Vision and Textuality

Front Cover
Stephen W. Melville, Bill Readings
Duke University Press, 1995 - 391 pages
The influence of contemporary literary theory on art history is increasingly evident, but there is little or no agreement about the nature and consequence of this new intersection of the visual and the textual. Vision and Textuality brings together essays by many of the most influential scholars in the field--both young and more established writers from the United States, England, and France--to address the emergent terms and practices of contemporary art history.
With essays by Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Norman Bryson, Victor Burgin, Martin Jay, Louis Marin, Thomas Crow, Griselda Pollock, and others, the volume is organized into sections devoted to the discipline of art history, the implications of semiotics, the new cultural history of art, and the impact of psychoanalysis. The works discussed in these essays range from Rembrandt's Danae to Jorge Immendorf's Café Deutschland, from Vauxhall Gardens to Max Ernst, and from the Imagines of Philostratus to William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams. Each section is preceded by a short introduction that offers further contexts for considering the essays that follow, while the editors' general introduction presents an overall exploration of the relation between vision and textuality in a variety of both institutional and theoretical contexts. Among other issues, it examines the relevance of aesthetics, the current concern with modernism and postmodernism, and the possible development of new disciplinary formations in the humanities.

Contributors. Mieke Bal, John Bender, Norman Bryson, Victor Burgin, Thomas Crow, Peter de Bolla, Hal Foster, Michael Holly, Martin Jay, Rosalind Krauss, Françoise Lucbert, Louis Martin, Stephen Melville, Griselda Pollock, Bill Readings, Irit Rogoff, Bennet Schaber, John Tagg

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Contents

Basic Concepts Of Art History
31
Vision Place and Power
38
Past Looking
67
A Discourse With Shape of Reason Missing
90
A German Perspective
115
How Obvious is Art? Kitsch and the Semiotician
143
Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum
174
It is Myself that I Paint
195
Armour Fou
215
The Politics of the Gazing Body
251
Vauxhall Gardens
282
BG
296
Vision Procured
317
The Contribution of the Camera
344
Flâneur and Detraquée in Bretons Nadja
361
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