Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing - Hardcover

Elkins, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0271016302 ISBN 13: 9780271016306

Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997

Synopsis

How do psychoanalytic, semiotic, deconstructive, and other interpretations represent works of art? What can they see, and what must they miss? In Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts, Elkins suggests that the philosophic problems posed by these questions are essentially insuperable because philosophy makes demands of visual artifacts that they can answer only by becoming mirror images of philosophic discourse. Elkins argues that writing is what art historians produce, and, whether such writing is a transparent vehicle for the transmission of facts or an embattled forum for the rehearsal of institutional relations and constructions of history, it is an expressive medium, with the capacity for emotion and reflection. Therefore, it needs to be taken seriously for its own sake: it is the testament of art history and of individual historians, and it is only weakened and slighted by versions of history that imagine it either as uncontrolled dissemination or objective discovery and reporting. Elkins's investigation is not a prescription for opening art history to new influences or for focusing it on particular problems. It is a plea for circumspection in the entire endeavor of trying to force images into words, and in the curious vocation of writing the history of art.

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Review

"Concerned with the rhetorical dimensions of art writing, Elkins identifies the ways in which immediate questions about the truth of interpretation are inevitably deflected by awareness of the stylistic qualities of art historians' texts. . . . Wildly imaginative at making connections, his highly original book inevitably will be one necessary starting point for all future discussion."

--David Carrier, Carnegie Mellon University

From the Author

Summary of the book's contents
This book is an assessment of the part played by writing in current art historical practice; the principal thesis is that historians are partly driven by the desire to "paint" artworks in prose, rather than merely naming or identifying them. The book includes analyses of texts by Donald Preziosi, David Carrier, Erwin Panofsky, Stephen Melville, Whitney Davis, Richard Wollheim, Michael Fried, Meyer Schapiro, Roberto Longhi, Alexander Marshack, Donald Davidson, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. Subjects include the place of theory, the "progress" of art history, the practices of close reading, style analysis, and iconography, the relation between logic and discursive writing, the potential of rhetorical analyses of art historians' texts, the adjudication of various theories (semiotics, psychoanalysis, and so forth), and the part played by repression, uncognized and unverbalized elements in art historical practice. Examples include prehistoric Irish forts, the Parthenon frieze, Chinese bronzes, and paintings from the middle ages to the present.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0271016302
• ISBN 13: 9780271016306
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312