Looking at Words: The Iconicity of the Page

S. Brent Plate

Abstract:

Regardless of their semantic meaning, words exist in and through their material, mediated forms. By extension, sacred texts themselves are material forms and engaged in two primary ways: through the ears and eyes. This presentation focuses on the visible forms of words that can stir emotional and even sacred responses in the eyes of their beholders. Thus words can be said to function iconically, affecting a mutually engaging form of "religious seeing." The way words appear to their readers will change the reader's interaction, devotion, and interpretation. Examples range from modern popular typography to European Christian print culture to Islamic calligraphy. Weaving through the argument are two key dialectics: the relation of words and images, and the relation of the seen and the unseen.

S. Brent Plate is visiting associate professor in Religious Studies at Hamilton College. His teaching and research focus on how ways of seeing affect ways of being religious. What humans look at, the type of images created, and how humans learn to see images, are all shaped by cultural, biological, and religious environments. Book-length publications include Religion and Film (Wallflower Press, 2008), The Religion and Film Reader (Routledge, 2007), Blasphemy: Art that Offends (Black Dog Publishing, 2006), Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics (Routledge, 2005), Representing Religion in World Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and Religion, Art, and Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Plate is Co-Founder and Managing Editor of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief, and Co-Founder and President of the Society for Comparative Research in Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT). He is currently writing A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects.

Website:
http://script-site.net/