Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures

Faced with an increasingly media-saturated, globalized culture, art historians have begun to ask themselves challenging and provocative questions about the nature of their discipline. Why did the history of art come into being? Is it now in danger of slipping into obsolescence? And, if so, should we care?
In Writing Art History, Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville address these questions by exploring some assumptions at the discipline’s foundation. Their project is to excavate the lost continuities between philosophical aesthetics, contemporary theory, and art history through close readings of figures as various as Michael Baxandall, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, and Alois Riegl. Ultimately, the authors propose that we might reframe the questions concerning art history by asking what kind of writing might help the discipline to better imagine its actual practices—and its potential futures.

Arts & Photography

Iversen, Margaret

Melville, Stephen

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Faced with an increasingly media-saturated, globalized culture, art historians have begun to ask themselves challenging and provocative questions about the nature of their discipline. Why did the history of art come into being? Is it now in danger of slipping into obsolescence? And, if so, should we care? In Writing Art History, Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville address these questions by exploring some assumptions at the discipline’s foundation. Their project is to excavate the lost continuities between philosophical aesthetics, contemporary theory, and art history through close readings of figures as various as Michael Baxandall, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, and Alois Riegl. Ultimately, the authors propose that we might reframe the questions concerning art history by asking what kind of writing might help the discipline to better imagine its actual practices—and its potential futures.

Philosophy Beside Itself  was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.The writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida have been the single most powerful influence on critical theory and practice in the United States over the past decade. But with few exceptions American philosophers have taken little or no interest in Derrida's work, and the task of reception, translation, and commentary has been left to literary critics. As a result, Derrida has appeared as a figure already defined by essentially literary critical activities and interests.Stephen Melville's aim in Philosophy Beside Itself  is to insist upon and clarify the distinctions between philosophy and criticism. He argues that until we grasp Derrida's philosophical project as such, we remain fundamentally unable to see his significance for criticism. In terms derived from Stanley Cavell's writings on modernism, Melville develops a case for Derrida as a modernist philosopher, working at once within and against that tradition and discipline.Melville first places Derrida in a Hegelian context, the structure of which he explores by examining the work of Heidegger, Lacan, and Bataille. With this foundation, he is able to reappraise the project of deconstructive criticism as developed in Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight and further articulated by other Yale critics. Central to this critique is the ambivalent relationship between deconstructive criticism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Criticism—radical self-criticism—is a central means through which the difficult facts of human community come to recognition, and Melville argues for criticism as an activity intimately bound to the ways in which we do and do not belong in time and in community. Derrida's achievement has been to find a new and necessary way to assert that the task of philosophy is criticism; the task of literary criticism is to assume the burden of that achievement.Stephen Melville is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University, and Donald Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa.

Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (Theory & History of Literature)

Literature & Fiction

Univ of Minnesota Pr

Best known for his radical land art of the 1960s and early 1970s, Robert Smithson (1938-1973) is now widely recognised as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Presenting new research on the figure of the 'time-crystal' in Smithson's practice, this book features essays by Amelia Barikin and Chris McAuliffe, and Stephen Melville, alongside manuscripts by Smithson drawn from the Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, which are reproduced in their complete form for the very first time. Robert Smithson: Time Crystals is published on the occasion of the first exhibition of Smithson's work to be held in Australia, which has been developed in cooperation with the Holt-Smithson Foundation. The exhibition has been made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Robert Smithson: Time Crystals (Monash University Museum of Modern Art (MUMA))

McAuliffe, Chris

Barikin, Amelia

Monash University Publishing

Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context (Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture)

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &amp; Francis, an informa company.

Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy

Routledge

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Books by Melville, Stephen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Melville, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures

Writing Art History: Disciplinary Departures

Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (Theory & History of Literature)

Robert Smithson: Time Crystals (Monash University Museum of Modern Art (MUMA))

Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context (Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture)

Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context (Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture)