Reveals the invention of the readymade as a critical point in contemporary art.

In 1992 W. J. T. Mitchell argued for a "pictorial turn" in the humanities, registering a renewed interest in and prevalence of pictures and images in what had been understood as an age of simulation, or an increasingly extensive and diverse visual culture. However, in what is often characterized as a society of the "spectacle" we still do not know exactly what pictures or images are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them. In this seminal collection of essays, the first to be devoted to the "pictorial turn", theorists from across the humanities and social sciences, representing the disciplines of art history, philosophy, geography, media studies, visual studies and anthropology, are brought together with a paleontologist and practising artists to consider amongst other things the relation between pictures and images, the power of landscape, the nature of political images, the status of images in the natural sciences, the "life" of images, and the pictorial uncanny. With these topics in mind, picture theory and iconology exceed in scope the objects of visual culture conventionally understood. This book was published as a special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique.

Today's music, painting, and film share with literature in the development of a new aesthetic, even as these other arts influence (and are influenced by) literary themes and structures. And at the same time the music and art of the past continue to re-echo in twentieth-century letters. The thirteen essays gathered here open a fine and varied view of the ways in which contemporary literature interacts with the other arts. Surrealism in French painting and literature, collage theory and the cutups of William Burroughs, texts of Butor as shaped by works of Duchamp—this volume offers a rich harvest of perceptive studies on these and other aspects of a fascinating topic.

Introduction: differential reading -- Crisis in the humanities? Reconfiguring literary study for the Twenty First Century -- Cunning passages and contrived corridors: rereading Eliot's "Gerontion" -- The search for "prime words": Pound, Duchamp, and the nominalist ethos -- "But isn't the same at least the same?" Wittgenstein on translation -- "Logocinema of the frontiersman" Eugene Jolas's multilingual poetics and its legacies -- "The silence that is not silence": acoustic art in Samuel Beckett's radio plays -- Language poetry and the lyric subject: Ron Silliman's Albany, Susan Howe's Buffalo -- After language poetry: innovation and its theoretical discontents -- The invention of "concrete prose": Haroldo de Campos's Galaxias and after -- Songs of the Earth: Ronald Johnson's Verbicovisuals -- THe Oulipo factor: The procedural poetics of Christian Bok and Caroline Bergvall -- Filling the space with trace: Tom Raworth's "Letters from Yaddo" -- Teaching the "new" poetries: the case of Rae Armantrout -- Writing poetry/writing about poetry: some problems of affiliation.

What precisely, W. J. T. Mitchell asks, are pictures (and theories of pictures) doing now, in the late twentieth century, when the power of the visual is said to be greater than ever before, and the "pictorial turn" supplants the "linguistic turn" in the study of culture? This book by one of America's leading theorists of visual representation offers a rich account of the interplay between the visible and the readable across culture, from literature to visual art to the mass media.

This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should—indeed must—reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age describes the "modern age" as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Adorno to Žižek have repeatedly drawn from medieval sources to theorize modernity. To forget the medieval, or to discount its continued effect on contemporary thought, is to neglect the responsibilities of periodization. In The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, modernists and medievalists, as well as scholars specializing in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century comparative literature, offer a new history of theory and philosophy through essays on secularization and periodization, Marx’s (medieval) theory of commodity fetishism, Heidegger’s scholasticism, and Adorno’s nominalist aesthetics. One essay illustrates the workings of medieval mysticism in the writing of Freud’s most famous patient, Daniel Paul Schreber, author of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). Another looks at Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, a theoretical synthesis whose conscientious medievalism was the subject of much polemic in the post-9/11 era, a time in which premodernity itself was perceived as a threat to western values. The collection concludes with an afterword by Fredric Jameson, a theorist of postmodernism who has engaged with the medieval throughout his career. Contributors: Charles D. Blanton, Andrew Cole, Kathleen Davis, Michael Hardt, Bruce Holsinger, Fredric Jameson, Ethan Knapp, Erin Labbie, Jed Rasula, D. Vance Smith, Michael Uebel

Modernism and Theory boldly asks what role theory has to play in the new modernist studies. The three sections comprise expositions and debates on modernist topics by leading contributors, and the book concludes with an afterword from Fredric Jameson.

What is the theological significance of art? Why has the Church always encouraged the arts? What is so profoundly human about the arts? In A Wounded Innocence Alejandro R. Garcia-Rivera answers these questions in a series of sketches" that are mixed spiritual and theological reflections on various works of art written in a poetic style. These reflections explore the relationship between the multi-dimensional spiritual and the arts. The first *sketch, - *The Beginning of Art, - introduces the rest that go on to explore further the human, artistic, and theological implications of a wounded innocence. Each *sketch - reflects on a particular human work of art. Some are conventional works of art. Others may never find their way into a museum but, then, that is one of the implications coming out of this book. A museum does not define what a work of art is, its human depth does. In these deeply studied yet spiritually written reflections on each work of art, it is hoped that the reader will find his and her own creative depth described, perhaps even revealed. A Wounded Innocence is both inspiring and informative. Readers will learn about art, spirituality, and theology, and will find themselves inspired to look at works of art, and even to produce a work of art. It sets a new way of doing theology that is at the same time spiritual. More importantly, Garcia-Rivera describes a theology of art. Chapters are *The Beginning of Art, - *The End of Art, - *Human Freedom and Artistic Creativity, - *Heaven-with-Us, - *The Human Aspect of Atonement, - *The Tyger and the Lamb, - and *A Wounded Innocence. - Includes black and white art. Alejandro R. Garcia-Rivera, PhD, is associate professor of systematic theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. The author of numerous articles, he also wrote a Catholic Press Association award-winning book on theology and aesthetics titled The Community of the Beautiful (The Liturgical Press). "

This volume presents original writings and interviews with prominent thinkers on the front lines of an international intellectual effort to reconsider the fundamental terms of modernity and promote a philosophical design that reconsiders the significance of modernity itself.