Seurat Re-viewed

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Paul Smith

Technique and Theory

1. Hors-d’œuvre: Edges, Boundaries, and Marginality, with Particular Reference to Seurat’s Drawings

Anthea Callen

2. Seurat and Color Theory

Georges Roque

Society and the Subject

3. The Family and the Father: The Grande Jatte and Its Absences

S. Hollis Clayson

4. Illuminations of Disenchantment: Seurat’s Parade de Cirque

Jonathan Crary

Irony

5. Interpreting Seurat’s Figure Paintings

John House

6. The Ironic Eye/I in Jules Laforgue and Georges Seurat

Joan U. Halperin

Sensation

7. Seurat and the Act of Sensing: Perception as Artifact

Brendan Prendeville

8. Grave Seurat

Richard Shiff

Stillness and Symbolism

9. “Souls of Glass”: Seurat and the Ethics of “Timeless” Experience

Paul Smith

10. Seurat and Mallarmean Thought

Richard Hobbs

Selected Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

“The book as a whole is eclectic and adventurous. There is a collective determination not to become mired in stale controversy. . . . Colour theory is not ignored, but there is far more here than Seurat’s palette and Chevreul’s colour disc. There is poetry and politics, ethics and edges, the family and the father, sensation, disenchantment, timelessness, irony and absence. It is by turns thrilling and demanding.”

—Alex Danchev, The Times Higher Education Supplement