Moments of Meaning-Making is both an analysis of memories and an aesthetic experience. • This is the 50th book authored by Mieke Bal, and her most personal one Mieke Bal (1946) is a Dutch theorist, video artist, and a well-known writer and feminist. Now that Mieke Bal is getting older—being remarkably active and involved in many art and research projects—she has been ruminating on how to reflect on a full life shaped by different roles, ideas and experiences. She did not want to write a conventional autobiography, nor a scholarly retrospective, but instead conceived an ABC of Memories: an abecedarium that collects key terms of personal and conceptual significance. Moments of Meaning-Making presents this collection of entries—Anachronism, Becoming, Criticism, Details, Envy, Friendship, Generosity, and many others—as a mesh of meaning. These terms are not ordered by narrative logic, but by affect, thought, and association. Together, they weave a layered and unique reflection on a life lived in and through ideas, teaching, art-making, and writing. Rather than isolating personal memories from intellectual work, Bal allows the two to meet and merge. The result is an intimate yet precise account of a way of thinking—a form of life writing that remains open, analytical, and exploratory.

Mieke Bal has been a Professor in Literary Theory (University of Amsterdam). In 1994 she was a co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Bal has been teaching at many institutes and universities in Europe, US, and beyond. She is known for her specific ways of ‘deep-reading’ artworks (e.g. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Louise Bourgeois, Nalini Malani), and intertwining her research with various disciplines, such as contemporary and nineteenth-century literature, psycho-analysis, gender studies, philosophy, bible studies. Bal also works as a video artist, which she approaches as a specific form of cultural analysis