Synopses & Reviews
Is seeing a matter of nature? Does perspective show things as they really are? Can we read an image in the same way as a text?
Reading Images draws together essays that attempt to answer these questions but in a variety of ways and from the different theoretical positions offered by psychoanalysis, semiotics, poststructuralism and postmodernism. The anthology opens up a dialogue between seeing and the seen, text and image, theory and practice. By discussing a range of visual material, from advertising and architecture to painting and photography, it crosses generic and disciplinary boundaries and suggests ways in which vision and visuality are related to questions of textuality, subjectivity, race, and gender.
About the Author
Julia Thomas is Lecturer at the Center for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University.
Table of Contents
Introduction * Perspective--Richard L. Gregory * Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson's Thriller--Kobena Mercer * The Look--Rosalind Coward * In Plato's Cave--Susan Sontag * Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (extract)--Roland Barthes * The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction (extract)--Walter Benjamin * Panopticism (extract)--Michel Foucault * Semiology and Visual Interpretation--Norman Bryson * Imaging (extract)--Teresa de Lauretis * Desperately Seeking Difference--Jackie Stacey * The Oppositional Gaze--Bell Hooks * Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a' (extract)--Jacques Lacan * Pornography, Nostalgia, Montage: A Triad of the Gaze (extract)--Slavoj Zizek * Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini (extract)--Julia Kristeva * Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books--Jacques Derrida * 'Las Meninas'--Michel Foucault * Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality--Jean Baudrillard