Visuality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt

This book analyzes Siri Hustvedt’s three novels The Blindfold, What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American with a focus on visual art. Siri Hustvedt is one of the most popular American writers today and her work is predominantly concerned with art historical and psychological themes. The author of this book investigates the function of paintings and photographs in Hustvedt’s novels and conceives of verbal representations of artworks as extended metaphors. Her analysis includes verbal descriptions of Giorgione’s The Tempest, Chardin’s Glass of Water and a Coffee Pot and Goya’s Black Paintings as well as various verbal forms of fictitious paintings and photographs. Based on this analysis the author shows how the American novel has moved from postmodernism to post-postmodernism.