Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"[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

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Iconology
• Part 1 The Idea of Imagery
• 1 What Is an Image?
• Part 2 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'sLaocoonand the Politics of Genre
• 5 Eye and Ear: Edmund Burke and the Politics of Sensibility
• Part 3 Image and Ideology
• 6 The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm: Marxism, Ideology, and Fetishism
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

An ``image'' is not easy to define, especially if one intends to cover all bases. Images are graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, or verbal-they have connotative as well as denotative meaning, dependent upon the context. It would seem that art and poetry might share the definition-but this is not the case. As the author states, images seem to resist any attempt at neutralization. To illustrate, Mitchell (English, Chicago) examines four representative texts: Nelson Goodman's Language and Art (1969), Ernest Gombrich's Art and Illusion (1978), and classics like G.E. Lessing's Laocoon and Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. Mitchell shows how each thinker established his own dichotomies in the iconological process, influenced by the political or religious ideologies that pertained at the time of composition. The author examines Marxist criticism, showing how these theorists sacrificed the role of the ``image'' entirely, thus aligning themselves to an iconoclastic ideology that has persisted since ancient times. To reinstate the role of image in art and literary criticism requires some model of dialectical pluralism. In this context questions posed by Marxist critics will be answered by liberal critics, ``to make both our love and hatred of `mere images' contraries in the dialectic of iconology.'' Appropriate for university collections.-D. Kolker, Cleveland State University