1. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 21–82. Jay’s first chapter is entitled “The Noblest of the Senses: Vision from Plato to Descartes.”
2. Stuart Clark provides an extensive overview of the early modern European debates over vision in Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). As an intellectual historian, Clark is interested in how changes in attitudes toward the value of vision shaped early modern intellectual and cultural life. My concern in the present study is to examine how these changes foreground the value of literature in negotiating philosophical and theological shifts having significant implications for social, political, and religious life.
3. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), passim.
4. See Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1:23. He associates the domination of the visual arts by literary concerns with the entire Western tradition.
5. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and the Repression of Language,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 348–71, esp. 366.