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Visual Literacy PDF

226 Pages·2007·4.76 MB·English
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V L ISUAL ITERACY V L ISUAL ITERACY EDITED BY James Elkins New York London This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Routledge Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue 2 Park Square New York, NY 10016 Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN © 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-95811-0 (Softcover) 978-0-415-95810-3 (Hardcover) Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this book may be reprin ted, reproduced, trans- mitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visual literacy / edited by Jim Elkins. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-415-95810-3 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-415-95811-0 (pbk.) 1. Visual literacy. 2. Visual communication. 3. Visual perception. I. Elkins, James, 1955- LB1068.V567 2007 370.15’5--dc22 2007017432 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge.com ISBN 0-203-93957-3 Master e-book ISBN Contents Preface vii Introduction: Th e Concept of Visual Literacy, and Its Limitations 1 JAMES ELKINS 1 Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy? 11 W. J. T. MITCHELL Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science 14 W. J. T. MITCHELL 2 Th e Remaining 10 Percent: Th e Role of Sensory Knowledge in the Age of the Self-Organizing Brain 31 BARBARA MARIA STAFFORD 3 Nineteenth-Century Visual Incapacities 59 JONATHAN CRARY 4 From Visual Literacy to Image Competence 77 JON SIMONS 5 Th e Visual Complex: Mapping Some Interdisciplinary Dimensions of Visual Literacy 91 PETER DALLOW 6 Visual Literacy in North American Secondary Schools: Arts-Centered Learning, the Classroom, and Visual Literacy 105 SUSAN SHIFRIN v vi • Contents 7 Philosophical Bases for Visual Multiculturalism at the College Level 129 WILLIAM WASHABAUGH 8 Bridging the Gap between Clinical and Patient-Provided Images 145 HENRIK ENQUIST 9 Th e Image as Cultural Technology 165 MATTHIAS BRUHN AND VERA DÜNKEL 10 Visual Literacy in Action: “Law in the Age of Images” 179 RICHARD K. SHERWIN Aft erword 195 CHRISTOPHER CROUCH Photo Credits 205 Index 209 Preface A tremendous force of rhetoric has been brought to bear on the notion that ours is a predominantly visual culture. Th eories concerning the visual nature of experience have been proposed in art history, cognitive psychology, psychoanalytic criticism, anthropology, artifi cial intelligence, women’s studies, neurobiology, neuropsychology, linguistics, and various branches of philosophy. At the same time, there is little discussion about how visual practices might inform a university education. First-year classes in universities throughout the world remain text-based, with images as an option oft en declined. Th e central purpose of this book is to ask about the possibility of turning the tenor of university education, at least in part, from text-based knowl- edge to visuality. Th e central premise is that theorizing on images, which currently takes place mainly in graduate studies in the humanities and in cognitive science, needs to move downward, toward fi rst-year education, where it can begin to directly intervene in the ordinary education of every college student. Th is book began as a conference and exhibition held at University College Cork in Ireland, in April 2005. Originally this was intended as a massive volume: it was to include another part of the conference on visual- ity in diff erent nations, and a text-intensive exhibition of image making in thirty departments around the university. In the event, those two will be published separately. Th e material on visuality in Western and non-West- ern countries will appear as Visual Cultures, and the exhibition of visual practices outside the arts will be a book called Visual Practices across the vii viii • Preface University.1 Together they comprise a single pedagogic and philosophic project, to try to get a provisional idea of the sum total of theories, prac- tices, “competencies,” and literacies of the visual. I owe a great deal of thanks to the people at University College Cork, who helped with all aspects of the conference and exhibition, and above all to Gerard Wrixon and Áine Hyland—then the president and a vice president of the university—who supported every initiative I thought of, no matter how ill-formed. And I owe special thanks to the ordinary (non- plenary) speakers at the conference, each of whom agreed to write multiple draft s of his or her paper, in advance of the conference, to ensure they formed a coherent group. (Some speakers revised their papers as many as fi ve times before the conference; many of them also wrote revisions aft er- ward.) With a fi eld as dishevelled as visual studies, it is important to search for moments of coincidence and agreement. J. E., April 2007 Endnote 1. Th e former is unpublished; the latter will appear as James Elkins, ed., Visual Practices across the University (Paderhorn, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007). Th e reasons for publishing with Wilhelm Fink, and for dividing the project, are explored in that book. Introduction The Concept of Visual Literacy, and Its Limitations JAMES ELKINS I chose the expression visual literacy, initially in the book Visual Stud- ies: A Skeptical Introduction, because its two words compress the common and unavoidable contradiction involved in saying that we “read” images. Visual literacy does not avoid that contradiction, or try to improve on it, but starts with the most succinct form of the contradiction itself. Tropes of reading are unavoidable in talk about images, as W. J. T. Mitchell argues in this volume, and visual literacy has the virtue of not trying to solve that structural problem. Th at is the fi rst reason for the title of this book. A sec- ond reason has to do with pedagogy. A search of newspaper and magazine databases revealed that visual literacy has been in uncommon but inter- mittent use for over a hundred and fi ft y years; it has been used to denote low-level, secondary school appreciation, of the sort that enables a student to identify Michelangelo’s David. I like that somewhat dusty feel, because it is a reminder that these issues of visuality impinge on undergraduate curricula. Visual literacy, or literacies—the plural will be at issue through- out—are as important for college-level education as (ordinary) literacy, and far less oft en discussed. A third and last reason for choosing visual literacy is that it is convenient in the absence of anything better. It might be possible to speak of visual competence, or visual competencies, but that sounds awkward, utilitarian, and prescriptive. Visual practices is common but vague. Visual languages is so freighted with inappropriate precedents, from Umberto Eco to Nelson 1

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What does it mean to be visually literate? Does it mean different things in the arts and the sciences? In the West, in Asia, or in developing nations? If we all need to become "visually literate," what does that mean in practical terms? The essays gathered here examine a host of issues surrounding "
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