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Preface
- Wesleyan University Press
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PRE F ACE T HIS anthology collects the work of fifteen lecturers who contributed to a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute entitled "Theory and Interpretation in the Visual Arts," held at the University of Rochester during July and August I989. Lecturers , organizers, participants, and visitors met daily for six weeks to chart, discuss, and argue over the impact of contemporary theory on the discipline of art history. We came together from an assortment of academic departments (art history, studio arts, philosophy, history, film studies, classics, theater, anthropology, psychology, and literary studies) and from a variety of educational institutions, from technical schools to graduate programs. Especially important to the organizers of the institute was the mix of geographical areas and of international perspectives, for we were concerned about the potential isolation of American art history from European cultural studies. This was the second time such an institute was held, and the second time the editors collected the lectures given for the occasion. Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (edited by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey) was published in I99I by Polity Press in Britain and Harper Collins in the United States as a result of the first symposium, held at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in I987. All of the essays anthologized in that volume were "theoretical"; most concentrated on questions arising from debates in analytic philosophy and phenomenology. In this second anthology, we focus on the impact of recent post-structuralist thinking on traditional art historical analysis. Both institutes were designed to encourage discussion of theoretical perspectives in art history. The organizers of the two symposia felt that not many other forums existed for debating the issues that have enlivened so many other fields in the humanities and social sciences, from history, philosophy, and anthropology to literary studies. We simply wanted to see what would happen to the conception of the discipline as a discipline if theoretical issues were brought to the fore. ...