Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth ― Hercules at the Crossroads

Building on Heidegger's comment that "Art is truth setting itself to work," Braider (French and comparative literature, U. of Colorado) examines the argument between history and truth in the high culture of the European baroque, and how that argument reflected changes in perception of the self. Topics of his five extended essays include the culture's compulsion for visual bedazzlement and its translation into gendered images that perpetuate violence against women; the increasingly personal interpretation of Pauline ontology in both the southern Catholic Caravaggio and the northern Protestant Rembrandt; the tension of indecision in Caracci's depiction of Hercules; and the creation and destruction of imaginary selves in the examples set by Descartes, Pascal, and Cyrano. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Christopher Braider is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700 (1993) and Indiscernible Counterparts: The Invention of the Text in French Classical Drama (2002).