Abstract

The author takes empiricism to be "accused of privileging the visual over the discursive, the literal over the rhetorical, the static over the temporal, and totalizing explanations over dialectical processes." It is, he says, his "goal to unsettle these binary oppositions and to argue that at the heart of empiricism lies a sophisticated, dynamic, and dialectical account of the relationship between language and visual perceptions that [is] fruitful for literary study".