About

Alexandra K. Wettlaufer is the Director of Plan II at the University of Texas at Austin's College of Liberal Arts. Her academic focus includes 19th-century literature, visual arts, culture, and gender studies in France and Britain. She is involved in teaching and research related to these areas, contributing to the understanding of cultural and artistic developments during the 19th century in these regions.

Research topics

• Art
• Sociology
• Art history
• Political Science
• Epistemology
• Literature
• Law
• History
• Linguistics
• Aesthetics
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• In tribute to Keith Hanley

  Nineteenth Century Contexts · 2023

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Art history
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Zola’s Painters</i> . By Robert Lethbridge <i>Zola’s Painters</i> . By LethbridgeRobert. (Research Monographs in French Studies, 68.) Cambridge: Legenda, 2022. xii + 230 pp., ill.

  French Studies · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Art history
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Signifying Difference

  Romanic Review · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Literature

  Abstract This essay considers the ways in which Honoré de Balzac and George Sand, an influential pair of “public writers” who were committed to diametrically opposing sociopolitical discourses, constructed aspects of their authorial identities and indeed the social import of their oeuvres in a self-conscious exchange with, and about, one another. In letters, novels, memoirs, and paratexts from their first encounter in the early 1830s to the end of their careers, Balzac and Sand portrayed, parodied, quoted, misquoted, alluded to, wrote, and rewrote each other in ways that their contemporary readers would doubtless have recognized. In considering some of these various invocations in terms of a larger dialogue between this pair of influential authors, surprising intersections emerge that complicate our current conceptions of the relationship between Balzac’s and Sand’s works. Reflecting on the dialogical generation of meaning, I trace the ways in which reading Balzac and Sand together reveals a complex and continuing conversation between the two authors about similarity, difference, and the dialectical nature of identity. This ongoing intertextual exchange, I argue, helps us see how their literary, social, and political positions as “public writers” were to some extent dependent on constructions of each other.

  PublisherDOI

• At Home [and] Abroad: Cosmopolitanism as Political Practice in George Sand and Pauline Viardot-Garcia

  Dix-Neuf · 2021-10-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Cosmopolitanism has been the subject of considerable recent academic inquiry, but the frequently vexed concept has never attracted much interest, to date, in French studies. Yet a cosmopolitan ethos is central to women's cultural production in nineteenth-century France and provides a valuable lens through which to consider networks of meaning and collaborative conversations across the boundaries of nations/languages/cultures. I read George Sand's Consuelo (1842-43) and the career of mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910), to whom the novel was dedicated, as interdependent expressions of women's cosmopolitanism marked by a shared vision of cross-cultural engagement with the politics of difference, mobility, and identity.

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• Laforgue, Philosophy, and Ideas of Otherness by Sam Bootle

  The Modern Language Review · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

   Reviews Fontainebleau. Hannoosh convincingly suggests that ‘Michelet’s engagement with artworks was one of repetition and recurrence’ (p. ), and the resultant textual material, in its different forms and different dates, is fascinating when treated with such patient attentiveness and sensitivity to contradiction. In the case of Géricault, for instance, his famous painting e Ra of the Medusa () functions as an aptly ambiguous image onto which Michelet projects his ‘changing, indeed ambivalent, feelings’ about post-Revolutionary France and its people (p. ). Yet Hannoosh also stresses from the outset that ‘his projection into the image acknowledges the shaping of the historian by the image’ (p. ), suggesting a complex, enriching, and ongoing two-way dialogue between the historian and a particular work of art. Hannoosh’s book is admirably attentive to multiple versions of different stories, anecdotes, descriptions, and reflections across Michelet’s notes and lecture notes, his Journal, and his published histories in their various editions. Michelet emerges as an obsessive and at times intriguingly changeable rewriter, and it is in this respect that Hannoosh’s study is exemplary in its choice and treatment of primary materials, as well as eloquent in its analyses and conclusions. U C L J R Laforgue, Philosophy, and Ideas of Otherness. By S B. (Research Monographs in French Studies, ) Cambridge: Legenda. . x+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Jules Laforgue is perhaps best known as one of the first French poets to publish in vers libre: ‘L’Hiver qui vient’, which appeared in La Vogue in , broke new ground with its irregular metre and rhyme, fragmented images, neologisms, and ellipses in a form that was influenced as much by Walt Whitman as by Baudelaire and was frequently likened to that of the Impressionist painters whose work he admired . A member of the Hydropathes at Le Chat Noir and a self-identified fumiste, Laforgue migrated to the margins of the Symbolist scene aer moving to Berlin in  to work as a reader for Empress Augusta. is identity as an outsider is central to his poetry, which is haunted by melancholy images of loneliness, isolation, and suffering, leavened only by the poet’s frequent recourse to parody, humour, and self-mockery. Very much a man, and an artist, of his conflicted time, Laforgue was at once playful and political, a pessimist with a hopeful passion for experimentation, and a decadent ascetic who gave eloquent voice to sexual longing. In Sam Bootle’s compelling study, Laforgue’s engagement with philosophy takes centre stage as Bootle explores the influence of Eduard von Hartmann and Arthur Schopenhauer on ‘the dominant themes of Laforgue’s œuvre: [. . .] pessimism in general and the sufferings of the body in particular’ (p. ). e concepts of Idea, Will, and (especially) the Unconscious were fundamental to Laforgue’s aesthetic and Bootle does a thorough job of tracing the poet’s dialogue with Schopenhauer and Hartmann in his poetry and prose. is is familiar territory—central to our understanding of the poet’s eclectic sources of inspiration and integral to his fin-de-siècle sense of existential despair. Bootle’s contribution, however, lies in MLR, .,   his suggestive exploration of ‘ideas of otherness’ that emerge in Laforgue’s œuvre. At the heart of the argument is the nineteenth-century construction of German thought as ‘fundamentally alien’ and ‘opposed in essence to the French way of thinking, philosophical tradition, and national character’ (p. ): this otherness attracted Laforgue (and other liberal thinkers of the period) precisely as a means of resistance to the French status quo. Embracing German pessimism, pathologized as a contagious disease leading to France’s national decline, Laforgue’s poetics of suffering represented a counter-cultural critique of the nationalist, pro-natal bourgeois discourses of the day. For Laforgue, Germany’s otherness was also rooted in its cultural ‘primitiveness’, a state of ‘naturalness’ superior to French ‘“over-cultivation”’ (p. ), which in turn made it ‘the chosen land of the Unconscious’ (p. ): notably, in his verse the image of the forest symbolized both Germany and the Unconscious. Finally, Schopenhauer ’s and Hartmann’s philosophy invoked an even more fundamental otherness through their use of Eastern thought and Buddhism, intellectual influences...

  PublisherDOI

• Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman

  Ohio State University Press eBooks · 2020-10-09

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Baudelaire and Other People

  ˜L'œesprit créateur/˜L'œEsprit créateur · 2018-01-01

  articleSenior author

  No description available

  PublisherDOI

• Absent Presence: Reading Other Artists in Baudelaire's Critical Essays

  ˜L'œesprit créateur/˜L'œEsprit créateur · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay considers the absent presence of other artists in Baudelaire's art criticism. In his salons and reviews, other artists (Delacroix, Dante, Gautier, Guys, et alia) are frequently there and not there: invoked or evoked, but not named; or inversely, named but only to be elided, effaced or erased. Crossing multiple borders–between artistic genres, between present and past, between sensation and memory–Baudelaire presents a praxis of reading that emphasizes an intertextual process taking place in the tension between presence–what is on the canvas, the page, the musical stage–and absence–what isn't there but is supplied by the perceiving consciousness. These evocations and erasures of other artists present a model for understanding Baudelaire's aesthetics of artistic reception and the generation of meaning in painting, in music, and in poetry itself.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Horace Vernet and the Thresholds of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture</i> . Edited by <scp>Daniel Harkett</scp> and <scp>Katie Hornstein</scp> <i>Horace Vernet and the Thresholds of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture</i> . Edited by HarkettDaniel and HornsteinKatie. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2017. xviii + 283 pp., ill.

  French Studies · 2018-07-19

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the Salon de 1846, Baudelaire dedicated several pages to his deep disdain for Horace Vernet (1789–1863). Proclaiming his paintings to be ‘une masturbation agile et fréquente’, the critic characterized Vernet as ‘l’antithèse absolu de l’artiste’, but also, tellingly, ‘le représentant le plus complet de son siècle’ (Œuvres complètes, ed. by Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76), ii, 470–71). While Baudelaire’s contempt for Vernet might strike us now as excessive, there is an undeniable element of truth in his assessment of the artist as the embodiment of his time. Indeed, much of what led Baudelaire to ‘hate’ Vernet (he repeats the verb haïr five times in the opening paragraphs) is precisely what makes him of interest today: his popularity, his fluidity, his mobility, his canny appeal to bourgeois audiences, his embrace of new media, and ultimately his position as the national painter of France. Vernet’s prodigious output of images, from battle scenes and Orientalist propaganda to history paintings, portraits, and genre scenes, reflects the political, cultural, and artistic landscape of the tumultuous decades from the rise of Napoleon Ier through the reign of Napoleon III. Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein’s marvellous collection of essays presents a compelling argument for the importance of including Vernet (and painters like him) in our consideration of nineteenth-century art: as ‘threshold figures’ crossing the boundaries between high and low, public and private, avant-garde and academic art, they mirror the complex conditions of the cultural marketplace in post-Revolutionary France. Their mixed reception and ambivalent social capital — both then and now — reveal the ongoing anxieties of blurred boundaries and distinctions, and this study brings invaluable perspectives and correctives to our understanding of French Romantic painting. The volume is divided into three equally compelling sections: ‘Making Vernet’ charts the artist’s creation of his public image, a self-fashioning achieved through his engagement with the press and new forms of publicity, his navigation of new urban spaces of public and private performance, and his acute awareness of the power of public opinion. Part Two, ‘Vernet and Genre’, establishes the modern and often radical nature of Vernet’s challenges to established categories of artistic genre and hierarchies of value, even as the Director of the French Academy in Rome. And in the final section, ‘Vernet and New Media’, authors examine the connections between visual technologies and forms of his day — lithography, photography, vaudeville, printmaking, panoramas, dioramas — and Vernet’s representations, that is, not only his artistic production, but his critical and popular reception as well. Harkett and Hornstein’s book includes a lively Introduction and the first overview of Vernet’s life and work to be published in English since 1880. The contributors to the volume are an impressive collection of well-established scholars and newer voices in the field, giving the work in its entirety a refreshing energy to complement its impressive depth and breadth. Singly and collectively, these articles make a strong case for considering Horace Vernet another worthy candidate for the title of ‘le peintre de la vie moderne’, Baudelaire notwithstanding. Beautifully conceived and generously illustrated, this is a must-read text for anyone interested in the politics of art and culture in nineteenth-century France.

  PublisherDOI

• Vision in the Novels of George Sand by Manon Mathias

  Tulsa Studies in Women s Literature · 2017-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Vision in the Novels of George Sand by Manon Mathias Alexandra K. Wettlaufer VISION IN THE NOVELS OF GEORGE SAND, by Manon Mathias. Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 192 pp. $110.00 cloth. Manon Mathias’s elegant and insightful study, Vision in the Novels of George Sand, presents a scrupulously researched and beautifully written exploration of the ideas of physical and abstract vision in George Sand’s oeuvre. Going far beyond its modest title both in the scope of its analyses and in its intellectual range, Mathias’s monograph brings refreshing new perspectives to our understanding of the most important female author in nineteenth-century France. More popular and critically acclaimed than Honoré de Balzac during their lifetimes (Sand was generally considered the better stylist), Sand was eclipsed by the male writers of the period (including Stendhal, Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert) following her death in 1876 and condemned to the literary periphery for nearly a century, reduced to a caricature as a cross-dressing, free-loving, cigar-smoking woman of letters. In the course of the last forty years, Sand has begun to receive the serious attention she deserves from French, British, and American academics who have identified Sand’s influential role as a female author articulating difference and giving voice to vital questions of gender, politics, and identity in French culture from the July Monarchy to the Third Republic. Mathias joins this conversation as she engages with the major scholars in the field—Béatrice Didier, Isabelle Naginski, Margaret Cohen, Naomi Schor, Martine Reid, and Nigel Harkness, among others—and gracefully moves the discussion in productive new directions as she endeavors to venture beyond gender per se to consider Sand within the rich context of contemporary authors and aesthetics: “it is the dialogue between her work and that of her peers which forms the focus of this study” (p. 8). Indeed, while [End Page 221] acknowledging Schor’s ground-breaking work on Sand’s idealism, Mathias returns our attention to Sand’s relationship with realism. Mathias cogently notes that Sand is not usually associated with the visual; as David Powell and others have shown, music tends to dominate her works—reflecting not only the author’s innate sensibilities but also, perhaps, her long-term affair with Frédéric Chopin. Yet, as Mathias deftly demonstrates, seeing, in its physical and metaphoric senses, is central to nearly all of Sand’s novels and foregrounds her ongoing engagement with realism as a dominant mode. Moving more or less chronologically through Sand’s oeuvre, Mathias begins with a chapter on “Realism and Introspection,” where she considers how the author’s early novels—Indiana (1832), Valentine (1832), and Lélia (1833)—simultaneously “adher[e] to certain expectations of realism” and “engag[e] in a dismantling of the binaries on which the realist system relies” as they “questio[n] our ability to understand the world through sight” (p. 6). Thus, where realism is generally understood to posit a world that is, at least on the surface level, coherent and readable through the interpretation of minutely detailed descriptions, Sand resists this logic for a vision of instability and confusion, where seeing and knowing (in French, voir and savoir) no longer cohere and the very project of representation is radically reconsidered. These questions are also central to Balzac, in somewhat different ways, and Mathias does an admirable job presenting realism in more complex terms, introducing the concepts of fluidity and uncertainty into the formulation. Indeed, the nineteenth century was far more skeptical of vision and knowledge than has often been assumed, and by including Sand’s “contribution to the development of a realism that represents reality whilst also revealing the instability of reality and our incapacity to grasp hold of it through sight,” Mathias complicates our views of the nineteenth century in thought-provoking ways (p. 41). Chapter two, “The Visionary,” documents the ways in which abstract vision—that is, dreaming, imagining, envisioning—is tied to a higher truth in Sand’s novels and reflects her increasing political engagement in the 1840s. The search for “la vérité” (the truth) is traced from physical sight to “conceptual seeing...

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Frequent coauthors

• Maria C. Scott

  1 shared

• Mary McAlpin

  University of Tennessee at Knoxville

  1 shared

• John G. Hutton

  1 shared

• Marie Lathers

  1 shared

• Andrew Lacey

  Lancaster University

  1 shared