In this innovative, interdisciplinary study, James Elkins argues against the assumption that images can be adequately described in words. In his view, words must always fail because pictures possess a residue of 'meaningless' marks that cannot be apprehended as signs. On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them is a 1998 text which provides detailed, incisive critiques of fundamental notions about pictures: their allegedly semiotic structures; the 'rational' nature of realism; and the ubiquity of the figure-ground relation. Elkins then opens the concept of images to non-Western and prehistoric ideas, exploring Chinese concepts of magic, Mesopotamian practices of counting and sculpture, religious ideas about hypostasis, philosophical discussions concerning invisibility and blindness, and questions on the limits of the destruction of meaning.

This deeply personal account of emotion and vulnerability draws upon anecdotes related to individual works of art to present a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past.

A group of sophisticated essays on how we experience film with all fives senses--and our sense of history .

Scholarly responses to Henry Miller's works have never been numerous and for many years Miller was not a fashionable writer for literary studies. In fact, there exist only three collections of essays concerning Henry Miller's oeuvre. Since these books appeared, a new generation of international Miller scholars has emerged, one that is re-energizing critical readings of this important American Modernist. Henry Miller: New Perspectives presents new essays on carefully chosen themes within Miller and his intellectual heritage to form the most authoritative collection ever published on this author.

'The most important art historian of his generation? is how some scholars have described the late Michael Baxandall (1933-2007), Professor of the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Baxandall?s work had a transformative effect on the study of European Renaissance and eighteenth-century art, and contributed to a complex transition in the aims and methods of art history in general during the 1970s, ?80s and ?90s. While influential, he was also an especially subtle and independent thinker - occasionally a controversial one - and many of the implications of his work have yet to be fully understood and assimilated. This collection of 10 essays endeavors to assess the nature of Baxandall?s achievement, and in particular to address the issue of the challenges it offers to the practice of art history today. This volume provides the most comprehensive assessment of Baxandall?s work to date, while drawing upon the archive of Baxandall papers recently deposited at the Cambridge University Library and the Warburg Institute.

This deeply personal account of emotion and vulnerability draws upon anecdotes related to individual works of art to present a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past.

In 2008, the editors published a well-cited journal paper arguing that while scholarly work on media representations of environmental issues had made substantial progress in textual analysis there had been much less work on visual representations. This is surprising given the increasingly visual nature of media and communication, and in light of emerging evidence that the environment is visualized through the use of increasingly symbolic and iconic images. Addressing these matters, this volume marks out the present state of the field and contains chapters that represent fresh and exciting high quality scholarly work now emerging on visual environmental communication. These include a range of fascinating and often alarming topics which draw on a variety of methods and forms of visual communication. The book demonstrates that research needs to think much more widely about what we mean by the ‘visual’ which plays a massive yet under-researched role in the politics and ideology of public understanding and misunderstanding of and the environment and environmental problems. The book is of relevance to students and researchers in media and communication studies, cultural studies, film and visual studies, geography, sociology, politics and other disciplines with an interest in the politics of visual environmental communication. This book was published as a special issue of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture.