With this widely acclaimed work, Fried revised the way in which eighteenth-century French painting and criticism were viewed and understood. "A reinterpretation supported by immense learning and by a series of brilliantly perceptive readings of paintings and criticism alike.... An exhilarating book." John Barrell, "London Review of Books".

My topic is authenticity in or perhaps as painting, not the authenticity of paintings; I know next to nothing about the problem of verifying claims of authorship. I am interested in another kind of genuineness and fraudulence, the kind at issue when we say of a person that he or she is false, not genuine, inauthentic, lacks integrity, and, especially when we say he or she is playing to the crowd, playing for effect, or is a poseur. These are not (...) quite moral distinctions (no one has a duty to be authentic), but they are robustly normative appraisals, applicable even when such falseness is not a case of straight hypocrisy but of lack of self-knowledge or of self-deceit. (A person can be quite sincere and not realize the extent of her submission to the other’s expectations and demands.) This sort of appraisal also has a long history in post-Rousseauist reflections on the dangers of uniquely modern forms of social dependence, and they are prominent worries in the modern novel. (shrink)

Adolf Menzel was one of the most important German artists of the 19th century, yet he is scarcely known outside his native land. In this study a leading art historian argues that Menzel deserves to be recognized not only as one of the greatest painters and draftsmen of his century but also as a master realist whose work engages profoundly with an extraordinary range of issues - artistic, scientific, philosophical and socio-political. Michael Fried explores Menzel's large and fascinating oeuvre, and (...) in so doing seeks to make the artist's achievement accessible to a wide audience. (shrink)

"'This book,' Michael Fried's work opens, 'was written not so much chapter by chapter as painting by painting over a span of roughly ten years.' Courbet's Realism is a magnificent work and its very first sentence brings us up against the qualities of mind of its author, qualities that make it as impressive as it is. It allows us to reconstruct the keen eye, the commitment to perception, the gift of rapt concentration, the conviction that great paintings are not necessarily (...) understood easily, and the further conviction that a great painter deserves to get from us as good as he gives. By drawing on these qualities, Fried achieves something out of reach for all but a handful of his colleagues. In his writing, art history takes on some of the character of art itself. It is driven by the same stubborn resolve to open our eyes."—Richard Wollheim, San Francisco Review of Books Courbet's Realism is clearly a major contribution to the highly active field of Courbet studies.... But to contribute here and now is necessarily also to contribute to central debates about art history itself, and so the book is also—I hesitate to say 'more importantly,' because of the way object and method are woven together in it—a major contribution to current attempts to rethink the foundations and objects of art history.... It will not be an easy book to come to terms with; for all its engagement with contemporary literary theory and related developments, it is not an application of anything, and its deeply thought-through arguments will not fall easily in line with the emerging shapes of the various 'new art histories' that tap many of the same theoretical resources. At this moment, there may be nothing more valuable than such a work."—Stephen Melville, Art History. (shrink)

Background Patients with chronic pain face significant barriers in finding clinicians to manage long-term opioid therapy (LTOT). For patients on LTOT, it is increasingly common to have them sign opioid treatment agreements (OTAs). OTAs enumerate the risks of opioids, as informed consent documents would, but also the requirements that patients must meet to receive LTOT. While there has been an ongoing scholarly discussion about the practical and ethical implications of OTA use in the abstract, little is known about how clinicians (...) use them and if OTAs themselves modify clinician prescribing practices.Objective To determine how clinicians use OTAs and the potential impacts of OTAs on opioid prescribing.Design We conducted qualitative analysis of four focus groups of clinicians from a large Midwestern academic medical center. Groups were organized according to self-identified prescribing patterns: two groups for clinicians who identified as prescribers of LTOT, and two who did not.Participants 17 clinicians from General Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, and Palliative Care were recruited using purposive, convenience sampling.Approach Discussions were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for themes using reflexive thematic analysis by a multidisciplinary team.Key Results Our analysis identified three main themes: (1) OTAs did not influence clinicians’ decisions whether to use LTOT generally but did shape clinical decision-making for individual patients; (2) clinicians feel OTAs intensify the power they have over patients, though this was not uniformly judged as harmful; (3) there is a potential misalignment between the intended purposes of OTAs and their implementation.Conclusion This study reveals a complicated relationship between OTAs and access to pain management. While OTAs seem not to impact the clinicians’ decisions about whether to use LTOT generally, they do sometimes influence prescribing decisions for individual patients. Clinicians shared complex views about OTAs’ purposes, which shows the need for more clarity about how OTAs could be used to promote shared decision-making, joint accountability, informed consent, and patient education. (shrink)

This paper surveys central justifications and approaches adopted by educators interested in incorporating history of mathematics into mathematics teaching and learning. This interest itself has historical roots and different historical manifestations; these roots are examined as well in the paper. The paper also asks what it means for history of mathematics to be treated as genuine historical knowledge rather than a tool for teaching other kinds of mathematical knowledge. If, however, history of mathematics is not subordinated to the ideas and (...) methods at the heart of the usual mathematical curriculum – algebraic equations, functions, derivatives, analytic geometry – if it becomes an essential subject for mathematics, then the attempt to find a place for history of mathematics requires refining our understanding of the nature of mathematics education itself. Thus, the paper asks not only how can history of mathematics be incorporated into mathematics education but also how the idea of mathematics education may need to be adjusted to accommodate history. (shrink)

This paper explores the complex relationship between the meaning of predicates and the morphosyntactic expression of their arguments, as manifested in the swarm-class alternations in Czech. One way of getting at the nature of the alternations is to take a frame-semantic approach, which allows us to introduce the notion of scene as an important factor in linking relationships. It is proposed that linking patterns are organized in a network of generalized scene types, each of which represents a particular role configuration (...) structured in such a way that one of its roles can be singled out as the vantage point from which that event type is conventionally presented in a particular diathesis; the analysis argues for the notion of viewpoint as an event-structuring concept (distinct from discourse-based topicness) that is directly reflected in certain conventionalized linking patterns. The results of the investigation show that what may appear to be hard-to-predict variations in subject selection can be treated as instances of regular linking relations. (shrink)

My basic supposition is that the destruction of the little Jew's face and hands in Vandover and the Brute images the irruption of mere materiality within the scene of writing-that instead of Crane's double process of eliciting and repressing that materiality, what is figured in the shipwreck scene is a single, unstoppable process of materialization, involving both the act of representation and the marking tool and actual page , the result of which can only be the defeat of the very (...) possibility of writing .Here it might be objected that such a reading derives whatever plausibility it has from the comparison with Crane, and in a sense this is true: my claim is precisely that it's only against the background of Crane's seemingly bizarre but, in this regard, normative or centric enterprise that the wider problematic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary "impressionism" can be made out. In another sense, however, the comparison with Crane involves an appeal to issues—notably that of materialism—which have long been basic to Norris criticism and which the recent work of Walter Benn Michaels has brought to a new level of conceptual sophistication and historical refinement. Specifically, the title essay in Michaels's book, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, interprets both McTeague and Vandover and the Brute in terms of a conflict between materiality and representation that found contemporary expression both in the debates over the gold and silver standards versus paper money and in the vogue for trompe l'oeil painting ." In this regard a crucial moment in Vandover's regression from man to beast is his discovery that, as a painter, he has lost the ability to represent nature three-dimensionally; Michaels treats this development as equivalent to "replac[ing] the painting with nature itself" , and goes on to remark: "But this ... is ultimately a distinction without a difference. Vandover the artist can so easily devolve into Vandover the brute precisely because both artist and brute are already committed to a naturalist ontology—in money, to precious metals; in art, to three-dimensionality. The moral of Vandover's regression, from this standpoint, is that it can only take place because . . . it has already taken place. Discovering that man is a brute, Norris repeats the discovery that paper money is just paper and that a painting of paper money is just paint" . My reading of the shipwreck passage would thus be consistent with what Michaels calls Norris's "trompe l'oeil materialism" , though the nearly sadomasochistic violence of that passage may be taken to imply that materialism's consequences for writing threaten to be even more disastrous than they are for painting. But rather than analyze the role of writing as such in Vandover, which would involve an intricate discussion not just of that novel and McTeague but also of Michaels's essay, I want to turn to another, lesser-known book by Norris, in which a thematic of writing plays a conspicuous and more nearly univocal role: A Man's Woman . Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Courbet's Realism . He is currently at work on a book to be titled Manet's Modernism. (shrink)

Presents some of the latest research in Frame Semantics, including work in computational lexicography as developed within the FrameNet project.

The basic disagreement between Richard Shiff and me is one of approach and ultimately of intellectual taste. What I tried to do in “Painting memories” was read Charles Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846 with a view to construing its central argument as rigorously as possible, which for me meant without appealing, except in one crucial, authorized instance, to other writings by Baudelaire or indeed anyone else. This seemed to me desirable, first, because on the strength of a long familiarity with the (...) Salon of 1846 I had become convinced that it was not the fragmented, somewhat incoherent, less than fully mature performance that many previous commentators had taken it to be but rather that it possessed a problematic consistency, even systematicness, which I wanted to explore; and second, because I had come to feel that one of the principal sources of the dreariness and predictability of much exegesis not only of that Salon but of Baudelaire’s art criticism generally was the tendency of many commentators to treat his art writing as a single, barely differentiated mass, to be supplemented when desired by selected passages from the lyric poems. Let me be as clear as I can. I am not claiming that the only fruitful approach to Baudelaire’s art criticism is to consider each of his writings in isolation from the rest. I am saying that the widespread tendency to read a particular Salon or article on the visual arts in the light of others has meant that insufficient attention has been paid to the workings of individual texts, with dismaying consequences both for our understanding of those texts and for our sense of the shape of Baudelaire’s intellectual career. Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Morris Louis and Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at work on books on Gustave Courbet and on Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane. His most recent contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Structure of Beholding in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans” and “Paitnig Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet”. (shrink)

Argument“The problem of university courses on infinitesimal calculus and their demarcation from infinitesimal calculus in high schools” is the published version of an address Otto Toeplitz delivered at a meeting of the German Mathematical Society held in Düsseldorf in 1926. It contains the most detailed exposition of Toeplitz's ideas about mathematics education, particularly his thinking about the role of the history of mathematics in mathematics education, which he called the “genetic method” to teaching mathematics. The tensions and assumptions about mathematics, (...) history of mathematics, and historiography revealed in this piece dedicated to educational ideas are what make Toeplitz's text interesting in the study of historiography of mathematics. In general, the ways historiography of mathematics and teaching of mathematics, even without an immediate concern for history, are deeply entangled and, in our view, worth attention both in historical and educational research. (shrink)

In the pages that follow I looked closely at two major paintings by Gustave Courbet : the After Dinner at Ornans, perhaps begun in the small town of the title but certainly completed in Paris during the winter of 1848-49; and the Stonebreakers, painted wholly in Ornans just under a year later. The After Dinner and the Stonebreakers are the first in a series of large multifigure compositions--others are the Burial at Ornans and the Peasants of Flagey Returning from the (...) Fair —that mark not only Courbet's maturity as an artist but his emergence as a disruptive force, almost a one-man wrecking crew, in the cultural politics of his time. They are also those works in which his self-declared identity as a Realist first becomes manifest, and probably the chief concern of the most interesting recent scholarship on Courbet has been to try to decode that epithet in social-historical terms, or at any rate to situate his activity as a painter during the years 1848-55 in the context of the social and political struggles that accompanied the creation of the Second Republic and its subversion by Louis Bonaparte.2 At the core of that tradition, motivating and, as it were, mobilizing it, is the demand that the painter succeed in placing in abeyance the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld—that he contrive in one way or another to establish the fiction, the meta-illusion, that the beholder does not exist, that there is no one standing before the picture. From Greuze through Gèricault, this was chiefly to be accomplished in and through the medium of visual drama, that is, by representing figures so deeply absorbed in their actions, emotions, and states of mind and furthermore so efficaciously bound together in a single comprehensive dramatic situation that they would strike one as absolutely immured in the world of the painting and a fortiori as oblivious to the very possibility of being viewed. And one way of describing the crisis that I believe overtook French painting by the 1820s and '30s is to say that the dramatic as such came more and more to be revealed as inescapably theatrical—that the array of conventions that once had served to establish the meta-illusion of the beholder's nonexistence now seemed merely to attest to his controlling presence.1. The present essay is adapted from a book-length study, in progress, of Courbet's art. Recent books and articles emphasizing social and political considerations include Linda Nochlin, Gustave Courbet: A Study of Style and Society ; T.J. Clark, "A Bourgeois Dance of Death: Max Buchon on Courbet," Burlington Magazine 111 : 208-12, 282-89, and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-51 ; Jack LIndsay, Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art ; Klaus Herding, ed., Realismus als Widerspruch: Die Wirklichkeit in Courbets Malerei ; Herding, "Les Lutteurs 'détestables': Critique de style, critique sociale," Histoire et critique de l'art 4-5 : 94-122; and James Henry Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon .2. For an account of the early evolution of that tradition, see my Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot , as well as the essays on Courbet cited in n. 3.Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Morris Louis and Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at work on a book on Courbet. (shrink)

Near the beginning of Charles Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846—one of the most brilliant and intellectually ambitious essays in art criticism ever written—the twenty-five-year-old author states that “the critic should arm himself from the start with a sure criterion, a criterion drawn from nature, and should then carry out his duty with a passion; for a critic does not cease to be a man, and passion draws similar temperaments together and exalts the reason to fresh heights.”1 It may be the emphasis (...) on passion, indeed on strong personal feeling of every kind, not only here but everywhere in the Salon, that has prevented commentators from taking wholly seriously the possibility that a single criterion is in fact at work throughout it. But what if that criterion operates in the realm of feeling, if it is itself a feeling or complex of feelings, and if, moreover, as Baudelaire as much as says, no conflict between the claims of reason and of passion exists within his conception of the critical enterprise? Not that scholars have failed to recognize either the brilliance or the ambitiousness of the Salon of 1846; on the contrary, it is widely regarded as the major extrapoetic text of Baudelaire’s early career and especially in recent years has received extensive commentary. But by and large, those who have written about it have focused primarily on topics, such as Baudelaire’s conception of nature, his vision of the creative process, and the relation of his ideas to those of other critics, that seem to me, if not quite pseudoproblems, at any rate concerns that lead us to ignore what the text may be saying about its own manner of proceeding.2 I acknowledge, too, that certain features of that manner—the mixture of irony and seriousness in the opening dedication to the bourgeois, the many abrupt fluctuations of tone in the body of the essay, the seeming breaks in the argument from section to section, the texture and movement of the prose—could hardly be less systematic in effect. And yet it would not be hard to show that the Salon as a whole is the product of a remarkable effort, not merely to ground the judgment of individual works of art in a single experiential principle but also to bind together a number of diverse concerns—pictorial, literary, political, philosophical—in an intellectually coherent structure every part of which is meant to be consonant with every other. No wonder the last sentence of the Salon apostrophizes Balzac: the sheer inclusiveness of Baudelaire’s undertaking recalls nothing so much as the scope of the Comédie humaine. 1. Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1846, Art in Paris 1845-1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne , pp. 101-2. All further references to the Salon of 1846 will be included parenthetically in the text . I have also consulted the recent edition, Baudelaire: “Salon de 1846,” ed. David Kelley , which includes a useful introduction and bibliography.2. See, for example, Margaret Gilman, Baudelaire, the Critic , pp. 12-53 and 77-111; F. W. Leakey, “Les Esthétiques de Baudelaire: Le ‘Système’ des annés 1844-1847,” Revue des sciences humaines, n.s., fasc. 127 : 481-96, and Baudelaire and Nature , pp. 73-88; and Kelley, “Deux Aspects du Salon de 1846 de Baudelaire : La Dédicace aux bourgeois et la couleur,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 5 : 331-46, and introduction to Baudelaire: “Salon de 1846,” pp. 1-114. Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Morris Louis and Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at work on a book on Gustave Courbet. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry, “The Structure of Beholding in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans,” appeared in the June 1983 issue. (shrink)

So there will be no mistake, I don’t deny, why would I wish to, that a thematic of racial difference is crucial to the overall plot of Almayer’s Folly. What I claim is that that thematic falls short of significantly determining or even, to use Brown’s word, appreciably “complicating” the problematic of erasure that surfaces in the closing chapters. It’s as though the rest of the novel is there chiefly to stage those chapters and their dramatization of erasure; something similar (...) takes place in Powell’s narrative of spying into Captain Anthony’s cabin toward the end of Chance and even, to a lesser degree, in the climactic encounter between Winnie Verloc and her husband in chapter 11 of The Secret Agent. It’s worth noting, too, that the opening paragraphs of A Personal Record, Conrad’s autobiographical account of the beginnings and origins of his “writing life,” describe the circumstances under which “the tenth chapter of ‘Almayer’s Folly’ was begun.”8 This in itself suggests that Conrad has a special stake in the last three chapters of his first novel, and one of my aims in “Almayer’s Face” was to discover what that stake may have been.9 8. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record , pp. 72: my emphasis.9. Again, so there will be no mistake, I would distinguish Almayer’s Folly sharply in this respect from, for example, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” in which effects of erasure are disseminated throughout the text and in which the title character’s blackness is crucial to their production. Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, is currently at work on books on Manet and on literary “impressionism.” His most recent book is Courbet’s Realism. (shrink)