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Our beautiful, dry, and distant texts : art history as writing
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Our beautiful, dry, and distant texts : art history as writing

Author: James Elkins
Publisher: University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, ©1997.
Edition/Format:   Book : State or province government publication : EnglishView all editions and formats
Summary:
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.
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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.

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