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Dinosaur Author
W.J. T. (Tom) Mitchell |
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Dino Stats (tm) Name: W.J.T. Mitchell Age: Length:5 Weight: Favorite Food: Sushi (this week) Family: Wife, 2 Children Genus: ? Species: Professor of Art History, Magazine Editor (Critical Inquiry) Place of Origin: California, USA Habitat: Chicago,Illinois USA Favorite Movie: The Godfather, Part I Favorite TV Show: NBA Basketball Favorite Dinosaur: ? Favorite Sport: ? Exercise: Roller Blading Hobbies: Sand Castle Building Distinguishing Features: ?
Tom Mitchell was the
Vera Velociraptor's Very Vast, Verbose, Voracious Vocabulary Migrated - picked up all your bags and boxes and moved to a new place. Icons - those little things that are scattered all over the desktop of your computer monitor. Lttle pictures, students, that remind you of something else! Iconologist - someone who wastes all his spare time looking at icons instead of looking at my vocabulary lists. Do not confuse this word with iconoclast. An iconoclastic iconologist is almost beyond understanding. Cultural icons - Pictures (or sometimes words or people) that tell us a lot about the way our society works. I, Vera Velociraptor, for example, am an icon of fine breeding and proper speech! If you think of me, you think of how things ought to be! Oh, students? Don't worry. I hardly know what the rest of those words mean without a handy dictionary. You keep a dictionary by your computer when you are surfing, don't you students? Vera does! And Vera is an icon of correctness! I never migrate anywhere without my dictionary. Students? Pay Attention! Be sure to check out, that is to say, investigate, (humph), certain other useful pieces of terminology at the 7V-WOW Archives. |
![W.J.T. Mitchell and Friend. Photo (c) Joel Snyder [23KB]](http://dinosaur.webjump.com/image/bzmitchell.gif)
W. J. T. (Tom) Mitchell is a professor of art history and English literature at the University of Chicago. Born in California, he grew up in Carson City, Nevada, then migrated eastward to Saginaw, Michigan for high school, Michigan State for college, and Johns Hopkins for graduate school. He taught at Ohio State University from 1968 to 1977, and has been at the University of Chicago since 1977. He has written or edited many books on art and literature (Blake's Composite Art; The Language of Images; Art and the Public Sphere; Iconology; Picture Theory, and Landscape and Power), and he has edited the magazine Critical Inquiry for the last 21 years. His books and editions have won a number of prizes, including the College Art Association's award for an outstanding book in art history. Mitchell's main interest is in images, or what are sometimes called "cultural icons." He is not a paleontologist, but an iconologist, a historian, critic, and theorist of images. He approaches the study of dinosaurs, then, for their interest as personal and social symbols, objects of fantasy. Despite what you may have heard, he does not dislike dinosaurs (though he admits that he wasn't into them as a child). His main attitude toward the dinosaur is curiosity about their cultural signicance, and his most recent book, The Last Dinosaur Book, is an attempt to solve the riddle of human fascination with dinosaurs. Despite the tongue-in-cheek title, his aim is not to debunk dinos, but to understand them in a new way. There is, suprisingly, no previous study of the meaning of the dinosaur across the boundaries of film and popular culture, fine art, literature, and scientific illustration. Far from being the "last" book on this subject, The Last Dinosaur Book aims to open up a new field of research on cultural icons. There is much more to learn about the dinosaur in this framework, and about other important images as well. Mitchell's book tries to place dinosaurs mainly in the context of American culture (though it recognizes the international significance of this phenomenon). He connects the dinosaur as cultural icon to Thomas Jefferson's interest in natural history, big bones, and mastodons; to the rise of the Robber Barons and big corporations in America after the Civil War; to fantasies about encounters with monsters and "vanishing races" on the frontiers of the expanding American empire; to the cycles of "innovation and obselescence" that make all of us dinosaurs sooner or later; to anxieties about mass destruction and the survival of the human species in the face of new technologies. His book also looks at children's fascination with dinosaurs and offers a theory of the dinosaur as a "transitional object" that kicks in at a certain stage in the maturation process, coming after the teddy bear which serves the same function for infants and toddlers. Mitchell's interests are not confined to dinosaurs. He gives courses on Visual Culture (the study of images, media, and spectatorship); on landscape aesthetics and the sense of place and territory; on violence and representation. He has lectured recently on such topics as American photography in the fifties, the relation between American wilderness and the "Holy Landscape" of Israel/Palestine, and on "hypervalued" images such as totems, fetishes, and idols. He has travelled widely, giving lectures and seminars in Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, China, Australia, and Africa. He is married to a musician (Chicago composer and performer Janice Misurell-Mitchell),
and has two grown children: his daughter, Carmen, is a writer, teacher,
and actor in Seattle; his son, Gabriel is living in Chicago and writing
screen-plays. His hobbies (passions, really) include roller-blading and
sand-castle building..
June, 1999
Related Resources:
Books by W.J.T. Mitchell
(sometimes
with others)
Against
Theory : Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism
Art
and the Public Sphere
Blake's Composite Art (out of print) Iconology
: Image, Text, Ideology
Landscape
and Power
Landscape
and Power
The
Language of Images (A Phoenix Book)
The
Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon On
Narrative
Picture
Theory : Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation
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