Why do we have such extraordinarily powerful responses toward the images and pictures we see in everyday life? Why do we behave as if pictures were alive, possessing the power to influence us, to demand things from us, to persuade us, seduce us, or even lead us astray? According to W. J. T. Mitchell, we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. What Do Pictures Want? explores this idea and highlights Mitchell's innovative and profoundly influential thinking on picture theory and the lives and loves of images. Ranging across the visual arts, literature, and mass media, Mitchell applies characteristically brilliant and wry analyses to Byzantine icons and cyberpunk films, racial stereotypes and public monuments, ancient idols and modern clones, offensive images and found objects, American photography and aboriginal painting. Opening new vistas in iconology and the emergent field of visual culture, he also considers the importance of Dolly the Sheep--who, as a clone, fulfills the ancient dream of creating a living image--and the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, which, among other things, signifies a new and virulent form of iconoclasm. What Do Pictures Want? offers an immensely rich and suggestive account of the interplay between the visible and the readable. A work by one of our leading theorists of visual representation, it will be a touchstone for art historians, literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers alike. "A treasury of episodes--generally overlooked by art history and visual studies--that turn on images that 'walk by themselves' and exert their own power over the living."--Norman Bryson, Artforum

How does a parent make sense of a child's severe mental illness? How does a father meet the daily challenges of caring for his gifted but delusional son, while seeking to overcome the stigma of madness and the limits of psychiatry? W. J. T. Mitchell's memoir tells the story--at once representative and unique--of one family's encounter with mental illness, and bears witness to the life of the talented young man who was his son. Gabriel Mitchell was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of twenty-one and died by suicide eighteen years later. He left behind a remarkable archive of creative work and a father determined to honor his son's attempts to conquer his own illness. Before his death, Gabe had been working on a film that would show madness from inside and out, as media stereotype and spectacle, symptom and stigma, malady and minority status, disability and gateway to insight. He was convinced that madness is an extreme form of subjective experience that we all endure at some point in our lives, whether in moments of ecstasy or melancholy or in the enduring trauma of a broken heart. Gabe's declared ambition was to transform schizophrenia from a death sentence to a learning experience, and madness from a curse to a critical perspective. Through vignettes and memories, by turns difficult, unsettling, and humorous, Mental Traveler shows how Mitchell was drawn into Gabe's quest for enlightenment within madness. Shot through with love and pain, this memoir holds many lessons for anyone struggling to cope with mental illness, and especially for parents and caregivers of those caught in its grasp.

A groundbreaking examination of the "double" in modern and contemporary art From ancient mythology to contemporary cinema, the motif of the double-which repeats, duplicates, mirrors, inverts, splits, and reenacts-has captured our imaginations, both attracting and repelling us. The Double examines this essential concept through the lens of art, from modernism to contemporary practice-from the paired paintings of Henri Matisse and Arshile Gorky, to the double line works of Piet Mondrian and Marlow Moss, to Eva Hesse's One More Than One, Lorna Simpson's Two Necklines, Roni Horn's Pair Objects, and Rashid Johnson's The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Emmett). James Meyer's survey text explores four modes of doubling: Seeing Double through repetition; Reversal, the inversion or mirroring of an image or form; Dilemma, the staging of an absurd or impossible choice; and the Divided and Doubled Self (split and shadowed selves, personae, fraternal doubles, and pairs). Thought-provoking essays by leading scholars Julia Bryan-Wilson, Tom Gunning, W.J.T. Mitchell, Hillel Schwartz, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Andrew Solomon discuss a host of topics, including the ontology and ethics of the double, the double and psychoanalysis, double consciousness, the doppelganger in silent cinema, and the queer double. Richly illustrated throughout, The Double is a multifaceted exploration of an enduring theme in art, from painting and sculpture to photography, film, video, and performance. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Exhibition Schedule National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC July 10-October 31, 2022

A stunningly illustrated look at how Blake's radical vision influenced artists of the Beat generation and 1960s counterculture In his own lifetime, William Blake (1757-1827) was a relatively unknown nonconventional artist with a strong political bent. William Blake and the Age of Aquarius is a beautifully illustrated look at how, some two hundred years after his birth, the antiestablishment values embodied in Blake's art and poetry became a model for artists of the American counterculture. This book provides new insights into the politics and protests of Blake's own lifetime, and the generation of artists who revived and reimagined his work in the mid-1940s through 1970, or what might be called the "long sixties." Contributors explore Blake's outsider status in Georgian England and how his individualistic vision spoke to members of the Beat Generation, hippies, radical poets and writers, and other voices of the counterculture. Among the artists, musicians, and writers who looked to Blake were such diverse figures as Diane Arbus, Jay DeFeo, the Doors, Sam Francis, Allen Ginsberg, Jess, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Charles Seliger, Maurice Sendak, Robert Smithson, Clyfford Still, and many others. This book also explores visual cultures around such galvanizing moments of the 1960s as Woodstock and the Summer of Love. William Blake and the Age of Aquarius shows how Blake's myths, visions, and radicalism found new life among American artists who valued individualism and creativity, explored expanded consciousness, and celebrated youth, peace, and the power of love in a turbulent age. Exhibition schedule: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University September 23, 2017-March 11, 2018

The fourteen distinguished contributors to this volume explore ways we tell, understand, and use stories. More important, through their exploration they collectively demonstrate that the study of narrative, like the study of other significant human creations, has taken a quantum leap in the modern era. No longer the province of literary specialists who borrow their terms from psychology or linguistics, the study of narrative has become and invaluable source of insight for all the branches of human and natural science. Multidisciplinary in scope, these essays dramatize and and clarify the most fundamental debates about the nature and value of narrative as a means by which human beings attempt to represent and make sense of the world.

"Against Theory," the title essay in this volume, challenges the notion that literary theory has any real work to do, or any results to show. This challenge--issued by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in "Critical Inquiry" (8: 4)--strikes some critics as scandalous, others as provocative and productive.
The argument is directed against both sides of the current debates in literary theory, criticizing theoretical "objectivists" like E. D. Hirsch, Jr., on the one hand, and proponents of indeterminacy like Paul de Man on the other. The attack is not just on a particular way of doing theory but on the entire project of literary theory. The challenge is not only to a way of thinking and writing but to a way of making a living.
The resulting controversy has drawn so much attention among literary critics that it has been collected in a single volume so that the debate can be followed from start to finish. This collection includes the essay "Against Theory," seven responses to it, and a rejoinder by Knapp and Michaels (originally published in "Critical Inquiry" 9: 4); in addition, there are two new statements plus a final reply by Knapp and Michaels.
The debate chronicled in this volume raises the most fundamental issues in the theory of meaning and the practice of interpretation. Are Knapp and Michaels confronting literary theory with a new "pragmatic" form of theory? Or are they (as some of their respondents suggest) arguing for a new form of nihilism? "If it is a nihilism," writes editor W. J. T. Mitchell, "it is one that demands an answer, not easy polemical dismissal, one that calls for theory to clarify its claims, not to mystify them and the easy assurance of intellectualfashion and institutional authority." It is the intention of "Against Theory" to aid in that clarification.

Can poem and picture collaborate successfully in a composite art of text and design? Or does one art inevitably dominate the other? W.J.T. Mitchell maintains that Blake's illuminated poems are an exception to Suzanne Langer's claim that "there are no happy marriages in art-only successful rape." Drawing on over one hundred reproductions of Blake's pictures, this book shows that neither the graphic nor the poetic aspect of his composite art consistently predominates: their relationship is more like an energetic rivalry, a dialogue between vigorously independent modes of expression. W.J.T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art and Design at the University of Chicago and editor of Critical Inquiry. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In "Occupy", W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors' lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide. "You break through the screen like Alice in Wonderland," Taussig writes in the opening essay, "and now you can't leave or do without it." Following Taussig's artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter - by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics - Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as a revolutionary monument. "Occupy" stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011's revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment - an occupation itself. Each Trios book addresses a pressing theme in critical theory, philosophy, or cultural studies through three extended essays written in close collaboration by leading scholars.

A place comes into existence through the depth of relationships that underwrite a physical location with layers of sedimented names. In Place Matters scholars and artists conduct varied forms of place-based inquiry to demonstrate why place matters. Lavishly illustrated, the volume brings into conversation photographic projects and essays that revitalize the study of landscape. Contributors engage the study of place through an approach that Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick call critical topography: the way that we understand critical thought to range over a place, or how thought and symbolic forms invent place through text and image as if initiated by an X marking the spot. Critical topography's tasks are to mediate and to diminish the gap between representation and referent, to be both in the world and about the world; to ask what place is this, what are its names, where am I, how and with what responsibilities may I be here? Chapters map the deep cultural, environmental, and political histories of singular places, interrogating the charged relation between history, place, and power and identifying the territorial imperatives of place making in such sites as Colonus, Mont Sainte-Victoire, Chomolungma/Everest, Hiroshima, Fort Qu'Appelle, Donetsk airport, and the island of Lesbos. With contributions from the renowned artists Hamish Fulton and Edward Burtynsky, the Swedish poet Jesper Svenbro, and others, the collection examines profound shifts in place-based thinking as it relates to the history of art, the anthropocene and nuclear ruin, borders and global migration, residential schools, the pandemic, and sites of refuge. In his prologue W.J.T. Mitchell writes: "Places, like feasts, are moveable. They can be erased and forgotten, lost in space, or maintained and rebuilt. Both their appearance and disappearance, their making and unmaking, are the work of critical topography." Global in scope, Canadian in spirit, and grounded in singular sites, Place Matters presents critical topography as an approach to analyze, interpret, and reflect on place.

Can poem and picture collaborate successfully in a composite art of text and design? Or does one art inevitably dominate the other? W.J.T. Mitchell maintains that Blake's illuminated poems are an exception to Suzanne Langer's claim that "there are no happy marriages in art-only successful rape." Drawing on over one hundred reproductions of Blake's pictures, this book shows that neither the graphic nor the poetic aspect of his composite art consistently predominates: their relationship is more like an energetic rivalry, a dialogue between vigorously independent modes of expression. W.J.T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art and Design at the University of Chicago and editor of Critical Inquiry. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Almost thirty years ago, W. J. T. Mitchell's Iconology helped launch the interdisciplinary study of visual media, now a central feature of the humanities. Along with his subsequent Picture Theory and What Do Pictures Want?, Mitchell's now-classic work introduced such ideas as the pictorial turn, the image/picture distinction, the metapicture, and the biopicture. These key concepts imply an approach to images as true objects of investigation--�an "image science." Continuing with this influential line of thought, Image Science gathers Mitchell's most recent essays on media aesthetics, visual culture, and artistic symbolism. The chapters delve into such topics as the physics and biology of images, digital photography and realism, architecture and new media, and the occupation of space in contemporary popular uprisings. The book looks both backward at the emergence of iconology as a field and forward toward what might be possible if image science can indeed approach pictures the same way that empirical sciences approach natural phenomena. Essential for those involved with any aspect of visual media, Image Science is a brilliant call for a method of studying images that overcomes the "two-culture split" between the natural and human sciences.

"This is a startlingly original collection, challenging readers to think well beyond normative contours of the literary text toward a living art of the embodied sign. A significant contribution to literary, performance, and Deaf culture studies, "Signing the Body Poetic" will make us all see differently."--Della Pollock, editor of "Remembering: Oral History Performance"
""Signing the Body Poetic" is both a book and an event--a long-anticipated work that questions and recasts some of our most embedded definitions of poetry and other language arts. The work of several generations of signing poets has made a place for gesture that eliminates once and for all the hegemony of the spoken word as the single determinant of poetry and language performance. That is the accomplishment analyzed and celebrated in these pages and in the accompanying DVD that clearly shows the work at hand."--Jerome Rothenberg, coeditor of "Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry"
""Signing the Body Poetic" is the first major scholarly work to celebrate and theorize American Sign Language artistic expression, ranging from poetry to theater and film. A must for anyone interested in contemporary poetry, drama, or literary theory."--Lennard J. Davis, editor of "The Disability Studies Reader"
""Signing the Body Poetic" brings new and productive dimensions to the phrase 'body of literature.' This impressive collection details the aesthetics, the epistemological importance, and the cultural life of American Sign Language literature in clear, accessible prose. Close analyses of key texts in/as performances are enhanced by the accompanying DVD, itself aninvaluable resource. This collection will be useful for scholars and general readers interested in the complexities of literary production and reception."--Judith Hamera, author of "Opening Acts" and editor of "The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies"
"This collection is as unique as ASL, merging linguistics, nonverbal communication, and performance both in the content of the chapters and in its form (text and DVD). Unlocking the performative dimension of ASL, it merges disciplines, communicative forms, and channels while demonstrating that our ability to communicate is not limited by the organs we use to do so but only by our ability to perform."--Michael L. Hecht, coeditor of "Redefining Culture: Perspectives across the Disciplines"

The first edition of this book, published in 1994, reshaped the direction of landscape studies by considering landscape not simply as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as an instrument of cultural force, a central tool in the creation of national and social identities. This second edition adds not only a new preface, but five new essays--from Edward Said, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jonathan Bordo, Michael Taussig, and Robert Pogue Harrison-extending the scope of the book in remarkable ways.

This is a book about the things people say about images. It is not primarily concerned with specific pictures and the things people say about them, but rather with the way we talk about the idea of imagery, and all its related notions of picturing, imagining, perceiving, likening, and imitating. It is a book about images, therefore, that has no illustrations except for a few schematic diagrams, a book about vision written as if by a blind author for a blind reader. If it contains any insight into real, material pictures, it is the sort that might come to a blind listener, overhearing the conversation the sighted speakers talking about images. My hypothesis is that such a listener might see patterns in these conversations that would be invisible to the sighted participant.

Communications, philosophy, film and video, digital culture: media studies straddles an astounding array of fields and disciplines and produces a vocabulary that is in equal parts rigorous and intuitive. "Critical Terms for Media Studies" defines, and at times redefines, what this new and hybrid area aims to do, illuminating the key concepts behind its liveliest debates and most dynamic topics. Part of a larger conversation that engages culture, technology, and politics, this exciting collection of essays explores our most critical language for dealing with the qualities and modes of contemporary media. Edited by two outstanding scholars in the field, W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, and featuring a team of distinguished contributors - including N. Katherine Hayles, Johanna Drucker, and Bernard Stiegler - "Critical Terms for Media Studies" offers diverse opportunities for students to understand the language that underpins much of new media. The essays, commissioned expressly for this volume, not only emphasize the ways in which technology changes our understanding of mediation, but also help to articulate issues important to media practitioners, such as the obsolescence of the body and the changing role of memory. Mitchell and Hansen have organized these essays into three interrelated groups: 'Aesthetics' engages with terms that describe sensory experiences and judgments, 'Technology' offers entry into a broad array of technological concepts, and 'Society' invites inquiry into language that describes the systems that allow a medium to function. A compelling reference work for the twenty-first century and the media that form our experience within it, "Critical Terms for Media Studies" will engage and deepen anyone's knowledge of one of our most important new fields.

In this companion volume to "Iconology", the author extends his investigation to pictures - the concrete, representational objects in which images appear. Although we have many words about pictures, Mitchell notes that we do not yet have a satisfactory theory of them. What we have is a variety of disciplines - semiotics, philosophical inquiries into representation, new departures in art history, studies in mass media - that attempt to converge on the problem of pictorial representation and visual culture. Identifying the problems inherent in the attempt to master visual representation with verbal discourse, Mitchell proposes instead to "picture theory." He looks at the way pictures function in theories about culture, consciousness, and representation, and at theory itself as a form of picturing. What precisely, he asks, are pictures (and theories about pictures) doing now , in the late 20th 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? Focusing on Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing", Oliver Stone's "JFK", and television coverage of the Gulf War, he examines the capacity of visual images to awaken or stifle public debate, collective emotion, and political violence. An "applied iconology," this volume by one of America's leading theorists of visual representation offers an account of the interplay between the visible and the readable across the culture, from literature to visual art to the mass media.

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In "Occupy", W. J. T. Mitchel, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors' lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide. "You break through the screen like "Alice in Wonderland"," Taussig writes in the opening essay, "and now you can't leave or do without it." Following Taussig's artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter - by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics - Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as revolutionary monument. "Occupy" stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011's revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment - an occupation itself. Each Trios book addresses a pressing theme in critical theory, philosophy, or cultural studies through three extended essays written in close collaboration by leading scholars.

The phrase 'War on Terror' has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T. Mitchell argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it. Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of clones and cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, he argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell's startling analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with 'faith-based' foreign and domestic policies. Bringing together the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib with the cloned stormtroopers of the "Star Wars" saga, Mitchell draws attention to the figures of faceless anonymity that stalk the ever-shifting and unlocatable 'fronts' of the War on Terror. A striking new investigation of the role of images from our foremost scholar of iconology, "Cloning Terror" will expand our understanding of the visual legacy of a new kind of war and reframe our understanding of contemporary biopower and biopolitics.

"A remarkably rich and provocative set of essays on the virtually infinite kinds of meanings generated by images in both the verbal and visual arts. Ranging from Michelangelo to Velazquez and Delacroix, from the art of the emblem book to the history of photography and film, "The Language of Images" offers at once new ways of thinking about the inexhaustibly complex relation between verbal and iconic representation."--James A. W. Heffernan, Dartmouth College

Communications, philosophy, film and video, digital culture: media studies straddles an astounding array of fields and disciplines and produces a vocabulary that is in equal parts rigorous and intuitive. "Critical Terms for Media Studies" defines, and at times redefines, what this new and hybrid area aims to do, illuminating the key concepts behind its liveliest debates and most dynamic topics. Part of a larger conversation that engages culture, technology, and politics, this exciting collection of essays explores our most critical language for dealing with the qualities and modes of contemporary media. Edited by two outstanding scholars in the field, W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, and featuring a team of distinguished contributors - including N. Katherine Hayles, Johanna Drucker, and Bernard Stiegler - "Critical Terms for Media Studies" offers diverse opportunities for students to understand the language that underpins much of new media. The essays, commissioned expressly for this volume, not only emphasize the ways in which technology changes our understanding of mediation, but also help to articulate issues important to media practitioners, such as the obsolescence of the body and the changing role of memory. Mitchell and Hansen have organized these essays into three interrelated groups: 'Aesthetics' engages with terms that describe sensory experiences and judgments, 'Technology' offers entry into a broad array of technological concepts, and 'Society' invites inquiry into language that describes the systems that allow a medium to function. A compelling reference work for the twenty-first century and the media that form our experience within it, "Critical Terms for Media Studies" will engage and deepen anyone's knowledge of one of our most important new fields.

The title "The Late Derrida", with all puns and ambiguities cheerfully intended, points to the late work of Jacques Derrida, the vast outpouring of new writing by and about him in the period roughly from 1994 to 2004. In this period, Derrida published more than he had produced during his entire career up to that point. At the same time, this volume deconstructs the whole question of lateness and the usefulness of periodization. It calls into question the "fact" of Derrida's turn to politics, law, and ethics and highlights continuities throughout his oeuvre. The scholars included here write of Derrida's newest work and how it affects their earlier understandings of such classic texts as "Glas" and "Of Grammatology". Some have been closely associated with Derrida since the beginning - both in France and in the United States - but none can be called Derrideans. Based on a special issue of the journal "Critical Inquiry", this volume is a work of critique and a deep and continued engagement with the thought of one of the most significant philosophers of our time. It represents a recognition that Derrida's work has yet to be addressed - and perhaps can never be addressed - in its totality.