Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual RepresentationWhat precisely, W. J. T. Mitchell asks, are pictures (and theories of pictures) doing now, in the late twentieth century, when the power of the visual is said to be greater than ever before, and the "pictorial turn" supplants the "linguistic turn" in the study of culture? This book by one of America's leading theorists of visual representation offers a rich account of the interplay between the visible and the readable across culture, from literature to visual art to the mass media. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Picture Theory | 9 |
The Pictorial Turn | 11 |
Metapictures | 35 |
Beyond Comparison Picture Text and Method | 81 |
Textual Pictures | 107 |
Visible Language Blakes Art of Writing | 109 |
Ekphrasis and the Other | 149 |
Word Image and Object Wall Labels for Robert Morris | 239 |
The Photographic Essay Four Case Studies | 279 |
Pictures and Power | 321 |
Illusion Looking at Animals Looking | 327 |
Realism Irrealism and Ideology After Nelson Goodman | 343 |
Pictures and the Pub Sphere | 361 |
The Violence of Public Art Do the Right Thing | 369 |
From CNN to JFK | 395 |
Narrative Memory and Slavery | 181 |
Pictorial Texts | 207 |
Ut Pictura Theoria Abstract Painting and Language | 211 |
Some Pictures of Representation | 415 |
Index | 425 |
Common terms and phrases
abstract art aesthetic Agee American art history artist Barthes beholder Blake's called claim critical critique Cubism dialectic discourse Duck-Rabbit edited ekphrasis figure film formal Foucault further page references genre Gombrich Goodman human icon iconology ideology illusion illusionism imagetext James Agee kind label Las Meninas literal literary look medium memory Meninas metapicture modern modernist monument Morris's narrator Nelson Goodman notion object Operation Desert Storm Palestinian Panofsky Panofsky's photographic essay pictorial turn pipe poetic political postmodernism public art public sphere question reading realism relation represent rhetoric Robert Morris Saul Steinberg scene scroll sculpture seems semiotic sense simply slave narrative slavery social space spectacle Spike Lee Steinberg story structure suggests symbolic textual theory things tion tradition University Press violence visible language vision visual arts visual culture visual representation Walker Evans William Blake word and image writing York