This review considers a body of research on lunar poetics done for a series of artworks by the author. The Moon embodies history, philosophy, cosmology, and passions the nature of love, persecution, and our capacity for the sublime. Centuries of human inquiry have engaged this mysterious object. Confronting this new visual economy and the ensuing epistemological dif fi culties early modern natural philosophers suggested along with their scienti fi c methods, a new poetics that allows the mind’s eye to intuit a new sort of knowledge founded on a new super-sensory sight. In his short 1611 musings with the six-cornered snow flake, Kepler suggests mathematical ways for the observation, measurement and manipulation of nihil (i.e., Nothing). In his 1604 treatise on optics Kepler confronts similar doubts, suggesting a new visual economy based on “unsubstantial” shadows “similar to nothing”, arti fi cially produced within a camera obscura. Shakespeare’s protagonists initiate a thorough investigation into what kind of knowledge is possible in a world of apparitions and visual deceptions. The outlines of this distrust are poignantly expressed in some of Shakespeare’s major plays. The gradual dissolution of early modern trust in vision as a source of knowledge of the natural world reached its climax towards the end of the sixteenth century. In tracing these different visions of alterity in Banville’s solipsistic literary world, this study offers a better understanding of his insistent and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human. What remains constant throughout these different perspectives is the disruption of representations by brief but haunting glimpses of otherness. In close textual analyses of Banville’s most important novels, it maps out a thematic development that moves from an interest in the epistemological and aesthetic representation of the world in scientific theories, over a concern with the ethical dimension of representations, to an exploration of self-representation and identity. By drawing on the rich history of the problem of representation in literature, philosophy and literary theory, this study provides a thorough insight into the rich philosophical and intertextual dimension of Banville’s fiction. It investigates one of the fundamental concerns of Banville’s novels: mediating the gap between subject and object or self and world in representation. Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville offers detailed and original readings of the work of the Irish author John Banville, one of the foremost figures in contemporary European literature.

Figuring maria popova