As the early Wittgenstein had pointed out, a picture is a fact; whereas a logical picture of facts denotes an idea. The ‘visual culture’, in fact, has emerged as a history of images instead of that of art. The visual though is never pure and is invariably contaminated by the influence of other senses, touched by certain texts and discourses. For hypostasizing the visual risks of reinstalling the ‘noble’ sense’s hegemony, the visual, it can be argued, is ‘languaged’ just the way language itself tends to carry a visual dimension.
The idea of vision to go with that as intuition or imagination probably has a long history if one rewinds the clock. Idea is derived from the Greek term of verb, meaning ‘to see’. A sort of deep etymology, it suggests that the way an individual thinks is essentially guided by a visual paradigm. In this scheme of things in Western culture, the acts of looking, seeing and knowing often get intertwined hence the manner in which we come to follow the core concept of an ‘idea’ is bound up with issues of a picture or of an image, and its ‘appearance’.
In this context, ‘Word, Image, Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture’ (Edited by Shormishtha Panja, Shirshendu Chakrabarti, and Christel Devadawson; Publishers: Orient Blackswan, Price: Rs 445; Pages: 212) goes on to approach the Western intellectual history’s content and form in terms of how they ‘look’.
Giving an idea of the rationale and scope of the exercise, an introductory note elaborates: “The book is an attempt to break down the isolation of the two disciplines, literature and the visual arts, and to make parallelism an exploratory method aimed at a mutually enriching synthesis. Since ideas and tendencies acquire an irreducibly concrete life in artistic representation, examination of the same life in two different art forms deepens our understanding of it as well as of the larger issues and contexts in which the literary and visual texts are embedded. While this is a collection of scholarly essays, there is enough here to interest the lay reader.”
The idea of vision to go with that as intuition or imagination probably has a long history if one rewinds the clock. Idea is derived from the Greek term of verb, meaning ‘to see’. A sort of deep etymology, it suggests that the way an individual thinks is essentially guided by a visual paradigm. In this scheme of things in Western culture, the acts of looking, seeing and knowing often get intertwined hence the manner in which we come to follow the core concept of an ‘idea’ is bound up with issues of a picture or of an image, and its ‘appearance’.
In this context, ‘Word, Image, Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture’ (Edited by Shormishtha Panja, Shirshendu Chakrabarti, and Christel Devadawson; Publishers: Orient Blackswan, Price: Rs 445; Pages: 212) goes on to approach the Western intellectual history’s content and form in terms of how they ‘look’.
Giving an idea of the rationale and scope of the exercise, an introductory note elaborates: “The book is an attempt to break down the isolation of the two disciplines, literature and the visual arts, and to make parallelism an exploratory method aimed at a mutually enriching synthesis. Since ideas and tendencies acquire an irreducibly concrete life in artistic representation, examination of the same life in two different art forms deepens our understanding of it as well as of the larger issues and contexts in which the literary and visual texts are embedded. While this is a collection of scholarly essays, there is enough here to interest the lay reader.”
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