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

Elkins, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415926637 ISBN 13: 9780415926638

Publisher: Routledge, 2000

Synopsis

Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts examines art historical writing as an expressive medium, capable of emotion and reflection - and therefore deserving of serious consideration for its own sake, as the testament of art history and of individual historians. Elkins asks such questions as: How do various art historical approaches represent works of art? What can they see, and what must they miss? And what insight does such writing offer us about ourselves? Drawing on analyses of texts by Derrida, Deleuze and other leading critics, as well as illustrations of artworks from various cultures, Elkins constructs an eloquent plea for circumspection in the entire endeavour of trying to force images into words and in the curious vocation of writing the history of art.

About this title

Review:

"Concerned with the rhetorical dimensions of artwriting, 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: Routledge
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0415926637
• ISBN 13: 9780415926638
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 326