Images: A Reader / Edition 1

by Sunil Manghani, Arthur Piper, Jon Simons

Overview

Images: A Reader provides a key resource for students, academics, practitioners and other readers engaged in the critical, theoretical, and practical study of images. The Reader is concerned with the notion of the 'image' in all its theoretical, critical and practical contexts, uses and history. It provides a map of the differences and similarities between the various disciplinary approaches to images, breaking the ground for a new interdisciplinary study of images, in the arts and humanities and beyond. The selection of over 80 key readings, across the domains of philosophy, art, literature, science, critical theory and cultural studies tells the story of images through intellectual history from the Bible to the present. By including both well-established writings and more recent, innovative research, the Reader outlines crucial developments in contemporary discourses about images.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412900447
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Publication date:	12/18/2006
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.53(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Part One: Historical and Philosophical Precedents
Genesis to Locke
Man Created in God's Image
Graven Images - Genesis 2: 26 and 27
Abraham and the Idol Shop of his Father Terah - Exodus 20: 4-6
The Simile of the Cave - Midrash Rabbah
Art and Illusion - Plato
The Origins of Imitation - Plato
Thinking with Images - Aristotle
Iconodules and Iconoclasts in Byzantium - Aristotle
John of Damascus
Horos at Nicaea, 787 A.D.
Horos at Niera, 754 A.D.
Image and Idolatry
Evil Demon - Thomas Hobbes
Images and the Brain - René Descartes
Of Ideas - René Descartes
Kant to Freud - John Locke
Representation and Imagination
Space and Time - Immanuel Kant
Camera Obscura - Gotthold Lessing
The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
How the Real World at Last Became a Myth - Karl Marx
On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense - Friedrich Nietzsche
Images, Bodies and Consciousness - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Dream-Work - Henri Bergson
Part Two: Theories of Images - Sigmund Freud
Ideology Critique
Television: Multilayered Structure
Society of the Spectacle - Theodor Adorno
The Precession of Simulacra - Guy Debord
Image as Commodity - Jean Baudrillard
'Race' and Nation - Fredric Jameson
Never Just Pictures - Paul Gilroy
Art History - Susan Bordo
Studies in Iconology
Invention and Discovery - Erwin Panofsky
Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas - Ernst Gombrich
Towards a Visual Critical Theory - Svetlana Alpers
Semiotics - Susan Buck-Morss
Nature of the Linguistic Sign
The Sign: Icon, Index, and Symbol - Ferdinand de Saussure
The Third Meaning - Charles Sanders Peirce
From Sub- to Suprasemiotic: The Sign as Event - Roland Barthes
The Semiotic Landscape - Mieke Bal
Phenomenology - Gunter Kress and Theo van Leeuwen
Thing and Work
Eye and Mind - Martin Heidegger
Description - Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Imagination - Jean-Paul Sartre
Scientific Visualism - Mikel Dufrenne
Psychoanalysis - Don Ihde
The Gaze / Anamorphosis
The All-Perceiving Subject - Jacques Lacan
Woman as Image (Man as Bearer of the Look) - Christian Metz
Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills - Laura Mulvey
Two Kinds of Attention - Joan Copjec
Part Three: Image Culture - Anton Ehrenzweig
Images and Words
The Roots of Poetry
Icon and Image - Ernest Fenollosa
This is Not a Pipe - Paul Ricoeur
The Despotic Eye and its Shadow: Media Image in the Age of Literacy - Michel Foucault
Images, Audiences, and Readings - Robert Romanyshyn
Image as Thought - Kevin De Luca
Pictures and Facts
Body Images - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Involuntary Memory - Antonio Damasio
The Philosophical Imaginary - Marcel Proust
Thought and Cinema: The Time-Image - Michèle Le Doeuff
The Dialectical Image - Gilles Deleuze
Ways of Remembering - Walter Benjamin
Fabrication - John Berger
Taking a Line for a Walk
On Montage and the Filmic Fourth Dimension - Paul Klee
Electronic Tools - Sergei Eisenstein
Camera Lucida - William J. Mitchell
Images Scatter into Data, Data Gather into Images - David Hockney
Visual Culture - Peter Galison
The Medium is the Message
The Image of the City - Marshal Mc Luhan
The Image-World - Kevin Lynch
The Philosopher as Andy Warhol - Susan Sontag
Symbol, Idol and Murti: Hindu God-images and the Politics of Mediation - Arthur Danto
The United Colors of Diversity - Gregory Price Grieve
The Unbearable Lightness Of Sight - Celia Lury
Vision and Visuality - Meiling Cheng
Modernising Vision
The Im/Pulse to See - Jonathan Crary
Lighting for Whiteness - Rosalind Krauss
Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn - Richard Dyer
The Modularity of Vision - Martin Jay
Image Studies - Semir Zeki
The Family of Images
The Domain of Images - W.J.T. Mitchell
A Constructivist Manifesto - James Elkins
Images, Not Signs - Barbara Stafford
What is Iconoclash? Or is there a World Beyond the Image Wars? - Régis Debray

Editorial Reviews

This is just what visual studies needs: a sober, analytic, parsimonious selection of crucial texts
James Elkins
Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism School of the Art Institute of Chicago

The sheer breadth of this collection - from Genesis to Hockney and Plato to Lacan- shows how much images have always been a part of our culture. This volume makes a welcome contribution to our (re)discovery of the visual in society and how much we stand to learn from it, past and present
Richard Howells
King's College, London

There are many fine anthologies on visual culture, yet none that offer such a concise and comprehensive array of the theoretical perspectives defining this interdisciplinary field
Robert Hariman
Northwestern University

An indispensible resource for image analysis. The best thing I have seen in this field by a long way
Valerie Walkerdine
Professor of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

The editors make two particularly useful contributions to the anthology. At the outset of each section, an introduction effectively summarizes and presents key issues for that section's readings, relates dominant themes to those earlier or later in the anthology, and outlines the significance of the individual excerpts in terms of the editors' proposed field of image studies. Aware of the bias with which they may have compiled the volume, however, the editors also have chosen to include four alternative tables of contents that fall at the end of the book's general introduction ... Accessible and well-organized, these alternative tables go far in exemplifying the extent to which the editors wish to open up the field of inquiry in the study of images
Mark Andrews
Invisible Culture

A rich, well-considered volume that is bound to become a critical introductory text for students of images and images studies everywhere, as well as an essential resource for academics and practitioners alike. This reader is an invaluable tool for those interested in images and image studies across a vast array of disciplines
Zoë Sadokierski
Visual Communications

Much theorizing in visual studies, visual anthropology, and visual culture is offered in an a-historical vein, sliding along secondary and tertiary conceptual trajectories, with little sense of interdisciplinary origin. This book recovers the historical grounds of the study of 'images' and provides and contextualizes most of the defining texts, and a lot more besides. A cursory flipping through visual anthropology textbooks will reveal that few cite any of the authors included here... One could question the choice of works to reprint in the compilation: one could, with one or two exceptions, discuss the white, Western-centric emphasis of the anthology, and one could query others things besides. For the most part this would be pointless, as the tome offers a comprehensive overview. I can’t do any better than repeating Martin Jay’s blurb on the back cover: "Images, from time immemorial, have generated words, words to describe them, words to interpret them, words to enhance or keep their magic at bay. Many of the most eloquent and insightful of these words, from the Bible to Plato, to contemporary visual culture studies, are gathered together in this remarkable collection, which is surely destined to be a standard reference in its field for many years to come”
Keyan G. Tomaselli
Visual Anthropology

From the Publisher

"Images; A Reader is a key resource for academics and others studying images and their interpretation. College-level collections, whether art history holdings or cultural studies collections, will find it intriguing."

James A. Cox

The sheer breadth of this collection - from Genesis to Hockney and Plato to Lacan - shows how much images have always been a part of our culture. This volume makes a welcome contribution to our (re)discovery of the visual in society and how much we stand to learn from it, past and present.

Richard Howells

This is just what visual studies needs: a sober, analytic, parsimonious selection of crucial texts.

James Elkins

There are many fine anthologies on visual culture, yet none that offer such a concise and comprehensive array of the theoretical perspectives defining this interdisciplinary field.

Robert Hariman

An indispensible resource for image analysis. The best thing I have seen in this field by a long way.

Valerie Walkerdine

The editors make two particularly useful contributions to the anthology. At the outset of each section, an introduction effectively summarizes and presents key issues for that section's readings, relates dominant themes to those earlier or later in the anthology, and outlines the significance of the individual excerpts in terms of the editors' proposed field of image studies. Aware of the bias with which they may have compiled the volume, however, the editors also have chosen to include four alternative tables of contents that fall at the end of the book's general introduction... Accessible and well-organized, these alternative tables go far in exemplifying the extent to which the editors wish to open up the field of inquiry in the study of images.

Mark Andrews

A rich, well-considered volume that is bound to become a critical introductory text for students of images and images studies everywhere, as well as an essential resource for academics and practitioners alike. This reader is an invaluable tool for those interested in images and image studies across a vast array of disciplines.

Zoë Sadokierski

Much theorizing in visual studies, visual anthropology, and visual culture is offered in an a-historical vein, sliding along secondary and tertiary conceptual trajectories, with little sense of interdisciplinary origin. This book recovers the historical grounds of the study of 'images' and provides and contextualizes most of the defining texts, and a lot more besides.

Keyan G. Tomaselli