Vision and Textuality

This volume brings together the work of distinguished critics and art historians in order to reflect and assess the impact of current critical theory on the discipline and practice of art history. Centring on the intersection of questions of vision with the problematic of textuality, the book addresses how issues of politics, semiotics, psychoanalysis and historiography have contributed to the emergent terms and practices of the new art histories. Front Matter....Pages i-xvii Front Matter....Pages 1-1 General Introduction....Pages 3-28 Front Matter....Pages 29-29 Basic Concepts. Of Art History....Pages 31-37 Beholding Art History: Vision, Place and Power....Pages 38-66 Past Looking....Pages 67-89 A Discourse (With Shape of Reason Missing)....Pages 90-114 The Aesthetics of Post-History: A German Perspective....Pages 115-140 Front Matter....Pages 141-141 How Obvious is Art? Kitsch and the Semiotician....Pages 143-146 Reading the Gaze: The Construction of Gender in ‘Rembrandt’....Pages 147-173 Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum....Pages 174-194 Topic and Figures of Enunciation: It is Myself that I Paint....Pages 195-214 Armour Fou....Pages 215-248 Front Matter....Pages 249-249 The Pen and the Eye: The Politics of the Gazing Body....Pages 251-255 Impersonal Violence: The Penetrating Gaze and the Field of Narration in Caleb Williams....Pages 256-281 The Visibility of Visuality: Vauxhall Gardens and the Siting of the Viewer....Pages 282-295 B/G....Pages 296-314 Front Matter....Pages 315-315 Vision Procured....Pages 317-325 In the Master’s Bedroom....Pages 326-343 Photo-unrealism: The Contribution of the Camera to the Crisis of Ocularcentrism....Pages 344-360 Chance Encounters: Flâneur and Détraquée in Breton’s Nadja....Pages 361-372 Back Matter....Pages 373-391 "Melville and Readings have done a superb job, not only in their choice of essays, but in their elaborate and highly ambitious introduction. It is the best assessment that I know of the current state of contemporary art history and criticism, the most subtle analysis of the theoretical alternatives open to contemporary and future work in these disciplines."--Keith Moxey, Barnard College and Columbia University Brings together the work of critics and art historians to reflect and assess the impact of contemporary critical theory on the practice of art history. The text addresses how issues of politics, semiotics, psychoanalysis and historiography have contributed to the discipline.