Iconic Turn: A Plea for Three Turns of the Screw
Journal
Culture, Theory and Critique
ISSN
1473-5784
ISSN-Digital
1473-5776
Type
journal article
Date Issued
2015-09-01
Author(s)
Abstract
In the early 1990s, W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm independently proclaimed that the humanities were witnessing a ‘pictorial' or ‘iconic turn'. Twenty years later, we may wonder whether this announcement was describing an event that had already taken place or whether it was rather calling forth for it to happen. The contemporary world is, more than ever, determined by visual artefacts. Still, our conceptual arsenal, forged during centuries of logocentrism, still falls behind the complexity of pictorial meaning. The essay has two parts. In the first, it tries to assess the exact meaning of the ‘pictorial'/'iconic turn', and (re)places it into the context of Anglo-American visual studies and German Bildwissenschaften. It the second, it addresses the famous claim by the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius that ‘image sciences are easy' by advocating for three ‘turns of the screw' to make visual studies more difficult: a shift from iconology to symptomatology, a shift from extensive to intensive and a shift from the indicative to the subjunctive.
Language
English
Keywords
https://www.academia.edu/16676966/Iconic_Turn._A_Plea_for_Three_Turns_of_the_Screw
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
HSG Profile Area
SHSS - Kulturen, Institutionen, Maerkte (KIM)
Refereed
Yes
Publisher
Routledge
Publisher place
Abingdon, Oxfordshire
Volume
57
Number
2
Start page
228
End page
250
Pages
24
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
243793