This volume contains the essays presented at the conference that was held on 19-21 October 2005 at the University of Groningen under the auspices of the Groningen Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG). The conference was meant to be an occasion where the Groningen research into culture both past and present, as it occurs within ICOG, could present itself. The theme, Vision in Text and Image, was chosen on the one hand as a wide umbrella for practically the entire body of research being conducted in ICOG (from classical archaeology to modern literature), and on the other as a reference, albeit a modest one, towards a new, more context-oriented approach to text and image. In that sense the volume pinpoints to methodological strands of the study of arts. Nowadays there is little impetus to analyse literary texts and works of visual art per se, as was much more the case in the 1960s and 1970s. So, more attention has been paid to the ties between text/image and the surrounding contemporary culture. Furthermore, the study of arts is no longer considered as totally separate from the study of non-artistic images and texts, either methodologically or ideologically.
It is the aim of this volume to reveal the shifts in divisions of labour within the study of arts. Apart from a keynote speech delivered by Jurgen Pieters, professor of literary theory at the University of Ghent, the book contains contributions from all disciplines within ICOG: from young PhD students as well as from senior staff members. Through their practical approach to research, and in some cases also by way of theoretical reflection, they illustrate the dynamics and interchange that characterise the relationship between text/image and culture.