Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology

by W.J. Thomas Mitchell

Book Overview

" Mitchell] undertakes to explore the nature of images by comparing them with words, or, more precisely, by looking at them from the viewpoint of verbal language. . . . The most lucid exposition of the subject I have ever read."--Rudolf Arnheim, Times Literary Supplement

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226532291
• ISBN13: 9780226532295
• Release Date: July 1987
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Insightful, thoughtful, lucid. A great place to start.

Mitchell brings a kind of consensus approach within literary criticism to bear on the criticism of visual imagery; the criticism of an image as if it were a text. A lot of this has been done, without any discipline or care for consistency or clarity, by an army of post-structuralist French critics, with uneven results. Not that Agamben, Derrida and so on aren't quite worth reading, but I'd guess that reading them would be a lot more rewarding for someone who had read this little book first.