City of Second Sight

In Justin T. Clark's City of Second Sight, we find an exciting exploration of the symbiosis between human vision, the material visual, and the visionary in Boston in the three decades before the Civil War. More than an urban history, Clark's study interrogates how “ideas of seeing” shaped both visual culture and inhabitants’ and visitors’ experiences (p. 6, emphasis in original). As such, Clark explores Boston as a case study, as “the crucial space in which modernity and the modern subject appeared in the most literal sense” (ibid.). His greater purpose, though, is to consider the larger historical trajectory from Puritan logocentrism to the “democratic ocularcentrism” of today (p. 7). In this sense he engages visual culture theory that challenges historians’ traditional reliance on the textual: though we use such terms as glance, look, and observe to apply both to what we see and to what we read, how we understand seeing and how we understand reading require separate models of analysis

Aesthetics · Democracy · Epistemology · Linguistics · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Sight · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Subject (documents · Visual culture · Anthropology · Computer Science · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory