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Winner of the 2007 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award
”The standard convergence narrative of recent years presents media concentration as a threat both to the diversity of communication channels and to individuals' opportunities to engage in public discourse. A respected and well-established media scholar, Jenkins (MIT) here counters such pessimistic perspectives on the brave new media world with theoretical and evidentiary attestations to the growing power of individuals and grassroots groups to affect the larger media landscape.”
—Choice
“Jenkins is an astute observer of media culture and his insights are spot-on. . . . He intends his book to be a powerful tool both now and in the future. . . . This is a book to be praised. It raises many issues.”
—Los Angeles Times
"Remarkable. . . . Jenkins' insights are gripping and his prose is surprisingly entertaining and lucid for a book that is, at its core, intellectually rigorous. . . . Jenkins' impressive ability to break down complex concepts into readable prose makes this study vital and engaging."
—Publishers Weekly
"Jenkins tries to bring clarity to cultural changes that are melting and morphing into new shapes on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly basis.
Convergence Culture provides a view that looks at the restless ocean and tracks the currents rather than just looking at the individual rocks on the beach."
—The McClatchy Newspapers
“I thought I knew twenty-first century pop media until I read Henry Jenkins. The fresh research and radical insights in
Convergence Culture deserve a wide and thoughtful readership. Bring on the `monolithic block of eyeballs!'” —Bruce Sterling, author, blogger, visionary
"Henry Jenkins offers crucial insight into an unexpected and unforeseen future. Unlike most predictions about how New Media will shape the world in which we live, the reality is turning out far stranger and more interesting than we might have imagined. The social implications of this change could be staggering."
—Will Wright, designer of SimCity and The Sims
“One of those rare works that is closer to an operating system than a traditional book: it's a platform that people will be building on for years to come. What's more, the book happens to be a briskly entertaining read—as startling, inventive, and witty as the culture it documents. It should be mandatory reading for anyone trying to make sense of today's popular culture—but thankfully, a book this fun to read doesn't need a mandate.”
—Steven Johnson, author of the national bestseller, Everything Bad Is Good For You
"Henry Jenkins is the 21st century McLuhan I've been waiting for. With all the fuzzy generalities, moral panics, and gloomy pronouncements from industry spokesmen and social critics, Jenkins' clearly communicated and nuanced analysis is sorely needed. The world McLuhan foretold back in the age of 'electric media' has become immensely more complicated in today's many-to-many, converged, remixed and mashed-up, digital, mobile, always-on media environment. If you are a parent, a student, an educator, a creator or consumer of popular culture, an entrepreneur, or a media industry executive, you need to understand convergence culture. And you will only after reading Henry Jenkins."—Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
"For any Sony PS3 execs out there wondering why their technological masterpiece is being ridiculed by customers before its even released...
Convergence Culture is a must read...Jenkins offers numerous insights on how technology and media professionals can forge better relationships with their customers."
—Slashdot
"I simply could not put this book down! Henry Jenkins provides a fascinating account of how new media intersects old media and engages the imagination of fans in more and more powerful ways. Educators, media specialists, policy makers and parents will find
Convergence Culture both lively and enlightening."—John Seely Brown, Former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp & director of Xerox PARC
"Henry Jenkins is the Director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program. Or, in other words, he's a genius. He's one of those rare people you meet and are instantly jealous of, wishing you could somehow transplant their amazing wealth of knowledge into your own noggin. I was privileged to have made his acquaintance when he interviewed me for his fabulous new book,
Convergence Culture...Go read it, you just might learn something."
—The Heather Show
"The book is a short, smart, buttery read on a hot topic, and it is sure to draw both popular and academic interest."
—Water Cooler Games
”
Convergence Culture, is for anyone who is curious about future trends at the intersection of technology and humanity. Jenkins tries to bring clarity to cultural changes that are melting and morphing into new shapes on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly basis.
Convergence Culture provides a view that looks at the restless ocean and tracks the currents rather than just looking at the individual rocks on the beach.”
—Ledger-Enquierer
Convergence Culture maps a new territory: where old and new media intersect, where grassroots and corporate media collide, where the power of the media producer and the power of the consumer interact in unpredictable ways.
Henry Jenkins, one of America's most respected media analysts, delves beneath the new media hype to uncover the important cultural transformations that are taking place as media converge. He takes us into the secret world of Survivor Spoilers, where avid internet users pool their knowledge to unearth the show's secrets before they are revealed on the air. He introduces us to young Harry Potter fans who are writing their own Hogwarts tales while executives at Warner Brothers struggle for control of their franchise. He shows us how The Matrix has pushed transmedia storytelling to new levels, creating a fictional world where consumers track down bits of the story across multiple media channels.Jenkins argues that struggles over convergence will redefine the face of American popular culture. Industry leaders see opportunities to direct content across many channels to increase revenue and broaden markets. At the same time, consumers envision a liberated public sphere, free of network controls, in a decentralized media environment. Sometimes corporate and grassroots efforts reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding relations between media producers and consumers. Sometimes these two forces are at war.
Jenkins provides a riveting introduction to the world where every story gets told and every brand gets sold across multiple media platforms. He explains the cultural shift that is occurring as consumers fight for control across disparate channels, changing the way we do business, elect our leaders, and educate our children.
Customer Reviews:
Intersections: collisions and traffic flow.......2007-07-31
Jenkins is a genius. Not only does he provide a theoretically grounded book explaining cultural mass media...but he writes in a manner the masses can understand. Bravo! Convergence culture...the place of multiple media collisions and smooth traffic flow of participatory culture. This book is a must read for any scholar interested in understanding "new" literacies.
Good introduction to modern media culture.......2007-06-26
Henry Jenkins is one of the least dogmatic, most pragmatic voices on contemporary media culture. Unlike many other critics of electronic games and culture, he doesn't slavishly follow any particular school of thought; Jenkins consistently charts his own path, based primarily on research rather than preconceived notions. Like Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins is always worth reading.
That said, this is not a book for specialists. It's most effective as an introduction to "convergence culture"; experienced participants in digital community will find much of the book to be familiar ground. I hoped to see Jenkins extend his arguments, with more detailed exploration of each case and more thorough contextualization of the academic theory he references (e.g. the work of Pierre Levy).
In presenting his perspectives, Jenkins also neglects significant details of some of his supporting examples - e.g. the execrable state of code for "Enter the Matrix", or LucasArts' infamously counterproductive community management for "Star Wars: Galaxies". Such omissions are particularly surprising because they would deepen his case rather than compromising it. His point, after all, isn't to draw a clear path to the future, but rather to map the multivalent dependencies and challenges which must be negotiated along the way.
Ultimately, "Convergence Culture" is only an introduction, a brief safari into lands still marked (on mass-cultural maps) as "frontiers undefined". Readers already exploring those frontiers will encounter few surprises. Newcomers (latecomers?) to "convergence culture", however, will find no better place to start.
What an amazing book.......2007-05-19
"Convergence Culture - where old and new media collide" by Henry Jenkins is one of the most exciting books I have read in the last months. It provides a new understanding of media, interaction and user collaboration. After the magificent volumes from Lawrence Lessig "Convergence Culture" helps to enlarge the media perspective.
A thought-provoking and thorough analysis of online participatory culture.......2007-01-16
Henry Jenkins is one of the foremost researchers in the field of online culture, and in "Convergence Culture" he presents many of his timely ideas. In brief, Jenkins' states that convergence is a deployment of content across mediums. A movie might have different incarnations in an online discussion groups, a movie created by a fan, a book, a game, and finally, the movie itself. (The alluring but dated idea of traditional convergence, a "black box" that serves to unite multiple delivery methods, has thankfully been set aside) Entire chapters are devoted to in-depth analyses of how certain advertising campaigns have incorporated transmedia storytelling. Chapter 3 looks at the Matrix, and how fans have followed it through multiple incarnations, resulting in a multi-medium campaign that not only had a certain mystique, but was deep enough for fans of all levels to follow.
At the best points in the book, Jenkins produces insights that rival the best qualitative research; "Convergence Culture" accurately and colorfully follows the emergence of new ways of consuming media and connecting with people. Unlike many books on new media, he has created a very fairly evaluated and expansive book on a "hot" topic. His one central idea has implications for many different aspects of the interaction of mass communication and society. This is one of the more thought-provoking books I've read in the last year.
An excellent survey of media and culture.......2006-12-24
What I loved about this book was the approachability of the language. Rarely do you see an academic write in a style that's friendly to audiences not in the ivory tower, but Jenkins produced a book I thoroughly enjoyed, as opposed to a laborious, slogging read I usually expect with academic treatises.
His knowledge about pop culture, culture theory, convergence culture is explained excellently and well balanced with examples that focus on fan culture and consumer culture, such as survivor, star wars, and Harry Potter. Jenkins shows how these communities interact, negotiate, and recreate culture.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in media studies, pop culture, or related works. I know it will prove useful for me.
Book Description
From a cuneiform tablet to a Chicago prison, from the depths of the cosmos to the text on our T-shirts, Lawrence Weschler finds strange connections wherever he looks. The farther one travels (through geography, through art, through science, through time), the more everything seems to converge — at least, it does if you're looking through Weschler's giddy, brilliant eyes. Weschler combines his keen insights into art, his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of essays sure to illuminate, educate, and astound.
Customer Reviews:
everything that rises--------->.......2007-10-02
This is what art criticism at its best should do - converge themes from present and our rich history in a clear language.... not obfuscating academic deconstruction but brilliant exposition with beautiful language and so many rich references - it's a joy to read and it actually affirms the fact that you already have very rich knowledge base inside (instead of trying to teach and preach). It weaves our factoids into a beautiful tapestry of human experience, synthesizing and unraveling our time here.
Wonderful Book for Writer's Block.......2006-11-21
Lawrence Weschler has a powerful mind. The essays in this collection cover such divergent topics as art to politics. The author, however, finds was to connect seemingly unrelated works. The essays are a camera into a very thoughtful mind who looks at the world and tries to connect it to himself and tries to connect the edges to each other.
I personally had purchased this book and was reading it during a time of poetic writer's block and I found the essays so thought provoking that I produced at least 3 new pages of writing.
The only drawback is that a few of the essays are a bit dated. I am referring here to primarily those on Solidarity. I feel to really understand those in better detail I would have to do some more research on that time in our history.
This is a great intellectual read and is a pleasure for the eye as well with great photography and artwork within its' hardcover pages.
Emergence through convergence.......2006-08-30
For its strange and compelling originality, I gave this book five stars. Author Lawrence Weschler's visual connections are unlike anything I have ever been exposed to. And it was because of this work, that when I was compiling photos for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, that I began to notice family photographic "echoes."
A picture of my 1-year old brother in his stroller, mouth wide open in toothless glee, reaching toward the camera, echoed a photo taken at family gathering 45 years later in which the only things different are the chair in which he sits and his gleaming teeth. His body language, his expression, even his adult-sized outstretched arm are the same as the boy from the stroller.
These sorts of echoes are commonly seen in your standard `grip-and-grin" shots at traditional events such as birthdays and weddings. But in one-off photos like the baby/adult ones of my brother, there's something more at work. Did a buried memory surface when a similar photographic situation arose that caused him to echo his own pose from 45 years before?
That might explain the same person subconsciously reacting to a similarly presented situation, but it fails to explain completely separate scenes, at different times, featuring a random set of people or circumstances that nonetheless are captured in an eerily identical composition to each another by artists not known to one another.
Not all the connections in this book are photographic. Weschler includes geographical, artistic, scientific, and architectural connections, too, in which human behavior could not have influenced the outcome. This is a provocative look at an unusual and inexplicable phenomenon of things that converge between time and place.
Everything and everything else.......2006-06-12
Weschler says, in his introduction, that his publisher heard about one of Weschler's notebooks, one full of ideas that had not yet been put into print. The result is this lovely volume, a loose collection of gentle and wide-ranging speculations, most often driven by some kind of visual analogy.
In some, the parallel elements are clear. For example, p.9 shows, a cavernous ruin excavated during cleanup after the World Trade Center attacks. On the same page, it also shows a work by Piranesi, in his Carceri d' Invenzione (forgive my Italian: that may be "Dungeon of Invention"), with the same harsh but ambiguous lighting. There are certainly similarities in the two structures and compositions, but deeper similarities lie in reading each as a technological hellhole. Other sets of pictures, including the portraits on p.62, elude my sense of analogy. That's OK. This is a personal and unpolished set of musings coaxed into publication, possibly before its ideas had ripened fully, and I'm happy to have it be what it is.
I keep trying to liken this book to James Burke's "Connections," but the connection keeps not working. Burke's work is generally taut, sustained, fast-paced, and more or less rigorous in tracing the lineage between successive ideas. This book is unapologetically scattered and subjective. Ideas link to each other along circuitous routes, and with wider concerns than Burke's focus on technology. Weschler's softer topics include "Women's Bodies", in which he addresses his subject lovingly, but as a marvel and a mystery - well, don't we all? At least, all of us who aren't women?
His best writing, however is in the chapter on "Political Occasions." It describes the freeing of Eastern Europe and especially Poland during the 1980s and 1990s. He creates a dichotomy between the Polish regime and the Polish people, whom he idealizes in wonderful ways. If I take Weschler at face value, the Poles are a people who have uniquely integrated their arts, politics, and lives, based on examples in graphics, poetry, theater, and literature. (I also respect their rich mathematics, but Weschler is an artist.) As citizen-artists, they subvert their oppressors with the words of the oppressors, in subtle displays of thaumaturgic judo.
This is a book that I've wanted to see for a long time. Other books give beautiful examples of scientists reaching out from science into the subjective studies, and execrable examples of artists trying to do the same. This, instead, shows an artist reaching out towards science and politics within his cast of mind, and succeeding brilliantly.
//wiredweird
That Invisible Thread That Connects Us All.......2006-03-14
It is difficult to read Lawrence Wechsler's latest book without spinning off into realms of thought that defy description. The well known art historian and writer has gathered a series of essays that while not confined to art commentary still manage to reference 'art' on every level in which it influences our lives, our observations, and our deja vu!
EVERYTHING THAT RISES: A BOOK OF CONVERGENCES begins with the postulate that recognized or not, images rise and fall with some sense of continuity no matter how disparate or how separated in time - or even how ironically dissociative! To even summarize the contents of this book would seem a disservice to the potential reader: the joy in reading Wechsler's erudite yet lighthearted writing must be experienced in the manner in which he lays out his plethora of ideas.
But for teasers, Wechsler's 'conversations' and musings find similarities in such seemingly unassociated images as comparing a Myerowitz color photograph of the 9/11 firefighters resting with an anonymous black and white photograph of Union Army engineers in a nearly identical pose from the Civil War! Rembrandt's painting of the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp from 1632 is paced side by side with an uncanny photograph from the 1967 black and white photograph of Bolivian soldiers gathered around the slain Che Guevara and the similarity looks as though the latter image was posed with Rembrandt's painting as model!
But these are only two examples of the art related convergences Wechsler addresses. Other forms are from observed cloud formations, political posters, old and new landscapes, etc - or in Wechsler's words 'uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections'. The beautifully illustrated book is well designed, richly interesting, and quite unlike any other volume that challenges our senses. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, March 06
Book Description
From every quarter we hear of a new global culture, postcolonial, hybrid, announcing the death of nationalism, the arrival of cosmopolitanism. But under the drumbeat attending this trend, Timothy Brennan detects another, altogether different sound. Polemical, passionate, certain to provoke, his book exposes the drama being played out under the guise of globalism. A bracing critique of the critical self-indulgence that calls itself cosmopolitanism, it also takes note of the many countervailing forces acting against globalism in its facile, homogenizing sense.
The developments Brennan traces occur in many places--editorial pages, policy journals, corporate training manuals, and, primarily, in the arts. His subject takes him from George Orwell to Julia Kristeva, from Subcommandante Marcos to Julio Cortázar, from Ernst Bloch to contemporary apologists for transnational capitalism and "liberation management," from "third world" writing to the Nobel Prize, with little of critical theory or cultural studies left untouched in between. Brennan gives extended treatment to two exemplary figures: the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, whose work suggests an alternative approach to cultural studies; and the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, whose appreciation of Cuban popular music cuts through the usual distinctions between mass and elite culture.
A critical call to arms, At Home in the World summons intellectuals and scholars to reinvigorate critical cultural studies. In stripping the false and heedless from the new cosmopolitanism, Brennan revitalizes the idea.
Book Description
The United States has always imagined that its identity as a nation is insulated from violent interventions abroad, as if a line between domestic and foreign affairs could be neatly drawn. Yet this book argues that such a distinction, so obviously impracticable in our own global era, has been illusory at least since the war with Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century and the later wars against Spain, Cuba, and the Philippines. In this book, Amy Kaplan shows how U.S. imperialism--from "Manifest Destiny" to the "American Century"--has profoundly shaped key elements of American culture at home, and how the struggle for power over foreign peoples and places has disrupted the quest for domestic order.
The neatly ordered kitchen in Catherine Beecher's household manual may seem remote from the battlefields of Mexico in 1846, just as Mark Twain's Mississippi may seem distant from Honolulu in 1866, or W. E. B. Du Bois's reports of the East St. Louis Race Riot from the colonization of Africa in 1917. But, as this book reveals, such apparently disparate locations are cast into jarring proximity by imperial expansion. In literature, journalism, film, political speeches, and legal documents, Kaplan traces the undeniable connections between American efforts to quell anarchy abroad and the eruption of such anarchy at the heart of the empire.
Customer Reviews:
Installing the Circuits of Empire.......2003-05-03
In THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE IN THE MAKING OF US CULTURE Ms. Kaplan has put together a number of illuminating readings of selected American texts as a way to explore the beginnings of empire, its expression in the U.S. in the mid to late 19th century. Her sources range from women's magazine's such as Harper's, works by Twain and W.E.B. du Bois, through "Birth of a Nation" to Welle's "Citizen Kane." She shows how the boundaries of empire were drawn, and how no one was were untouched by its discourse whether they recognized its contours or not.
She begins with a discussion of Mark Twain's first real assignment as a newspaperman: writing "letters" from Hawaii that were published in a San Francisco newspaper intended to promote the island to mainland businessmen and settlers. These letters and his observations later formed the basis of his first lectures and thus served as the springboard to his later career as a novelist. Twain, she notes, in his personal letters to friends and family is drawn to and repelled by the exotic, anxious to witness the rites of the dying Hawaiian people before they pass from history, and at the same time scandalized by their cultural practices, such as their lascivious dancing. Known generally now as an anti-colonialist because of an article he wrote during the Spanish American War(s), she demonstrates how he, knowingly, and with no little anxiety, early on recognized he was implicated in the colonial project. On the sea voyage to Hawaii, for instance, he comes down with a bad cold, and mordantly writes to a friend that the illness he bears may kill off a few more thousand more Hawaiians. Kaplan maintains that Twain's exposure to empire in the color line in Hawaii and the exploitation of that people, (a quite different experience from how he experienced the color line in Missouri), laid the foundation for his later perspective and production of "Huckleberry Finn" some twenty years later.
Other key readings include the first full-length films produced during the "Spanish-American War Mania" when documentary footage of U.S. soldiers was mixed with some staged battles and scripted domestic scenes drew huge audiences to the movies. She suggests that the public happily participated in the jingoistic pursuit of empire through these films, and that these productions laid the groundwork for not just the war movie genre, but the full-length film. Prior to these movies, shorts were the order of the day. She notes these films influenced the structure and visual imagery of "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915, which, if you haven't seen it recently, presents African Americans as the lords of misrule in the American South. Encapsulated in all these cultural productions are the portrayals of non-white men as stupid, power-crazed savages who in their grab at power, attempt to deflower the flower of the white womanhood, while non-white women are seen as exotic and erotically destabilizing. The Birth of a Nation casts the Klan as heroic figures who must preserve civilization through lynching, terror and mayhem. The Rough Riders were seen as masculine white heroes who swept away the decadent vestiges of a cruel empire, freeing Filipinos and Cubans who as non-whites and subjugated peoples could not understand or appreciate the boon of freedom that had been conferred upon them.
Orson Welle's "Citizen Kane," the fictionalized life of Henry Luce, is also examined as critique of the circuits of imperial power. She notes that it is one of the few films that even touches on the Spanish American War as a subject, but that this war was central to Luce's creation of his own media empire. Making the point that the yellow press grew to prominence during this era, repeating the story that Hearst started the war in Cuba to sell newspapers, she shows how the media supported the drive toward empire, and in their cultural productions assigned roles to citizens.
Her larger point is that empire is not a one way street, but rather is complex circuit through which the dreams of the imperial power are modified and altered through contact with the Other. Through her examination of W.E. DuBois, she summarizes his view that WWI was not centered in a dispute between European powers but that it grew out of Africa. By decentering the standard narrative, he rewrites the conflict as the history as growing out of the contact of Europe with Africa. This chapter nicely resonates with her introduction She relates through a Supreme Court decision how Puerto Rico was both a possession, and not a possession, holding it through law at arm's length -- a place in which it still resides, in a limbo as both dependent and quasi-independent. A similar judgment was made during the 1830s by the Supreme Court when they ruled that the Cherokee was not a nation in the strict sense, but a dependent population so that they could be uprooted and sent forth on the Trail of Tears. (See the book "1831" Year of Eclipse" by Louis Masur for the history behind that similarly ambiguous decision.
This is a thoughtful book to which full justice cannot be given in a short review. Her location of the Spanish American War as a key node in America's consolidation of its colonial aspirations is important and convincingly done. As a chapter in history, the Spanish American War(s) has always been dismissed as a minor episode, portrayed as the U.S. trying on the role of the colonizer during the colonial era's last gasp, an activity for which as a democracy it was ill suited. What Kaplan shows is that it was a rehearsal for a different kind of imperialism, the stimulation of the American middle-class through narratives of power as presented through the media, and the later colonization of the world through the globalization construct put forth under the rubric of democracy and free trade.
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CineTech: Film, Convergence and New Media
Stephen Keane
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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Book Description
What does it mean to regard cinema as technology? How do special effects change our experience of contemporary film? How important is the Internet to the film industry and film fans? CineTech explores these debates and examines the important intersection between film and new media. Providing a comprehensive introduction to the digital practices used in film, this book moves from historical perspectives to up-to-date analysis. Applying these debates through specific case studies, examples are drawn from recent Hollywood blockbusters such as the Star Wars prequels and the Matrix trilogy. Case studies, exercises, and suggestions for further study make this an ideal resource for courses and student assignments in both film and media studies.
Book Description
With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays, the first since Harvard University Press published The World, the Text, and the Critic in 1983, reconfirms what no one can doubt--that Said is the most impressive, consequential, and elegant critic of our time--and offers further evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and our culture.
As in the title essay, the widely admired "Reflections on Exile," the fact of his own exile and the fate of the Palestinians have given both form and the force of intimacy to the questions Said has pursued. Taken together, these essays--from the famous to those that will surprise even Said's most assiduous followers--afford rare insight into the formation of a critic and the development of an intellectual vocation. Said's topics are many and diverse, from the movie heroics of Tarzan to the machismo of Ernest Hemingway to the shades of difference that divide Alexandria and Cairo. He offers major reconsiderations of writers and artists such as George Orwell, Giambattista Vico, Georg Lukacs, R. P. Blackmur, E. M. Cioran, Naguib Mahfouz, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Walter Lippman, Samuel Huntington, Antonio Gramsci, and Raymond Williams. Invigorating, edifying, acutely attentive to the vying pressures of personal and historical experience, his book is a source of immeasurable intellectual delight.
Customer Reviews:
That Rare thing, the American Intellectual.......2007-07-19
It is easy to get off on the wrong foot with Said if you are distracted by ideology and feel yourself threatened. What one has to do is look beyond the politics for long enough to see Said for what he is, namely, an intellectual who has devoted his life to learning. This is terribly rare these days. Sontag held the spot light for years as America's premier intellectual. Gore Vidal still has a role to play, Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling both deserve mention, as do others, but in the end we are talking about a handful of people who can seriously be compared to the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre. American academics may be intellectual but they are rarely if ever intellectuals. I am not certain why, but Said, an expert on music among other things, succeeded in creating this role for himself. These essays provide a great introduction into the breadth of his thought. Like all intellectuals, he has his moments of stupidity and can be blindingly prejudiced, but then again so could Edmund Wilson and Sartre himself. What becomes apparent with intellectuals is that all of life gets submitted to intellectual scrutiny. There is none of this, "That's not my field" stuff. Everything, including Philly steak sandwiches, gets analyzed. The erudition is impressive, but then finally it is love that stands out, not learning. Said is a lover of life, and that, ladies and gentlemen, can't be taught.
A satisfying intellectual journey.......2002-03-28
This book takes you onto a spectacular and highly satisfying intellectual journey. Many essayists set up their tent with the first couple of paragraphs and then spend the rest of the time just rearranging the furniture inside. With Said, one never knows what point he might make next, what brilliant new connection will be created before our eyes. You can tell by reading this collection how Said won his reputation as a fantastic lecturer and educator. I guess this is why Columbia University stuck by him when he was being vilified by his enemies for championing the Palestinian cause and demanding the end of Israeli occupation. Buy it, read it, enjoy!
the design of intelligence.......2002-03-06
The essay is a text that is closer to what we mortals can write than the book is close. And yet, it is all the more amazing to witness Said's attempts at a form I'm known to attempt. Because he can simply say things I cannot say. His writing is pyrotechnical. As Zappa would say, it's "stunt writing". It's not only worth reading, it's worth memorizing. As Said says, "Extraordinary varieties of diversity are open to text." Some people can take these simple words we all know and link them in magical series. They have figured out how to do this. They've been told secrets few have been told.
"History is a battle of interpretations." Text never floats. It is always sourced in other texts. If you read Said, you begin to feel closer and closer to his intelligence, until it's almost like he's here with you, conversing. That's good, because most of us won't have the gift of direct access to him. But this also happens with the world. Each of us is imprisoned in a small arena of consciousness. Other people can join us in it, but we can never leave. We can never get outside our lives. Unless text. With it, we can see. We can bring vast horizons of experience into our arenas. And it's not just like having a writer with us. Because text is not just what writers think. It's more than that. We can write things we'd never be able to say. We can write things we wouldn't even have been able to think before we wrote them. Like DeLillo, we don't know what we know, until we write.
Criticism at its Best.......2002-02-05
This collection of essays is a new triumph for Said whose exceptional energy and courage should be an example for all of us. Ever since he was diagnosed with cancer, he has been engaged in a Proustian race against time producing such compelling works as "Culture and Imperialism", "Out of Place", and "The End of the Peace Process".
"Reflections on Exile" includes some of the finest essays written in the second half of the twentieth century. No critic could afford to ignore such important pieces as "Opponents, audiences, constituencies, and community" and "Traveling theory reconsidered". Not for Said is jargon or ill considered perspective; his thought is always sober and penetrating.
His greaest contribution was that he forced the academy to consider the narrative of the marginalised, the "voiceless", paving the way for an understanding of the world as inhabited by equal humans-- not superior "westerners" and inferior "easterners". But his contribution is not limited to deconstructing the Manicheanism of the post-colonial world; Said is the most insightful critic of his generation. He has an unmatched ability to capture the most delicate nuances in both the aesthetic and political realms. Whether he is comparing Nietzsche and Conrad or reflecting upon the Question of Palestine, Said proves his indispensibility by avoiding the pits of hazy thought that others regularly fall into.
Professor Said is simply the finest essayist alive; even on a purely literary basis, the merit of his writting is undeniable. He is passionate, coherent, and eloquent.
This collection of essays should be of interest to anybody concerned with literary theory, music, cultural criticism, politics and theory of nationalism. It provides a good overview of Said's breathtaking range of thought, and also includes first rate criticism on many thinkers,novelists, and musicians including: Conrad, Vico, Adorno, Lukacs, Orwell, Naipaul, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Gould, Hemingway, Mahfouz, Hobsbawm, Blackmur, Gramsci and Foucault.
Said is an engaged intellectual hero. Like Sartre, Russell, and Chomsky, his presence has been essential as a thinker who chooses to be in exile, who avoids the centres of dominance and keeps a distance (but is never detached) from society in order to be able to speak truth to power. His work provides a base for us to work on building human narratives free of hegemony. After Said, we cannot afford but to have a "contrapuntal" reading of the world, celebrating the values of enlightenment, hybridity, and freedom.
a static theorist.......2002-01-08
Well as Said books go this one is the most palatable as his long held interests are divided up into individual essays and not all garbled together as his book length studies are. Said is a theorist if you don't already know that. He has theories about history, about knowledge, about how culture is created and transmitted, about individual thinkers, about books, about everything. In this book you get both his favorite thinkers, many of them theorists themselves, and his theories about their theories. I think theories are fine so long as they are not over used or relied on too much. I personally think Said is far too reliant on his collection of theories. So much so that he can't think outside of them. Some thinkers are stuck in an old way of thinking, Said is stuck in his new way of thinking which if you have followed his career doesn't feel that new anymore. The same theories are marched out over and over again. I don't find him a particularly insightful literary thinker nor do I find in him an intellectual who broadens out from book to book and expands his ideas, evolves them. I find his work mired in the same old theories he began with thirty years ago. This book will not change your opinion about Said if you already have one. It will clarify some of the confusion if you are looking to understand him better as all of his sources are identified and discussed here. The familiar 17th Italian Vico, the marxist Antonio Gramsici,and Foucault are all given further treatment and several literary essays are also included on Conrad, T.E Lawrence, the critic R.P. Blackmur,& V.S. Naipaul.
Book Description
What is the connection between the United States' imbalance of trade with Japan and the imbalance of translation in the other direction? Between Western literary critics' estimates of Japanese fiction and Japanese politicians' "America-bashing"? Between the portrayal of East-West relations in the film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and the terms of the GATT trade agreements?
In this provocative study, Masao Miyoshi deliberately adopts an off-center perspective--one that restores the historical asymmetry of encounters between Japan and the United States, from Commodore Perry to Douglas MacArthur--to investigate the blindness that has characterized relations between the two cultures.
Both nations are blinkered by complementary forms of ethnocentricity. The United States--or, more broadly, the Eurocentric West--believes its culture to be universal, while Japan believes its culture to be essentially unique. Thus American critics read and judge Japanese literature by the standards of the Western novel; Japanese politicians pay lip service to "free trade" while supporting protectionist policies at home and abroad.
Miyoshi takes off from literature to range across culture, politics, and economics in his analysis of the Japanese and their reflections in the West; the fiction of Tanizaki, Mishima, Oe; trade negotiations; Japan bashing and America bashing; Emperor worship; Japanese feminist writing; the domination of transcribed conversation as a literary form in contemporary Japan. In his confrontation with cultural critics, Miyoshi does not spare "centrists" of either persuasion, nor those who refuse to recognize that "the literary and the economical, the cultural and the industrial, are inseparable."
Yet contentious as this book can be, it ultimately holds out, by its example, hope for a criticism that can see beyond the boundaries of national cultures--without substituting a historically false "universal" culture--and that examines cultural convergences from a viewpoint that remains provocatively and fruitfully off center.
Customer Reviews:
good book.......2001-06-11
honestly I have only read parts of the book, but of those that I've read, I think Miyoshi does a great job discussing notions of power withing Japan, and various phases of contact between Japan and the 'west'. There is a great chapter on Junichiro Tanizaki entitled: "the Lure of the West." and another chapter on Japanese women and women writers discusses how women pose a threat to the traditional patriarchy in Japan. Overall a really good book about Japanese contact with 'others'. i plan on reading the entire book after finals.
Average customer rating:
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Ethics and Profits: A Convergence of Corporate America's Economic and Social Responsibilities
R. Eric Reidenbach , and
Donald P. Robin
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0132902141 |
Book Description
The digital revolution is transforming media and communications industries worldwide, and media companies are keen to emerge at the forefront of an increasingly transnational and competitive communications marketplace. However, the volume and scale of mergers and alliances involving media players has raised considerable challenges for regulators and state authorities alike.
Media Ownership:
- Investigates the commercial and strategic advantages of consolidation and cross-media expansion
- Examines the socio-political and cultural implications of media concentration
- Analyzes how policy makers have responded to media concentration and convergence
- Assesses the relationship between media ownership and economic performance
- Looks at the balance of power between politicians and media owners
This book offers an up-to-date and timely critical overview of the contemporary media environment, as such it will be an essential text for all those with an interest in media economics, media policy, media law and management.
Books:
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- Dry: A Memoir
- Edge City: Life on the New Frontier
- Emotional Vampires: Dealing With People Who Drain You Dry
- Encyclopedia of Counseling: Master Review and Tutorial for the National Counselor Examination and State Exams
- Exploring Socio-Cultural Themes in Education: Readings in Social Foundations (2nd Edition)
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