W. J. T. Mitchell

W. J. T. Mitchell (1942) is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. Under his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago's prestigious Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

Publications

Books

• Blake's Composite Art, Princeton University Press, 1977.
• The Language of Images, University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• On Narrative, University of Chicago Press, 1981.
• editor, The Politics of Interpretation, University of Chicago Press, 1983.
• editor, Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, University of Chicago Press, 1985.
• Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• editor, Landscape and Power, University of Chicago Press, 1994; 2nd ed., 2001.
• editor, Art and the Public Sphere, University of Chicago Press, 1994.
• Picture Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1994.
• The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of Images, University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• with Homi Bhabha, Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• with Arnold Davidson, The Late Derrida, University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Selected papers and articles

• "Critical Inquiry and the Ideology of Pluralism", Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982), pp 609-618.
• "What is an Image?", New Literary History 15:3 (Spring 1984), pp 503-537.
• "The Violence of Public Art: 'Do the Right Thing'", Critical Inquiry 16:4 (Summer 1990), pp 880-899.
• "An Interview with Barbara Kruger", Critical Inquiry 17:2 (Winter 1991), pp 434-448.
• "The Pictorial Turn", Artforum, (March 1992).
• "Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture", Art Bulletin 77:4 (December 1995), pp 540-544.
• "What Do Pictures Really Want?", October 77 (Summer 1996), pp 71-82.
• "911: Criticism and Crisis", Critical Inquiry 28:2 (Winter 2001); repr. in Situation Analysis 1 (October 2002).
• "Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture", in Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies, eds. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press, 2002, pp 231-250, repr. in Journal of Visual Culture 1:2 (2002), pp 165-181.
  • "Mostrando el ver: una crítica de la cultura visual", Estudios visuales 1 (November 2003), pp 17-40. (Spanish)
• "Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium", Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004), pp 324-335.
• "There Are No Visual Media", Journal of Visual Culture 4:2 (2005), pp 257-266; repr. in MediaArtHistories, ed. Oliver Grau, MIT Press, 2007, pp 395-408.
• "Dead Again", Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007), pp 219-228.
• "World Pictures: Globalization and Visual Culture", Neohelicon 34:2 (2007), pp 49-59.
• "Addressing Media", MediaTropes 1 (2008), pp 1-18.
• More

Links

• Home Page
• Mitchell at Wikipedia