Cultivating Picturacy : Visual Art and Verbal Interventions

by Heffernan, James A. W.

• ISBN13: 9781932792416
• ISBN10: 1932792414
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-09-30
• Publisher: Baylor Univ Pr

Summary

"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 prehistoric 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."--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

James A. W. Heffernan is Emeritus Professor of English at Dartmouth College.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
List of Abbreviations	xvii
Acknowledgments	xix
Introduction	1	(200)
1 Literacy and Picturacy	11	(28)
How Do We Learn to Read Pictures?
2 Speaking for Pictures	39	(30)
The Rhetoric of Art Criticism
3 Alberti on Apelles	69	(14)
Word and Image in De Pictura
4 Text and Design	83	(18)
Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience
5 Marginal Language	101	(14)
Word and Image in Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion
6 Painting against Poetry	115	(26)
Reynolds's Discourses and the Discourse of Turner's Art
7 Wordsworth, Constable, and the Poetics of Chiaroscuro	141	(18)
8 Self-Representation in Byron's Poetry and Turner's Art	159	(20)
9 Looking at the Monster	179	(22)
Frankenstein and Film
10 Love, Death, and Grotesquerie	201	(30)
Beardsley's Illustrations of Wilde and Pope
11 Hockney Remakes Hogarth	231	(22)
A Gay Rake Progresses to America
12 Peter Milton's Turn	253	(34)
An American Printmaker Marks the End of a Millennium
13 Reza, Pollock, Richter	287	(24)
Language and Abstract Art
Notes	311	(62)
Works Cited	373	(24)
Index	397