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Cultivating Picturacy
James A.W. Heffernan
€ 62.02
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Description for Cultivating Picturacy
Hardcover. Num Pages: 430 pages, 17 colour plates, 79 b&w photos. BIC Classification: ABA. Category: (P) Professional & Scholarly; (UF) Further/Higher Education; (UP) Postgraduate. Dimension: 234 x 160 x 35. Weight in Grams: 866.
Though English has no word for the visual counterpart to literacy, Heffernan argues that the capacity to interpret pictures must be cultivated and deserves a name: picturacy. Using examples such as the pre-historic cave paintings of Lascaux, film versions of Frankenstein, the provocative photographs of Sally Mann, and the abstract canvases of Gerhard Richter, the volume illustrates how learning to decode the language of pictures resembles the process of learning to read. While words typically frame and regulate our experience of art, the study also explains how pictures can contest the authority of the words we use to interpret art.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2006
Publisher
Baylor University Press United States
Number of pages
430
Condition
New
Number of Pages
437
Place of Publication
Waco, United States
ISBN
9781932792416
SKU
V9781932792416
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-20
About James A.W. Heffernan
James A. W. Heffernan (Ph.D. Princeton) is Emeritus Professor of English at Dartmouth College.
Reviews for Cultivating Picturacy
During the past 25 years, James Heffernan's nuanced and clear-eyed writings on words and images have firmly placed him among the finest practitioners of interartstic theory and criticism. This new volume reveals him at his very best. Picturacy should be required reading for anyone wishing to learn how
and how not
to read pictures.
Richard Wendorf, Stanford Calderwood Director and Librarian, The Boston Athenaeum Wide-ranging, steadily insightful, and richly illustrated, Cultivating Picturacy offers both a method and a model for reading the visual image. Cultivating Picturacy will stand alongside the works of Norman Bryson, Nelson Goodman, and W. J. T. Mitchell as a fundamental contribution to the field of inter-art scholarship. -Ernest B. Gilman, New York University James Heffernan's Cultivating Picturacy is a treasure for scholars and students interested in the history, theory, and practice of text-image relations. The volume, beautifully produced and illustrated by Baylor University Press, contains a breadth of reference, richness of analysis, and limpid prose that are truly marvelous. It consists of fourteen essays (including the introduction), almost all published in the period 1988-2000, which, taken together, crown a distinguished career in what used to be rather quaintly called 'sister arts' criticism, but which is now, in the age of metastasizing visual-verbal media, among the most urgent topics of cultural history and aesthetics.
Gillen D'Arcy Wood
Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net For two decades, James Heffernan has covered the intermedial field precisely by letting his favored topics flow smoothly into associated questions generated from them, one issue dovetailing transparently into another due to the engrossing, subtle clarity of the critic's prose. Having wondered at the start about 'why we have no word to denote the visual counterpart of literacy, no word that designates the capacity to interpret pictures' (1)
the ability or 'capacity,' that is, but also the grain of attention involved
literary scholar Heffernan not only gives us such a term but offers an extended case in point for its flexible understanding, telling application, and real aesthetic yield. Entitled by neologism, the book brings news in every chapter.
Garrett Stewart
European Romantic Review
and how not
to read pictures.
Richard Wendorf, Stanford Calderwood Director and Librarian, The Boston Athenaeum Wide-ranging, steadily insightful, and richly illustrated, Cultivating Picturacy offers both a method and a model for reading the visual image. Cultivating Picturacy will stand alongside the works of Norman Bryson, Nelson Goodman, and W. J. T. Mitchell as a fundamental contribution to the field of inter-art scholarship. -Ernest B. Gilman, New York University James Heffernan's Cultivating Picturacy is a treasure for scholars and students interested in the history, theory, and practice of text-image relations. The volume, beautifully produced and illustrated by Baylor University Press, contains a breadth of reference, richness of analysis, and limpid prose that are truly marvelous. It consists of fourteen essays (including the introduction), almost all published in the period 1988-2000, which, taken together, crown a distinguished career in what used to be rather quaintly called 'sister arts' criticism, but which is now, in the age of metastasizing visual-verbal media, among the most urgent topics of cultural history and aesthetics.
Gillen D'Arcy Wood
Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net For two decades, James Heffernan has covered the intermedial field precisely by letting his favored topics flow smoothly into associated questions generated from them, one issue dovetailing transparently into another due to the engrossing, subtle clarity of the critic's prose. Having wondered at the start about 'why we have no word to denote the visual counterpart of literacy, no word that designates the capacity to interpret pictures' (1)
the ability or 'capacity,' that is, but also the grain of attention involved
literary scholar Heffernan not only gives us such a term but offers an extended case in point for its flexible understanding, telling application, and real aesthetic yield. Entitled by neologism, the book brings news in every chapter.
Garrett Stewart
European Romantic Review