Imagology

It is the comparative study of literary works as far as images are concerned. 

Imagology is not to be confused with imagery.

Imagery is a literary device that converts the reading experience into a sensory experience. 

Imagology is something different in that it deals with the image as a cultural, social, and political construct.

The image has a very strong impact. It is a device that operates at the level of the unconscious. The images which are constructed and emitted are received without us knowing by the unconscious, without the mediation of our knowing minds. For such reasons, the image is a powerful tool. The field of advertisement makes use of it to efficiently meet marketing purposes.

Constructed images are ethnocentric and their contraction is intertwined with a process of Othering. Images are constructed for the purpose of defining the unknown Other. What is unknown is dangerous. To define it is to have control over it and to dominate it. The image is an efficient way to dominate the unknown Other because once built and established images stick and could not be easily removed. Literature and art are means of constructing images. An example is the image that orientalist artists and writers built about the Orient. They wanted to define the unknown Orient to have control over it. They built a faulty stereotypical image (the exotic, the erotic, the barbaric) which later have come to be accepted and interiorized by the Orient and turned into its reality. What used to be an image in the mind of the West about the East became the reality of that East. 

Eugene Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus 1827 is a perfect example of that orientalist image.

  

To revise that image, the East should employ the same strategy and adhere to the philosophy of "define yourself or you are defined". It is through literature and art that this image has been constructed and it is through literature and art that it should be revised.

Terminology:    

Stereotype: a stereotype is a received idea which is not necessarily true that we take from society without questioning it. Stereotypes always necessitate a boundary (of gender, racial, geographical, ethnic, national…). They also submit to the law of binarism which stipulates that one side of the boundary has superiority over the other side. 

For instance, one could find gender stereotypes in fairy tales or in primary school books that feminism tries to revise.    

Cliché: it is a phrase that is overused that it loses its evocative power and becomes devoid of its meaning. e.g.: Love is blind. 

Caricature: it is a representation of something or someone where certain aspects are over-exaggerated while other are over-simplified for the purpose of constructing a specific image about that something or someone. Not only a cartoon, caricature could also be a literary device. 

Notice how the following colonial caricatures by Salomon Assus built a certain image about Algerians (referred to and defined as "indigènes" by the colonizer). They are mostly represented as stupid, dump and backward people and the merchants facial expressions implies they are greedy tricksters or cheaters. Somehow it tells a lot about the origins of negative self-image algerians have of themselves. These images were interiorized by the colonized. Inferiority is interiorized. Unless Algerians redefine themselves by revising those images, the images will stay forever as well as the devastation they cause.