James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. He was formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. His most recent books are Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (2007); Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (2010), which was featured in his earlier Rorotoko interview; and Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (2019), which is featured in his recent Rorotoko interview.
I hope the reader would pleasurably remark first on the book’s brevity. It aims to pack a large punch in a small format. It can be read quickly.Readability aside, I hope the reader might fall to browsing either the Introduction or Chapter 1 first.All historiography should start with present predicaments.So the Introduction introduces the striking parallels between the Taliban and Early Modern Europeans in the matter of image destruction.Further on, I hope that many of my readers will share my predicament of being deeply puzzled by abstract art.In the first chapter I evoke my 1967 experience of witnessing, at the age of 13, in Melbourne Australia, Abstract Expressionism for the first time. I start with this vibrant, youthful encounter, asking naively: how did we get here? By what mysterious path did the grown ups end up paying to look at black squares? The chapter moves progressively back, back to the larger Cold War situation that promoted Abstract Expressionism, and back from there to the Puritan architecture and visual culture that explains the formal features of abstraction.Cultural history should, in my view, ideally start from the present, move to the past, and return to the present, knowing the place for the first time. Only by making history whole in this way can we re-enter the dynamism of our own unstable histories.I wish this book to make visible the buried, surprising histories behind our frequent experiences.And to four interlocking publics: art historians who are interested in the broader function of the image, or representation; literary critics who are asked to rethink the stabilities of the English poetic tradition; cultural historians who think about the function of museums; and, by far the most important, the educated reader!I would, perhaps hubristically, wish this book’s argument to be in the mind of readers when they witness contemporary Islamic iconoclasm, when they read English poetry, when they enter a museum, when they consider the Statue of Liberty—which, I argue, could only exist with a long history of iconoclasm behind it.
James Simpson Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition Oxford University Press204 pages, 8½ x 5½ inches ISBN 978 0199591657
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