Vision and Textuality

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by Stephen W. Melville,

Edited by Bill Readings

Duke University Press

Due/Published July 1995, 288 pages, paper

ISBN 0822316447

The influence of contemporary literary theory on art history is increasingly evident, but there is little or no agreement about the nature and consequences of this intersection of the visual and the textual. Examining both the distinctness and the community of each, this anthology brings together original pieces that address the emergent terms and practices of contemporary art history. The editors' introduction discusses the relation between vision and textuality within various contexts. Providing a brief history of mimesis, they go on to examine the relevance of aesthetics, the current concern with modernism and postmodernism, and the possible development of new disciplinary formations in the humanities. The essays that follow are grouped around questions about the discipline of art history, the implications of semiotics, the emergence of a new cultural history of art, and the impact of psychoanalysis. Each section is preceded by a short introduction that works both to situate the essays that follow and further open the questions at stake in them. The objects under discussion range from the Danae to Cafe Deutschland, from Vauxhall Gardens to Max Ernst, and from the Imagines of Philostratus to William Godwin's Caleb Williams.