Böcker av Linda Seidel

"This is a travel adventure set in the legendary French city of Arles. Founded in Roman times, Arles is a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in scenic Provence in the south of France. For the last hundred years it has been an important destination for the countless tourists who arrive in pursuit of the great Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, who famously spent an intense fourteen months in Arles, painting the most brilliant works of his career (all those sunflowers and quivering landscapes), squabbling with fellow artist Paul Gauguin, guzzling absinthe, and famously cutting off the lobe of his ear, which landed him in the local hospital in the throes of a mental breakdown. Linda Seidel has visited Arles many times, initially to study the splendid medieval church of Saint-Trophime, but eventually to follow in the long shadow of Vincent's passage, which he recorded in numerous paintings and drawings. Together, they make a pair of charming guides, sharing with us the wonders of Arles's Roman amphitheater, which seats 20,000 people and has been in continuous use for two thousand years; the Alyscamps, a Roman cemetery featuring paths still lined with ancient sarcophagi; the Church of St. Trophime with its astonishing Romanesque portal; the Arles Hospital, which has been converted into a museum about Vincent; the cafes and bars where he hung out; new buildings such as the tower by Frank Gehry; and of course the Provenðcal countryside with its dazzling wildflowers and quaint farms. Ultimately, this is Vincent's story, told as never before through an engagement with the mysterious, culturally rich town that transformed his life and, indeed, the entire course of modern art"--

This text presents an exhibition held at the the University of Chicago. The exhibition challenges the decontextualized approach to images and learning by setting ritual, functional and intentionally aesthetic objects side by side, together with inventories and technical viewing devices.

Whereas 12th-century pilgrims flocked to the church of St-Lazare in Autun to visit the relics of its patron saint, present-day pilgrims journey there to admire its superb sculpture, said to have been created by Gislebertus. These two cults, of sculptor and of saint, form the basis for this study.

Mediated Maternity: Contemporary American Portrayals of Bad Mothers in Literature and Popular Culture, by Linda Seidel, explores the cultural construction of the bad mother in books, movies, and TV shows, arguing that these portrayals typically have the effect of cementing dominant assumptions about motherhood in placeor, less often, of disrupting those assumptions, causing us to ask whether motherhood could be constructed differently. Portrayals of bad mothers not only help to establish what the good mother is by depicting her opposite, but also serve to illustrate what the culture fears about women in general and mothers in particular. From the ancient horror of female power symbolized by Medea (or, more recently, by Casey Anthony) to the current worry that drug-addicted pregnant women are harming their fetuses, we see a social desire to monitor the reproductive capabilities of women, resulting in more (formal and informal) surveillance than in material (or even moral) support.

First published in 1993, Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon examines one of the earliest and most celebrated paintings in the history of European art from a variety of perspectives. In her lucid analysis, Seidel considers this famous double portrait as social record, legal document, material object, and poetic fiction.