ABSTRACT
ANDREW MCNAMARA: Your intellectual background is associated more with literary theory or cultural theory rather than art history or the visual arts. What has led to your interest in the visual?
W.J.T. MITCHELL: Actually, I’ve been interested in the visual arts since the beginning of my scholarly career. My dissertation (Blake’s Composite Art, 1968) was on the illuminated books of William Blake, and dealt with relationships between poetry and painting, the printed word and the imprinted or engraved image. I wrote the thesis for a literature degree, but I was supervised and examined by art historians like John White (at Johns Hopkins) as well as “hybrid” word/ image scholars like Ronald Paulson. I’ve always located my work in this interstitial space between the arts and media. But it’s true that, to art historians, I’m often associated with literary and cultural theory, while my literary colleagues sometimes accuse me of deserting literature for the visual arts. Part of my pleasure in this double identity is no doubt a perverse delight in going against the grain; part of it may be “hardwired”: I am ambidextrous, and thus tend to have a lot of right/ left brain “crosstalk” or interference. I respond to verbal metaphors and descriptions with vivid visual and tactile images, and enjoy the magical process of verbalizing about pictures and works of art, especially the ones that seem most reluctant to “say” anything very explicit. I suspect also that my early boyhood experiences with Catholic illuminated missals, especially one that had a tiny ivory relief sculpture of the Virgin Mary encased inside the front cover, permanently imprinted me with a sense that texts and images are indissolubly connected, yet radically different.
