Description

Book Synopsis
In this innovative, interdisciplinary 1998 study, James Elkins argues against the assumption that images can be adequately described in words. In his view, words must always fail because pictures possess a residue of 'meaningless' marks that cannot be apprehended as signs.

Table of Contents
1. Marks, Traces, Traits, Contours, Orli, and Splendors; 2. The anti-splendor; 3. Figure and Ground in Philosophy, Neurophysiology, Phenomenology, Psychology, Painting, and Psychoanalysis; 4. The signs of writing; 5. The common origins of pictures, writing, and notation; 6. Different horizons for the concept of image; 7. Nine steps down the ladder of disorder; 8. The unrepresentable, the unpicturable, the inconceivable, the unseeable.

On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them

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    A Paperback by James Elkins

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      Book details

      Publisher Cambridge University Press
      Published 2/17/2011 12:00:00 AM
      ISBN-13 9780521624992
      978-0521624992
      ISBN-10 0521624991
      Also in:
      Theory of art

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      In this innovative, interdisciplinary 1998 study, James Elkins argues against the assumption that images can be adequately described in words. In his view, words must always fail because pictures possess a residue of 'meaningless' marks that cannot be apprehended as signs.

      Table of Contents
      1. Marks, Traces, Traits, Contours, Orli, and Splendors; 2. The anti-splendor; 3. Figure and Ground in Philosophy, Neurophysiology, Phenomenology, Psychology, Painting, and Psychoanalysis; 4. The signs of writing; 5. The common origins of pictures, writing, and notation; 6. Different horizons for the concept of image; 7. Nine steps down the ladder of disorder; 8. The unrepresentable, the unpicturable, the inconceivable, the unseeable.

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