Cultivating Picturacy

During the past 25 years, James Heffernan's nuanced and clear-eyed writings on words and images have firmly placed him among the finest practitioners of interartstic theory and criticism. This new volume reveals him at his very best. Picturacy should be required reading for anyone wishing to learn how—and how not—to read pictures.

~Richard Wendorf, Stanford Calderwood Director and Librarian, The Boston Athenaeum

Wide-ranging, steadily insightful, and richly illustrated, Cultivating Picturacy offers both a method and a model for reading the visual image. Cultivating Picturacy will stand alongside the works of Norman Bryson, Nelson Goodman, and W. J. T. Mitchell as a fundamental contribution to the field of inter-art scholarship.

~Ernest B. Gilman, New York University

James Heffernan's Cultivating Picturacy is a treasure for scholars and students interested in the history, theory, and practice of text-image relations. The volume, beautifully produced and illustrated by Baylor University Press, contains a breadth of reference, richness of analysis, and limpid prose that are truly marvelous. It consists of fourteen essays (including the introduction), almost all published in the period 1988-2000, which, taken together, crown a distinguished career in what used to be rather quaintly called 'sister arts' criticism, but which is now, in the age of metastasizing visual-verbal media, among the most urgent topics of cultural history and aesthetics.

~Gillen D'Arcy Wood, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net

For two decades, James Heffernan has covered the intermedial field precisely by letting his favored topics flow smoothly into associated questions generated from them, one issue dovetailing transparently into another due to the engrossing, subtle clarity of the critic’s prose. Having wondered at the start about 'why we have no word to denote the visual counterpart of literacy, no word that designates the capacity to interpret pictures' (1)—the ability or 'capacity,' that is, but also the grain of attention involved—literary scholar Heffernan not only gives us such a term but offers an extended case in point for its flexible understanding, telling application, and real aesthetic yield. Entitled by neologism, the book brings news in every chapter.

~Garrett Stewart, European Romantic Review