James Elkins

James Elkins

After 19 years of work, my experimental novel called Five Strange Languages is being published by Unnamed Press. It’s a very large, complex project in five volumes. The first one, Weak in Comparison to Dreams, is out, and there’s also a vinyl record to go with it. The second, A Short Introduction to Anneliese, is coming out this summer.

I’m posting weekly contests on social media. Anyone who can guess the hidden allusions gets a free copy. Test your literary knowledge! Here is a list of contests that are currently open. If you can identify one, email me for your copy.

Five Strange Languages is a single mega-novel. Lots more information here (scroll down).

I have uploaded 75 short videos on art theory to Youtube. These are for art students. They cover media, politics, gender, the sublime, skill, formal analysis, craft, time, narrative, Eurocentrism, style, research, the body… lots of subjects.

[Updated January 2025. Pages with information about the novel update live.]

Recent uploads: the books Pictures and Tears, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, How to Use Your Eyes, and an essay on the complicity between torture and formal analysis. Another entire book free, on Academia: What is Interesting Writing in Art History? It’s on ways to write experimental art history.

I have a number of texts and lectures on this topic. On this site, see especially:

The general theme, the mutual misunderstanding of art and science, remains pertinent in visual art, and someone should write a non-polemical piece about it: misunderstandings like the ones chronicled here can be productive, and so they are not like the mistakes that Sokol and Bricmont chronicle. The differences point to different discourses. Such an analysis might go some distance to relieving the reductive pressure that the “Sokal affair” put on interdisciplinary conversations.

(4) This lecture, which sums up some issues in the relations between the two fields:

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