Author Archives: Noa Yaari

Writes: “[…] for science, poetry, and love are alike in being “flights” above and away from the slave-world of literal reference and humdrum prosaic details, attempts to widen the petty narrowness of the personal self’s outlook, liftings toward Arūpa, toward that world of infinite harmony, sympathy and order, of unchanging truths and eternal things. CareContinue reading “Benjamin Lee Whorf”

In her Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, Mieke Bal refers to Roland Barthes’s remark that “the very end of myth is to immobilize the world,” and to Philip Rahv’s observation that the persistence of romanticism and conservatism, manifested in myth – and its criticism – result from the fear of history, change, choice andContinue reading “Wordimage in (is) Mythology”

In his essay “Shifters and Verbal Categories,” Roman Jakobson describes the complexity of “indexical symbols” – linguistic signs that, as symbols, represent their objects by convention and, as indices do, have existential relations with their objects, at the same time (following Peirce’s classification). Jakobson writes: “If we observe that even linguistic scientists had difficulties inContinue reading “Visual Quoting II”

Rarely do we see images without accompanying words, written or spoken. Images in books, newspapers, magazines, ads, television and the internet are often mediated by verbal language, that influences the way we see the images and think about them. In museums and galleries as well, the convention is to say something about the visual materialContinue reading “Word and Image”