Jan Baetens
Biographic Data
| ID | 3594236 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jan Baetens |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jan |
| FAMILY NAME | Baetens |
| SIGNATURE | BAETENS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | KU Leuven |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4084-9992 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 188 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 187 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Failure that Remains Failure
This article presents a cultural and media analysis of failure in its dialectical relationship with success, emphasizing the relative, frequently changeable and highly context-sensitive nature of the notion of failure. Aiming to offer a broad overview of the questions and based on a survey of the available literature, it opens on a general discussion of the status of failure in modern art and literature. It then proposes a general framework descr…
Clarissa Colangelo, The Belgian Photonovel, 1954-1985. An Introduction: Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2023, 250 pages
Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy
That Book is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars are Remaking Publishing
Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage
Why did Picasso (and Braque) invent collage, why in Paris, and why exactly in 1912? Because they were men, artists, geniuses, because they were driven by a creative impulse toward the new (in this case within the novelty of Cubism they had also invented), and because they were doing so in a time and a place that could institutionally recognize their achievement. Or to put it more bluntly: because this has long been how art history taught us how t…
Organizing Color: Toward a Chromatics of the Social
Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography
How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America
How the New World Became Old is a fascinating and extremely well written book that helps understand not only the facts but also the cultural roots and dimensions of the still fascinating mystery of deep time, “the billions of years over which the plan was born and life upon it appeared and evolved” (p. 2). As a mystery for the human brain, whose very structure and function cannot be separated from what it is triggered to know, deep time is at the…
The Hroswitha Club and the Impact of Women Book Collectors
The changes in the field of book history have become the perfect mirror of changes in culture at large, at least in the Western world, the world on which this excellent new volume in the Elements in Publishing and Book Culture series focuses. Book history is no longer a purely academic discipline: There is now room for nonacademic voices and insights (booksellers, antiquarians, auctioneers, collectors, and other book lovers), a happy return to th…
The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry
Cold War in the White Cube: U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art, 1959–1968
The “white cube” model is the museal translation of Clement Greenberg’s ideas on modernism and/as medium-specificity. It refers to a visually neutral space completely enclosed in itself, where the world outside is kept at a safe distance, if not totally ignored, and everything can be seen and read at the mere surface of the objects on display. In such a space, visitors do not interact with anything other than the works, all exemplifying what a me…
Shells: A Natural and Cultural History
Shells may not be the type of book one expects in Leonardo Reviews. At first sight it is more a (medium-sized) coffee table book, beautifully illustrated and containing everything one ever wanted to know about shells (here defined as “the hard, protective outer cases of molluscs or crustaceans,” p. 6), from a natural, as well as cultural, point of view, with chapters on, for instance, the shell makers (a seductively presented taxonomy of mollusks…
Modernité du livre: De nouvelles maisons d’édition pour de nouveaux lectorats
When something vanishes—a community, a natural environment, an institution—it suddenly invades public discourse. Would this also be the fate of the book? Publications on libraries, the history of reading, the future of the book, but also typography, bibliomania, or paper, are flooding the tables of all bookshops as well as the shelves of personal and public libraries. There are certainly readers for these kinds of books, if not the hype would not…
Dopostoria
Leading us from the description of a research project to the final artist of an artist book, DOPOSTORIA is a thrillingly complex and multilayered object as well as an intriguing dialogue with a concept borrowed from Pier Paolo Pasolini, who coined and illustrated this neologism in a 1962 poem (“Io sono una forza del passato”: “I am a force of the Past”). Yet from the very beginning, that is in Pasolini’s text already, each of its components rapid…
Boundary Images
For modern visual analysis, images are no longer pure images, they have become agents. Their actions and mechanisms no longer represent something, as traditionally studied in the field of semiotics, history, or art history, but actually do something: they produce various types of relationships and thus meanings in and outside the merely visual space. More concretely, they morph into “boundary images,” a concept that pays tribute to the work on WJ…
Saint Ghetto of the Loans: Grimoire
Saint Ghetto of the Loans (first edition 1950) is no longer a more or less forgotten key work of French lettrism, one of the many revolutionary avant-garde groups of post–World War II years in Paris, best known as the immediate precursor of situationism (all these groups were also circling around existentialism, the then-dominating new form of living, thinking, and writing). Thanks to the joint efforts of an American publisher, Ugly Duckling Pres…
The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century
In literary studies, the interest in the chapter as a literary form or device is not totally new, but this book—this impressive and admirable book— breaks new ground with the depth of its historical, as well as generic, scope and the profundity of its thinking on the cultural meaning of capitulation: a textual feature or compositional technique whose very ubiquity seems to make it almost invisible. Although Nicholas Dames explicitly builds on the…
Exploring Past Images in a Digital Age: Reinventing the Archive
Exploring Past Images in a Digital Age is an outstanding new publication in Amsterdam University Press’s “Framing Film” series, for many years a goldmine for all those interested in film culture in the broadest sense of the word. The book is the result of an international pre-COVID conference in Istanbul, a circumstance that explains both the (still reasonable) delay of its publication and the ever-increasing importance of its topic.As the title …
Historic Avant-Garde Work on Paper
Of all media, paper is perhaps the most ubiquitous, as well as the most invisible. Paper is everywhere, but we only see it as a pure host medium, the passive carrier of an inscription. By doing so, we miss its “paperiness,” that is, to quote the editorial introduction of Sascha Bru, “its intrinsic materiality, the tools, techniques and technologies employed to manipulate it, the conceptual and cultural practices it is most intimately associated w…
Giving Type Meaning. Context and Craft in Typography
There exist countless books on typography, but in this overcrowded market there should be room for this attractive and stimulating publication by Mia Cinelli, Associate Professor of Art Studio and Digital Design at the University of Kentucky. From the very start, the author specifies the scope and horizon of her work, which does not address the theory or history of typography but is meant to help students and professionals to correctly interpret …
Magazines and Modern Identities: Global Cultures of the Illustrated Press, 1880–1945
For many decades, modernism and little magazines have been perfect bedfellows. Changing perceptions of both modernism and magazine culture have shattered this ideal match, reshuffling the cards and bringing to the fore a more nuanced and complex picture. Modernism, on the one hand, is no longer a monolithic whole, safely protected from all things non-modern or antimodern. Magazines, on the other hand, have stopped being reduced to the prestigious…
La Résidence D’auteurs Littérature, Territorialité et Médiations Culturelles
Although less known than “artistic,” fine arts residences that have remained a vital element of advanced visual training and education for centuries, literary residences are neither new nor rare. In a more or less recent past, writers have frequently benefited from this type of financial and/ or logistic support. Bisenius-Penin’s book starts with a useful reminder of the long-standing tradition, as well as brief typology of who (which public or p…
Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice
Does it still make sense to study photography in national terms in an era when most cultural practices have become transnational, if not global, certainly in the case of language-insensitive media such as photography? And if so, how is it possible to do it in ways that do not simply return to outdated models of nationalism? And how to interpret the fact that French photography (and French art in general) is no longer strongly visible on the inter…
Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts
In literary criticism, the notion of paratext refers to all kinds of verbal or visual information that surrounds the actual work (the “text”) and that helps describe and identify as well as explain and interpret it. As initially theorized by Gérard Genette, the paratext consists of two main groups: first the peritext, that is the set of paratextual elements that spatially accompany the work, such as for instance a title or a blurb; second the epi…
Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry
Scale is part of everyone’s daily experience, and not all these experiences are as dramatic a mix of fear and awe as Pascal’s positioning of mankind between the infinitely large and the infinitely small. After all, to review a book is a scale experience, since the reviewer is no longer dealing with words, sentences, and paragraphs, which are the object of an actual reading, but with totally different units, ideas, claims, and hypotheses (and the …
Novelization, a Contaminated Genre
Cultural studies after the cultural studies paradigm
If cultural studies is in crisis, the answer to it is not to be found in some theoretical or methodological claims proper to the field (for instance, concerning the specificity of its object, culture), but in its two 'transversal' qualities: on the one hand its political commitment, on the other hand its interdisciplinarity. Discussing two attacks launched against inderdisciplinarity (S. Fish and R. Krauss), this article attempts to reconcile a n…
Free Writing, Constrained Writing: The Ideology of Form
Guest Editor's Introduction
The Intermediate Domain, or the Photographic Novel and the Problem of Value
Présentation: Écrire après le cinéma. Que fait le cinéma aux genres littéraires
crire aprs le cinma. Que fait le cinma aux genres littraires
Nouvelle narratologie, nouveau récit
Cet article est moins une « réplique » aux propositions critiques de Raphaël Baroni dans « L'Empire de la narratologie, ses défis et ses faiblesses » qu'une tentative de situer les débats actuels sur la narratologie dans un autre contexte. D'abord, on s'efforce de revenir à l'âge d'or du structuralisme, qui fut aussi une époque marquée par un refus catégorique du récit. Dans un deuxième temps, on propose une nouvelle lecture de la tension entre n…
IReworking or Making Up? A Note on Photonovels in Diarmuid Costello’s Approach to Medium Theory
Expanding the Field of Constraint: Novelization as an Example of Multiply Constrained Writing
This essay deals with the question of the multiple constraints that determine the production of highly commercialized literature, namely, novelization. As a literary genre, novelization is easy to define: it is the novelistic adaptation of an original film or, more specifically, of the screenplay of this film. As a cultural practice, however, novelization is hardly known, given its lack of prestige, therefore its near-absence in the scholarly fie…
Introduction: The Challenge of Constraint
This introductory essay defines the background terms and context of constraint-based writing and then situates each essay included in this double issue of Poetics Today. Taking the example of the Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature) as the foundational reference of contemporary intentional experiments with formal literary creation, we delineate the shifting boundaries of constrained literature, both in terms of its various practitioners (the…
Speed, Rhythm, Movement: "A Dialogue on K. Hume's Article "Narrative Speed
Speed, Rhythm, Movement:A Dialogue on K. Hume's Article "Narrative Speed" Jan Baetens (bio) and Kathryn Hume (bio) The following reflections on "narrative speed" are an attempt to remediate the traditional 'reply' to a scholarly article, followed by a 'reply to the reply' by the first author. Instead, the two authors of this jointly written response to the article published by Kathryn Hume in 2005 have decided from the very beginning to merge the…
History against the grain: On the relationship between visual aesthetics and historical interpretation in the contemporary Spanish graphic novel
In this essay the traditional historiographical distinctions between events and representations, texts and images, and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ images are interrogated through a reading of the contemporary spanish graphic novel. The focus is on the material form of the images in the historical bd lope de aguirre. This trilogy has one writer fernandez-cava and three different artists for each part of the trilogy: enrique breccia, federico del barrio, and …
Passacaille, ou la multiplication par zéro
Passages images
Seuils
Les dessous d’une planche: Champ censuré et métalepse optique dans un dessin de Joost Swarte
Autour Du Grammatexte
Autographe/allographe (À propos d'une distinction de Nelson Goodman)
Baetens Jan. Autographe/allographe (A propos d'une distinction de Nelson Goodman). In: Revue Philosophique de Louvain. Quatrième série, tome 86, n°70, 1988. pp. 192-199
Revolutions miniscules
Sur la figuration cachée
The Intermediate Domain, or the Photographic Novel and the Problem of Value
Latent Violence (Escher, Franc, Vaughn-James)
The calaceite conference on photo narrative
The study of photographic narration has tended to be limited and inconsistent. The international conference held at the Noesis Foundation in Spain (Calaceite, 21-28 August 1993) was the first attempt to examine photo narrative in a comprehensive and systematic way
John Berger and Jean Mohr: From photography to photo narrative
Photo narrative is usually defined as a visual narrative that uses photographic images arranged in sequence and mounted on a page. Thus the difference between photography and photo narrative is clearly of a technical nature particularly as regards framing and out-of-frame: in photography, the edges of the image signify an absolute break, whereas in photographic narration that same break is only relative since each fragment of a photo story is alw…
Renaud Camus, romancier barthésien
Renaud Camus, Barthesian novelist ? The issue of Barthes' heritage, if any, raises that of his teaching-neither dogmatic nor immediately liberal, but fluid. Renaud Camus' work continues its spirit, despite its novelistic aspect, because it nurtures networks, of writings, of writers, and of writing
Civil War News: How Popular Culture Rewrites History
Free Writing, Constrained Writing: The Ideology of Form
Le roman-photo: Média singulier, média au singulier
Le présent article s'interroge à la fois sur le cas particulier du roman-photo et le problème général de la définition des médias. À travers les difficultés que pose la circonscription du roman-photo, on cherche en effet à rouvrir le débat sur les manières dont il convient de penser le concept de média. Afin de suggérer quelques nouvelles pistes, on s'appuie dans cet article sur le grand livre de Stanley Cavell (philosophe encore mal connu du pub…
Colour in contemporary Belgian documentary photography: The example of Jan Kempenaers
Documentary photography in belgium has received recently a number of strong institutional as well as artistic impulses. First of all, there is the stimulating example and influence ofthe datar (‘direction de l'aménagement du territoire et de l'action régionale’) experience in france, which took place only a few miles from the belgian border and the images of which were undoubtedly recognizable to the local public and artists. Second, there is the…
History against the grain: On the relationship between visual aesthetics and historical interpretation in the contemporary Spanish graphic novel
In this essay the traditional historiographical distinctions between events and representations, texts and images, and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ images are interrogated through a reading of the contemporary spanish graphic novel. The focus is on the material form of the images in the historical bd lope de aguirre. This trilogy has one writer fernandez-cava and three different artists for each part of the trilogy: enrique breccia, federico del barrio, and …
The American west
For contemporary historians, photographic images are no lomger a mere supplement to written sources, the traditional core matter of historical research. In their eyes, photography itself has become an object of historical research; its richness and complexity as challenging, difficult, enigmatic and rewarding as text. in historiographic terms, photography is now considered a (multilayered) monument and not simply a (transparent) document. This in…
Brassaï and the ‘spirit of photography’
In this paper I present and analyse Brassaï's Paroles en l'air, a little-known collection of exercises in oral literature started by the famous photographer and sculptor during the German Occupation of Paris. 1 This book is interesting for several reasons. It is firstly a rare example of the direct influence of photography on literary writing. Texts and photographs are not simply juxtaposed. Nor does some common ‘Zeitgeist’ connect them, as Erwin…
Tintin père et fils
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Phototextualities
Based on a selection of papers presented at a conference hosted by the University of Durham, England, this collection of essays is a remarkable contribution to the theory and criticism of photography. Thanks to the strong editorial hand of the organizers, and the significant intellectual and literary qualities found in a majority of the texts, Phototextualities presents a new and coherent perspective on the medium of photography. In addition, the…
From photojournalism to photo-essay
Nacho López (1923–1986) enjoyed a brief but influential career as a documentary photographer before leaving the field to pursue film-making. Active between 1950 and 1957, López published in Hoy, Mañana and Siempre, the Mexican equivalents of LIFE and Look. His photo-essays were notable for their subject matter, the working class and the powerless in society, as much as for their aesthetic achievement. This new book by John Mraz, a thoroughly revi…
"La Bande Dessinée "Littéraire: Une Nouvelle Chance Pour La Littérature, Un Danger Pour La Bande Dessinée
Literature and photography
Abtract The fascination of Victorians with the medium of photography is undeniable and welldocumented. What remains intriguing is the speed with which the literary culture of the period engaged photography. Photography quickly became an integral part of the Victorian publishing industry. Photographically-illustrated books were issued at affordable prices. Photographs of authors, landscapes and sites related to literary texts were actively markete…
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