Ocular Proof

Archival Revelations and Aesthetic Response

Bibliographic Data

ID7960167
AuthorsJames A Knapp (0000-0002-4061-5988, corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume24
Issue4
Pages695-727
Publication date2003-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePoetics Today (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/03335372-24-4-695
OpenAlexW2166604575
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited34

A new materialism in literary and cultural criticism has regrounded much scholarly debate in the archive as a corrective to ahistorical theorizing. Often, in granting archival discoveries the evidentiary status of fact,historical criticism fails to attend to the difficulties surrounding the mediation of historical understanding by material things. In order to get at the thorny issues surrounding the material as an authorizing category in cultural analysis, I focus on Shakespeare's well-known literary meditation on visual proof (and visual perception) in Othellogy. Reemphasizing the problems that nag materialist epistemologies, I examine the role of material(ocular) proof in Othellogy, in the form of the much discussed handkerchief. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of perception, I argue that Othellogy provides a parable about the disaster of confusing the objecthood of things with the stories we tell about them. I conclude that as cultural history moves into its next phase—beyond the return to the archive—it must respond to the phenomenological challenge and avoid the temptation to stop with either thing or theory, always working to occupy the space between

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Epistemology · Literary criticism · Literature · Materialism · Mediation · Social science · Sociology · Temptation · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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