Find a copy in the library
Finding libraries that hold this item...
Details
| Material Type: | Government publication, State or province government publication |
|---|---|
| Document Type: | Book |
| All Authors / Contributors: |
James Elkins |
| ISBN: | 0271016302 9780271016306 |
| OCLC Number: | 34782702 |
| Description: | xvii, 300 p. : ill. ; 27 cm. |
| Contents: | 1. Dialogue with a Saturnian -- 2. The Sameness of Theory -- 3. On the Impossibility of Close Reading -- 4. Saying Who We Are -- 5. Saying What We Are Doing -- 6. Unease and Disease -- 7. The History and Theory of Meandering -- 8. The Brancacci Chapel and Spider Webs -- 9. The Avaricious Snap of Rhetoric -- 10. Writing as Reverie -- 11. On Half-Consciousness |
| Responsibility: | James Elkins. |
Abstract:
How do psychoanalytic, semiotic, deconstructive, and other interpretations represent works of art? What can they see, and what must they miss? In Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts, Elkins suggests that the philosophic problems posed by these questions are essentially insuperable because philosophy makes demands of visual artifacts that they can answer only by becoming mirror images of philosophic discourse.
Elkins argues that writing is what art historians produce, and, whether such writing is a transparent vehicle for the transmission of facts or an embattled forum for the rehearsal of institutional relations and constructions of history, it is an expressive medium, with the capacity for emotion and reflection. Therefore, it needs to be taken seriously for its own sake: it is the testament of art history and of individual historians, and it is only weakened and slighted by versions of history that imagine it either as uncontrolled dissemination or as objective discovery and reporting.
Reviews
User-contributed reviews
Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers.
Be the first.
Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers.
Be the first.
Tags
Add tags for "Our beautiful, dry, and distant texts : art history as writing".
Be the first.
