Vision and Textuality

by Stephen Melville (Editor), Bill Readings (Editor)

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

408 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Professor Melville's areas of expertise are contemporary art, theory and historiography. He has published widely on contemporary art as well as on issues in contemporary theory and historiography. Most recently, he served as resident faculty at the Getty Summer Institute in Visual and Cultural Studies (University of Rochester, 1999), and has given invited letures at Cornell University (Ruth Woolsey Findley and William Nichols Findley Lecture), The Johns Hopkins University, and The Tate Modern in London. With Philip Armstrong (Division of Comparative Studies) and Laura Lisbon (Painting), he curated a major exhibition of contemporary painting at the Wexner Center for the Arts in May, 2001. The exhibition was accompanied by a substantial catalogue from The MIT Press. He has been active on numerous committees for the American Society for Aesthetics and has been on the editorial board for both the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.