VISUAL CULTURE

Suzannah Biernoff is currently working on a cultural and phenomenological history of the Great War, focusing on representations and perceptions of injury, disfigurement and death. To what extent are our responses to these states of embodiment culturally inflected and regulated? What is and has been the role of images themselves in mediating the corporeal territories of war – from the wealth of visual documentation contained in WWI medical archives, to the visual rhetoric of sacrifice in the illustrated press, or in more self-consciously ‘realistic’ cinematic propaganda like The Battle of the Somme, which became one of the most successful British films on record when it was released in August 1916. The case studies within this broader project will connect with methodological debates in the history of medicine and visual studies, and with debates about war and censorship – particularly the selective representation of casualties. The wounded male body in First World War Britain was sentimentalised, idealised, mourned, reconstructed, socially and economically marginalised, and – in many cases – censored, avoided and forgotten. In order to understand this spectrum of emotional and institutional responses, this project will draw on a wealth of archival material – from artists’ depictions of injured servicemen, to popular journalistic accounts, and propaganda films.

Several conferences have been planned in relation to the project, including ‘Corporealities: The Contested Body in 19th and 20th-century Medical Photography’ in April 2005 (University of Warwick, Centre for the History of Medicine), and ‘Sublime! A Symposium to mark the 250th Anniversary of the Publication of Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry’ at Tate Britain, London, 19 & 20 October 2007.

• Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (London: Palgrave, 2002). In the cross-disciplinary spirit of visual studies, this book draws on medieval religious texts; optical theories; medical treatises; and the literature of courtly love, while engaging with recent writing on vision and the gaze. It attempts to extend the historical reach of current theoretical discussions of embodiment and vision as well as testing their limits of interpretation.
• ‘Carnal Relations: Embodied Sight in Roger Bacon, Merleau-Ponty and St Francis’, Journal of Visual Culture, April 2005, vol. 4(1): 39-52. Setting out to defamiliarise the present more than illuminate the past, ‘Carnal Relations’ examines resonances between medieval theories of embodied sight, and Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term ‘flesh’ in The Visible and the Invisible.
• ‘The Corporeal Sublime’, (Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, special issue Affect and Sensation, 2001-02, vol. 2(2) – 3(1): 61-75. This essay looks for evidence of a non-Kantian (non-transcendental) sublime in post-medieval Christianity and in modern performance and body art; in the process complicating the relationship between signification and embodied experience.
• ‘Shame, Disgust and the Historiography of War’, in Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward (eds), Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2007). Unlike other histories of the Great War (social, military, economic or intellectual), this chapter attends to the psychological landscape of war as mediated by forms of visual culture – ‘visual culture’ referring as much to censorship and the fear of seeing as it does to propaganda, documentary photography, or the representation of injured and disfigured servicemen in art or medical illustration.

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