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2004-2005 Fellows

2004-2005 Fellow Graybill

Lela Graybill

Stanford University
Department of Art and Art History

Lela Graybill is a doctoral student in the department of Art and Art History. She received her B.A. in Art History from the University of California at Irvine, and her M.A. in Art History from Stanford University. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the emergence of a new phenomenology of violence following the Enlightenment.

Project Summary

Graybill's dissertation examines the emergence of new conditions of violent experience after the Enlightenment. While torture and execution were gradually withdrawn from view throughout the long eighteenth century, horrifying spectacles multiplied in painting and print, drawing and even wax. Graybill argues that it is not simply that images of violence found greater visibility in the modern world, but rather that modes of representing violence were so altered as to create for the spectator a singular experience of what may also be regarded as a form of violation, one that occurs in the time of viewing. Where the Old Regime contextualized scenes of corporeal suffering within a religious and political order, violent spectacle of the post-enlightenment moment appealed to the cult of the individual. Direct corporeal address - prominent, visually descriptive presentations of violated and vulnerable bodies - supplanted a more distanced socio-political paradigm for viewing scenes of violence. This spectacularization of violence describes an alteration in the texture of the display of atrocity in the modern world: a trajectory in which visual culture moved away from anxious scenes of pain and suffering towards a phenomenology of sensation and shock.

Contextualizing this shift through an examination of Enlightenment debates and new technologies of violence, Graybill will trace three sites of visual production that illuminate the spectacularization of violence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Considerations of salon painting, the fait divers, and an emerging display culture establish the centrality of spectatorial violence to experiences of selfhood in the wake of the Enlightenment.