"[Mitchell] undertakes to explore the nature of images by comparing them with words, or, more precisely, by looking at them from the viewpoint of verbal language. . . . The most lucid exposition of the subject I have ever read."—Rudolf Arnheim, Times Literary Supplement

CONTENTS:

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Iconology
Part One: The Idea of Imagery
1. What Is an Image?
Part Two: Image versus Text Figures of the Differences
2. Pictures and Paragraphs: Nelson Goodman and the Grammar of Differences
3. Nature and Convention: Gombrich’s Illusions
4. Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoon and the Politics of Genre
5. Eye and Ear: Edmund Burke and the Politics of Sensibility
Part Three: Image and Ideology
6. The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm: Marxism, Ideology, and Fetishism
Bibliography
Index

AUTHOR:

W. J. T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago and editor of Critical Inquiry.