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humanities 363 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Paintings are puzzling, and books like this can sometimes mimic their strangeness by weaving from one topic, one insight, one aside, to another, with a rhymeless lack of reason that seems to fit the subject. The visual is various, so the argument might go, and therefore writing should be unfettered. I was amused and entertained at various places through the book on account of the turns Manguel allows himself to make. My reservations come from the same source. Manguel says at the outset that he has no theory of interpretation to offer; he names Michael Baxandall and E.H. Gombrich as people who have such theories. Yet his twelve chapters do have themes B >The Image as Reflection,= >The Image as Violence,= and so forth B and the book itself is about emotions; its subtitle is >A History of Love and Hate.= All essay writing is to some extent indebted to Montaigne, who made wandering a theme and a virtue. But isn=t Montaigne=s achievement different in kind, and not just in quality, from Manguel=s partly organized book, which ends B disingenuously and too easily B with the admission that what he has written is >made of haphazard notes and indecisions=? I want to distinguish this complaint from the usual academic criticism about popularization. Many things Manguel touches on briefly and lightly have been gone over much more rigorously in the academic literature (which is barely noticed in his bibliography). Even so, I do not think it is important that people familiar with the literature he glosses will not find much in his swift inventories of major issues, or in the kind of reasoning that leads so quickly from Andalucian Madonnas to the novelist Josef Škvorecký to Northrop Frye on Canadians. What matters is that any reader will have the impression that impressionism is an optimal method for catching what matters in visual art. At the end of one chapter, Manguel says that >if looking at pictures is equivalent to reading, then it is a vastly creative form of reading, a reading in which we must not only put words into sounds into sense but images into sense into stories.= Volumes of careful philosophy have been written around those notions, and yet pictures still resist being described. It seems in the face of such daunting complexity that there are two choices: either play, and let associations and insights jostle and create what they will; or sit down and think, and try to figure things out, even just a little. The fact that I prefer the latter does not just mean I am an academic: it also means I really care about pictures, and I think life is too short to assume that >haphazard= writing is the best strategy. (JAMES ELKINS) Robert J. Belton. Sights of Resistance: Approaches to Canadian Visual Culture University of Calgary Press. viii, 398. $59.95 Canadian art history presents an odd dilemma to those who teach or study it: the material encountered is often compelling, but the texts one might use 364 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 as a resource are lamentably dated in terms of method, media and chronological coverage, or all three. Wide reading or a coursepack can give access to some of the truly outstanding scholarship in the field, but then one=s illustrations are inadequate. This situation has been begging for attention for many years. The obvious solution would have been for someone, or a collective, to write a new introductory book in the field. To his great credit, Robert Belton avoided the quick fix and created a bold, innovative anti-text. Sights of Resistance is designed to be an open-ended, suggestive, and stimulating introduction to the visual culture of this country. Instead of presenting the last word on artists and monuments in the Canadian canon, the book questions categories and gives its readers the tools to make their own critical decisions. The four main sections of the book reflect Belton=s astute sense of how to approach his material. He begins with an articulate discussion...

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