benjamin Harshav, which was also when PTL became Poetics Today and a key moment in the development of literary studies toward a more theoretical grounding, this essay raises the issue of the place and status of poetics in today's field of literary studies. Through probing a passage from Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, the claim is put forward that the literary text itself,in addition to being poetic…
Semiotic Elements in Academic Practices
Mimesis and Genre Theory in Aristotle's Poetics
ion by which only a limited number of features of the reappear. Hence, thirdly, the pleasure is in the (re?)construction of the by means of signs, reversed by a detour via the recipient. This argument supports the view that the realism debate is irrelevant: if mimetic reception is a (re?)construction by the recipient of the semiosized model, the difference between figurative and nonfigurative art is negligible as far as the relation of art to rea…
The Laughing Mice: Or: On Focalization
Food, Form, and Visibility: Glub and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life
In James Purdy's 1984 novel On Glory's Course, the mother whose son has just left their small-town life to try his luck in Chicago as a singer, remains inconsolable after his departure. The descrip
Autotopography: Louise Bourgeois as Builder
What happens if the timeline implied in "bio-" in auto-biography is replaced by its spatial counterpart, "topo-"? Surely space is as influential for a person's sense of who she is as is the constantly changing series of discontinuities that constitutes a life. In this paper, an installation work by Louise Bourgeois is the interlocutor in my attempt to articulate what a spatial autobiography can be
Lots of Writing
Lot(s) of writing happen(s) in the Book of Esther, and writing is where words and images converge, where the visual and the verbal, fate and agency, Providence and plotting come together. In this article I grapple with visual and verbal representations of self-reflexion in the story of Esther, as depicted in the Scroll of Esther and in two paintings by Rembrandt. The paintings are used as a gloss on the Book of Esther and interpretations thereof,…
Sexuality, Sin and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character (A Reading of Genesis 1-3)
Mieke Bal, Sexuality, Sin and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character (A Reading of Genesis 1-3), Poetics Today, Vol. 6, No. 1/2, The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives (1985), pp. 21-42
Mise en abyme et iconicité
Deconcertante, car elle met en question la linearite du texte; seduisante, car elle suscite la reflexion sur la narrativite du recit, et provoque ainsi une prise de conscience de son fonctionnement; mal definie, car elle n'a pas ete incorporee dans une theorie coherente de la litterature : la mise en abyme est sujet depuis un quart de siecle a une veritable proliferation, tant dans les (nouveaux) romans que dans les ecrits theoriques et critiques…
Narratologie: Les Instances du récit
Notes on Narrative Embedding
First, the notion of metadiscourse as proposed by Genette (1972:239 e.s.). This notion has given rise to some interesting discussions. Many researchers have been of the opinion that Genette was wrong to use the term to mean the opposite of what it traditionally means. For if in the logico-linguistic tradition the prefix meta-indicates an activity having for its object an activity of the same class, the term metadiscourse should signify: discourse…
The Laughing Mice: Or: On Focalization
Mimesis and Genre Theory in Aristotle's Poetics
ion by which only a limited number of features of the reappear. Hence, thirdly, the pleasure is in the (re?)construction of the by means of signs, reversed by a detour via the recipient. This argument supports the view that the realism debate is irrelevant: if mimetic reception is a (re?)construction by the recipient of the semiosized model, the difference between figurative and nonfigurative art is negligible as far as the relation of art to rea…
The Rhetoric of Subjectivity
In this article, I will approach the problem of reality in fiction within the framework of the basic subjectivity of all discourse. The notion of subjectivity, both as the opposite of (illusory) objectivity, and as subject-dependency, but in the first place considered as activity of subjects, will be amply discussed. First I will briefly present the rather commonplace view that all discourse is subjective. As far as the relation between reality a…
Why I? Discussing the Subject In/Of Semiotics
The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction
The return of Peter Pan Peter Pan and Freud - who is talking and to whom?, Rousseau and Alan Garner - innocence of the child and of the word Peter Pan and literature for the child - confusion of tongues Peter Pan and commercialization of the child - children are a good sell Peter Pan, language and the state - Captain Hook goes to Eton
Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth Century Literature
Sexuality, Sin and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character (A Reading of Genesis 1-3)
Mieke Bal, Sexuality, Sin and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character (A Reading of Genesis 1-3), Poetics Today, Vol. 6, No. 1/2, The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives (1985), pp. 21-42
The Bible as Literature: A Critical Escape
Quelle Est La Faute De L'Abbe Mouret? Pour Une Narratologie Diachronique Et Polemique
Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Texts
Tell-Tale Theories
Femmes imaginaires: L'ancien testament au risque d'une narratologie critique
Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera's Death
Winner of the 1991 AAR Award for Excellence in the Study of ReligionWinner of 1991 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award: Best Books Relating to the Old Testament
Literature and Its Insistent Other
Journal Article Literature and Its Insistent Other Get access The literary Guide to the Bible. Edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Cambridge, Mass. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987. 678 pages. $29.95. Mieke Bal Mieke Bal Mieke Bal is Professor of Comparative Literature and Susan B. Anthony Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y. 14627. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford A…
The Politics of Biblical Narratology: Reading the Bible like/as a Woman
The Point of Narratology
By the accidents of life, I started out in the literary profession as a narratologist, having French as my foreign language and structuralism as my training. By another accident, I started in Israel. As one of the young, unknown invitees of the Synopsis 2 Conference where an unusual number of established stars were mixed with a good number of beginners like myself, with the most fortunate result, I optimistically brought a formalist, quite techni…
De-Disciplining the Eye
The Politics of Citation
The Predicament of Semiotics
In James Clifford's (1988) book The Predicament of Culture, various essays on critical practice, focusing on all sorts of cultural texts (exhibition catalogues, postcards, art collections, scholarly texts, and the very concepts we use to discuss all of these things), demonstrate the difficulty of talking about meanings. Meanings shift constantly according to social and historical pressures. The predicament of culture, it appears, is the instabili…
Telling, Showing, Showing off
Outlines how New York City sets an image, using nature as a sign. Its very layout demonstrates the importance of a balanced intercourse between background and figure, between plan and details, between chaos and organization. Central Park, the domesticated preserve of nature-within-culture; Exhibits; Floor plans; Demonstrations; Conclusions
First Person, Second Person, Same Person: Narrative as Epistemology
Rapports entre narratologie et paradigmes de la connaissance analyses par la presentation de trois etudes dans les domaines de l'anthropologie, l'histoire de l'art et la theorie feministe: narration et epistemologie, semiotique de la pratique pronominale (1 e , 2 e , 3 e personnes), seduction du mimetisme
His Master's Eye
Art (44 works) · Philosophy (44 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Linguistics (30 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Aesthetics (22 works) · History (22 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Literature (18 works)