May
2 , 2003 M.
J. T. Mitchell Lecture to Survey the History of Media Theory May
8
| 
M.
J. T. Mitchell's lecture, titled "Addressing
Media," will be the final talk in this year's
visual studies lecture series. |
Alfred
Hitchcock is famous for appearing in many of his own films. At
these cameo moments, the director seems to remind film goers,
"You are watching a fictional construct, and there is someone
(namely me) behind it." Not all image-makers build such
transparency into their films, advertisements, TV shows, landscapes,
buildings, and other media, but that doesn't mean we should
blindly consume their visual representations, according to M.
J. T. Mitchell, Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor
of English and Art History at the University of Chicago.
The final lecturer
of Mount Holyoke's yearlong series The Culture and Nature
of the Visual, Mitchell will discuss visual culture as a
construction that we must not only see, but see through. His lecture,
titled "Addressing Media," is scheduled for Thursday,
May 8, at 4:30 pm in Room 305 of Kendade Hall. A reception will
follow. The lecture and a related faculty seminar on Spike Lee's
Bamboozled are cosponsored by the Office of the Dean
of Faculty and the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for
Leadership.
"We live in a culture where modern media surround us with
visible signs, an era of what I have called 'the pictorial
turn,'" says Mitchell. Those signs, and vision itself,
are cultural constructions like languages, Mitchell finds, and
he introduced the first course in visual culture at the University
of Chicago, hoping to teach students of all disciplines to understand
these signs.
"I want students to have the very broad understanding that
visual culture has a history," says Mitchell, "that
the way people look at the world and the way they represent it
changes over time, and that this can actually be documented. These
changes are related not only to changes in technology, but also
to social transformations and changes in social structures."
In his talk, Mitchell will survey the history of media theory,
from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media to
Friedrich Kittler's Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter.
"I'm especially interested in the reflexive moment
in media," says Mitchell, referring to film moments (such
as Alfred Hitchcock's) in which the invisible media-maker
reveals himself and the subjectivity of his representation of
the world. Mitchell will frame his talk by showing clips from
Woody Allen's Annie Hall and David Cronenberg's
Videodrome, both of which feature appearances by theorist
McLuhan, who wrote several influential books on the effects of
mass media on twentieth-century culture.
"Imagine an archeological dig that exposes objects from
our culture," says Associate Professor of Art and series
coorganizer Anthony Lee. "Now imagine an archeologist scratching
his head and trying to figure out what cultural meanings he can
fashion from these objects. Tom Mitchell offers these kinds of
meanings from our own culture. From dinosaurs to films, he is
among the most intelligent voices in the field of visual culture,
showing common methods for thinking about what have been considered
completely disparate visual materials."
Mitchell is the longtime editor of Critical Inquiry, an interdisciplinary
quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences.
Under his editorship, the publication has won numerous awards
for special issues on such topics as intimacy, questions of evidence,
canons, writing and sexual difference, and identities. His scholarly
work spans new and old media as well as ancient and modern forms
of visual culture, focusing on the relation of verbal and visual
representation, the circulation and effect of images, and the
political-ethical significance of cultural forms. His books include
Blake's Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry
(1978), Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986), Picture
Theory (1994), and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and
Times of a Cultural Icon (1998).
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