The shoes and the authorship: a critical path

Abstract

This paper develops a approach to the theoretical question of authorship based on the images of shoes painted by Vincent van Gogh during the 1880s. More than the analysis of the paintings, the paper seeks to outline a range of connections between studies that have dealt with them, notably those of Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro and Jacques Derrida. Along with this, there is also the idea of the shoe as a metaphor for realism in literature, with J.M. Coetzee and Daniel Defoe, and as a metaphor for the relationship between the author and the text, with Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben.