Images - 9781412900447

This collection of readings has been put together by Manghani (critical and cultural theory, York St. John U., UK), Piper (image studies and visual culture, U. of Nottingham, UK), and Simons (communications, Indiana U., US), in part, as a response to W.J.T. Mitchell's complaint that "there is, at present, no real `field' in the humanities . no `iconology' that studies the problem of perceptual, conceptual, verbal and graphic images in a unified way." In pursuit of such an interdisciplinary field of image studies, they gather 81 essays and excerpts of longer works in order to indicate the types of concerns, methods of inquiry, subjects of study, and disciplinary connections that would constitute the field. Historical and philosophical precedents are presented in selections from the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and others. Theories of images are examined in sections dealing with ideology critique, art history, semiotics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. Finally, image culture is explored in sections on images and words, image as thought, image fabrication, visual culture, vision and visuality, and image studies. Among the notable authors represented in these last two sections are Régis Debray, Susan Sontag, Marshall Mcluhan, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Klee, Marcel Proust, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Theodor Adorno. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)