Although not as lavish as the usual book on painting, this volume is very beautiful indeed -- a rarity for the reader of literary criticism. Ben Stolzfus invokes Roland Barthes's Le Plaisir du texte in the course of his essay, and the pleasure of reading and viewing this text, with its playful interaction between the paintings of Jasper Johns and the prose of Alain Robbe-Grillet, is considerable. The eight color reproductions of Johns's work, including three versions of "The Target," are superb, and even the forty-four black and white photos are clear enough to suggest the originals.
Stolzfus, who has written extensively on Robbe-Grillet, including an essay on Robbe-Grillet's interaction with the paintings of Rene Magritte in La Belle captive, and who has published his own experimental novels, contributes, in addition to his translation, three pieces to this volume: an introduction, a critical analysis titled "Jasper Johns and Alain Robbe-Grillet: an Interarts Essay," and "Appendix: Target With Objects." In all of these, but especially in the essay, he draws on postmodernists such as Barthes and Foucault, semiotics, chaos theory, theories of metafiction and play, as well as his own acute observations, to produce an analysis that is at once sophisticated and clear.
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