OANA COGEANU
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi
Abstract
There
is one book which so often finds its way into the backpack of 19th
century Americans travelling to Europe that one cannot help enquiring
over the cause and purpose of such luggage; the more so as the book
is neither the Bible, nor the Declaration of Independence, but John
Ruskin’s Modern
Painters. Prior to
fathering American realism, William Dean Howells was one of the
travel writers who would pack their literal and figurative luggage
and steer towards Europe – since Art, like all ideals, was not to
be found at home. This paper aims at showing that Howells’s search
for an American ars
poetica in Europe
through the agency of Ruskin took place within a semiotic colloquium
involving an author-traveller, a double object (travel and account)
and a mise-en-scenic guidebook, and resulted in a realist affirmation
of art as presence. To this aim, the paper looks at the polemical
(inter)textual instances in Howells’s Venetian
Life illustrating a
transcontinental search for truth as the meaning of art.
Keywords:
William Dean Howells, John Ruskin, Venice, polemical intertextuality,
ars poetica, semiotic triangle, semiotic colloquium, art as presence
|
