Crossmappings: Essays on Visual Culture

Crossmappings here collects for the first time a selection of distinguished literary and art critic, Elisabeth Bronfen’s highly praised essays on visual culture for a wider public, many of which have never before been available in English.

Among Bronfen’s subjects are Edgar Degas’s portraits of women and the female nude; pop culture and cinema; and hysteria and culture—included throughout are color images that support and illustrate her ideas. She also presents essays on great twentieth century artists, such as Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, and Frida Kahlo, and key figures of contemporary art, including Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Pipilotti Rist, and Paul McCarthy. In addition, Crossmappings includes a comparative examination of the photographs of Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, and Nobuyoshi Araki. In a new introductory essay, Bronfen reflects on the deep changes in current visual culture and its significance within our everyday life.

Offering fascinating and unparalleled insight into artists and their work, Crossmappings is a triumph of acute intelligence spanning a wide-range of subjects that will interest scholars of visual culture, and artists and art lovers alike.

“An admirably rigorous study of the intricate ties between artistic representation, femininity, and death, Elisabeth Bronfen's Over Her Dead Body stands as a comprehensive must-read in her field. . . . Her readings are fully engaged, often seductive, always provocative. ”—Pat E. Boyer, University of Tulsa

Elisabeth Bronfen is professor of English and American studies at the University of Zurich. A specialist in nineteenth and twentieth century literature, she has also published in the fields of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory, and art. Her books include Over Her Dead Body: Death, Feminity, and the Aesthetic and The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents.