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434 books match the query 'Criticism & Theory' and 5 start with v

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Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing

Bryan Jay Wolf

University of Chicago Press, 2001

This book begins with a single premise: that Vermeer painted images not only of extraordinary beauty, but of extraordinary strangeness. To understand that strangeness, Bryan Jay Wolf turns to the history of early modernism and to ways of seeing that first developed in the seventeenth century. In a series of provocative readings, Wolf presents Vermeer in bracing new ways, arguing for the painter's immersion in—rather than withdrawal from—the intellectual concerns of his day.

The result is a Vermeer we have not seen before: a painter whose serene spaces and calm subjects incorporate within themselves, however obliquely, the world's troubles. Vermeer abandons what his predecessors had labored so carefully to achieve: legible spaces, a world of moral clarity defined by the pressure of a hand against a table, or the scatter of light across a bare wall. Instead Vermeer complicated Dutch domestic art and invented what has puzzled and captivated his admirers ever since: the odd daubs of white pigment, scattered across the plane of the canvas; patches of blurred surface, contradicting the painting's illusionism without explanation; and the querulous silence that endows his women with secrets they dare not reveal.

This beautifully illustrated book situates Vermeer in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries, and it demonstrates how powerfully he wrestled with questions of gender, class, and representation. By rethinking Vermeer's achievement in relation to the early modern world that gave him birth, Wolf takes northern Renaissance and early modern studies in new directions.

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Virgin Microbe

Essays on Dada

Michael White

Northwestern University Press, 2013

The essays in Virgin Microbe foreground thematic issues and advance recent theoretical agendas, such as the study of identity construction and the relationship between the avant-garde and mass culture, rather than focusing on biographies of individual Dadaists or centers of Dada activity. The authors represent a wider spectrum of disciplines and a broader international perspective than other recent collections on Dada. Ambitious in terms of contemporary academic interests, Virgin Microbe draws on a rich spectrum of intellectual traditions and contexts, prioritizing Dada’s metaphysical enquiries and its complicated connection to modernity.

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Visual Imaginations and Modern Jewish History

Richard I. Cohen

Brandeis University Press, 2026

Establishes the centrality of visual culture within Judaism and Jewish history.

Visual Imaginations and Modern Jewish History traces how visual experience reflected and shaped Jewish life from the late seventeenth century onward. Richard I. Cohen shows how images, spaces, and objects were central to the making of modern Jewish identities and how the act of seeing itself became a site of cultural negotiation. Cohen claims that the prominence of visual art in modern Jewish life cannot be overlooked. Visual expression has become such a significant factor in Jewish life that it serves as both a mirror and an agent of Jewish modernity.

Cohen engages with a range of artists, figures like Moses Mendelssohn, Uriel Da Costa, and Baruch Spinoza, and such topics as the visual imaginings of the Mishnah, Jews in the military, and the motif of the Wandering Jew. Taken as a whole, the studies in this book argue that approaching modern Jewish history through images is not to replace the written word, but to restore to it the world of sight that Jews inhabited, created, and transformed.

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Visual Time

The Image in History

Keith Moxey

Duke University Press, 2013

Visual Time offers a rare consideration of the idea of time in art history. Non-Western art histories currently have an unprecedented prominence in the discipline. To what extent are their artistic narratives commensurate with those told about Western art? Does time run at the same speed in all places? Keith Moxey argues that the discipline of art history has been too attached to interpreting works of art based on a teleological categorization—demonstrating how each work influences the next as part of a linear sequence—which he sees as tied to Western notions of modernity. In contrast, he emphasizes how the experience of viewing art creates its own aesthetic time, where the viewer is entranced by the work itself rather than what it represents about the historical moment when it was created. Moxey discusses the art, and writing about the art, of modern and contemporary artists, such as Gerard Sekoto, Thomas Demand, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Cindy Sherman, as well as the sixteenth-century figures Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and Hans Holbein. In the process, he addresses the phenomenological turn in the study of the image, its application to the understanding of particular artists, the ways verisimilitude eludes time in both the past and the present, and the role of time in nationalist accounts of the past.

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Voiceworks

Sarah Hayden

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

An acute theorization of the human voice in contemporary art

Voiceworks is a perceptive exploration of contemporary artworks in which the primary medium of activation is the human voice. Engaging in close readings of video and installations primarily from the 2010s and 2020s, Sarah Hayden reveals how voiceworks intervene politically through their handling of writing and voicing.

Surveying works from eighteen established and emerging artists including Hito Steyerl, John Akomfrah, Alban Muja, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, and Cally Spooner, Voiceworks attends to the sensuous potentiality of voiced language in composition and physical space. The book elucidates how these works operate relationally, conscripting embodied involvement in the service of collective critical and resistant aims.

Augmented by Hayden’s experience as a curator of exhibitions and public programs around audiovisual work, Voiceworks skillfully traverses scholarship in critical theory, sound studies, film and video theory, poetics, and feminist criticism to analyze this prominent but underexplored strand of contemporary art practice.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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