A Mieke Bal Reader. Mieke Bal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; illustrations; xxiv+491 pages; ISBN 0-22603585-9; $32.95US (paper).
This monumental collection of scholarly work produced by the Dutch critic and theorist best known for her contributions

to narratology and innovative application of literary theory to the visual arts is comprised of sixteen essays written between the years 1977 and 2004. The volum e is organized into five sections corresponding with major areas of Bal's intertwined interests in literature, interdisciplinary methodologies, visual analysis, postm odern theology and cultural analysis. W hether she is analyzing Shakespeare, the Bible, Proust, museum spaces, the practice of collecting, photography, fem inist politics, Rem brandt or Caravaggio, her overriding concern is with different forms of boundary crossing, challenging borders traditionally drawn around disciplines and genres, texts and images, social history and works of art, and aesthetics, politics and ethics.
The author makes a strong argum ent for interdisciplinarity. An integrative, interdisciplinary approach constitutes for her an indispensable fram ework for the study of culture as well as for any study within any particular discipline. Allegorically speaking, interdisciplinarity encapsulates the dem ands of doing academic work within, for example, the European Union or in a transnational frame. Bal's rigorous, intellectually demanding criticism is grounded in precisely defined concepts and "thick" knowledge of disciplinary and contextual issues. Rather than fixed categories, concepts are cognitive and intersubjective tools that "travel" between individual scholars, across disciplines, geographies and histories. She insists on the im portance of the past to our understanding of the present and on the "preposterously" anachronistic use of contem porary discourses to illum inate the past.
Bal's book is about theory-m aking through the practice of reading. She treats texts and cultural artifacts as "theoretical objects," interlocutors for theorists and critics. Literature and art do not reflect or illustrate pre-existing reality, but are productive in the anti-m im etic sense of being "m eaning producing machines." They cannot be viewed solely in terms of

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representation, but m ust also be regarded in their institutional, performative and fram ing aspects. Bal's method of postmodern cultural analysis relies on close reading, which allows her to address the complexity and specificity of particular texts or im ages while foregrounding their relationship to ideologies, politics, and aesthetics. Her readings dem onstrate the instability of intention, agency and subjectivity, at the same tim e as they problematize a comm on tendency in fem inist, queer and cultural studies to "naturalize" visual and textual constructs by referring them back to the outside world. She finds form al equivalents or encodings of such naturalizing readings in narrative, rhetorical and tropological structures.
Another unifying thread found in this volum e is Bal's fem inist concern with gender, articulated through the recurrent themes of rape and violence against wom en, violence of representation, or epistemic violence. Even her interest in biblical narratives derives from a desire to study the recorded beginnings of patriarchy and m isogyny, supported by her optim istic belief that we are now witnessing the "unstable end of patriarchy." Of particular interest to W omen's Studies is her essay "Enfolding Feminism ," in which she proposes a rallying m etaphor of the fold to repair severed links and seemingly irreconcilable conflicts in fem inism .
Bal's work has a role to play in the general critique of what makes culture constrictive and lim iting, exposing the abuse of power, embracing ethical non-indifference and deconstructing the supposedly "unmarked" dominant modes of perception of reality through whiteness, Christianity, and colonialism . In the end, this Reader is a form of "life writing," the text writing the life of a thinker, philosopher and academic who acts as our guide and who occasionally lightens up her theorizing with humour, playfulness and personal anecdote.
Eva C. Karpinski York University