‘To fasten words again to visible things’: the American imagetext
 

Keynote speakers:

Professor WJT Mitchell (University of Chicago): 
'Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media and Visual Culture'

Professor Miles Orvell (Temple University): 
‘The Talking Picture:  Speech, Silence, and Ventriloquism in the Discourse of Photography’

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that ‘America is a poem in our eyes’, he was partly expressing the transcendental belief that words and images share a unique and ‘radical correspondence’ that might enable the poet ‘to fasten words again to visible things.’  Walt Whitman answered Emerson’s call for such a poet, cementing the special relationship that still exists in America between the written word and visual image.

The burgeoning discipline of visual studies is perfectly placed to take the exploration of this relationship in new directions.  However, there is at present a tendency in such studies to neglect the roots of language in pictures, and to overlook the importance of visual/textual relations to the expression of American character, culture and identity.  Whilst the growth of visual studies is an exciting development, ‘visual literacy’ remains a nebulous and confusing term, and as a field of academic study, tends not to generate readings outside a tried and trusted sociological and ideological framework.  There is a pressing need for scholarship in image – text relations to be made more various, more theoretically adventurous and more culturally and historically penetrating, and for scholarship to place the study of contiguous images and texts in a much deeper cultural history of visual/verbal responses to film and theatre, to landscape and the built environment, to the visual and plastic arts, to contemporary considerations of mixed media texts, illustrated texts, illuminated manuscripts, and more.

This conference considers the product and practice of the interrelations of image and word across disciplines, and in a specifically American context, encouraging theoretical approaches that include any aspect of science, historiography, theology, iconology, art history, multicultural and transnational study, film and media studies, poetry scholarship, cognitive psychology.

Programme:
Download conference programme here

Enquiries:
Please send any enquiries to Dr Catherine Gander and Dr Sarah Garland at americanimagetext@gmail.com.