Book Description
Arthur Asa Berger's unique ability to translate difficult theories into accessible language makes this book an ideal introduction to cultural criticism. Berger covers the key theorists, concepts, and subject areas, from literary, sociological, and psychoanalytical theories to semiotics and Marxism.
Cultural Criticism breathes new life into the discipline by making these theories relevant to students' lives. The author illustrates his explanations with excerpts from classic works giving readers a sense of the important thinkers' style and helping place them in their context. Berger also provides a comprehensive bibliography on cultural criticism for those who wish to explore the topics at greater length.
Cultural Criticism is the perfect undergraduate supplemental text for such courses as media studies, literary criticism, and popular culture.
Customer Reviews:
Critspeak made easy.......2000-07-30
This is an excellent book for beginners who want some sort of a road map into the intricate territory of cultural criticism.Not only is most of the critspeak that is around almost intractably obscure,at times you almost wonder if these chaps write in English at all. For those of you who have thrown up your hands in despair after your fortieth attempt to read Derrida and his ilk.. and you have no clue at all as to what these guys are talking about..(Of course,with Derrida one can't loosely use such words as 'Talking' unless you want to be deconstructed within an inch of your life) Do not despair!You can atleast begin here. With extraordinary lucidity and sparkling intelligence,Berger takes us on a guided tour of the whole crit theory pantheon....Marxism,Semiotics..to mention a few.A stimulating read. A must-buy for beginners..Run out and get your copy!
Book Description
From genetically modified food to weapons of mass destruction, we live in an age of intense debate about technology's place in our culture. While the technologies have changed, these debates go back hundreds of years, and their assumptions have become deeply entrenched in our culture.
Culture + Technology is an essential guide to the fascinating history of these debates, and offers new perspectives that give readers the tools they need to make informed decisions about the role of technology in our lives. In clear and compelling language, Slack and Wise untangle and expose the cultural assumptions that underlie our thinking about technology, stories so deeply held we often don't recognize their influence. The book considers the perceived inevitability of technological advance and our myths about progress. It also looks at sources of resistance to these stories from the Luddites of the 19th century to the Unabomber in our own time. Slack and Wise help readers sift through the confusions about culture and technology that arise in their own everyday lives.
This book is a must read for anyone who cares about the place of technology in our lives. It is a primer for beginners, and an invaluable resource for those who have pondered these issues before.
Book Description
During its seven-year run, Buffy the Vampire Slayer attracted a wide range of viewers and almost unprecedented academic interest. Sex and the Slayer explores one of the most talked-about topics in relation to this pioneering TV series--gender. As fantasy, Buffy potentially opens up a space for alternative representations of gender. But how alternative can popular television be?
Taking a feminist cultural studies approach, Jowett explores the ways in which the series represents femininity, masculinity, and gendered relations, including sexuality and sexual orientation. Written for undergraduates, Sex and the Slayer provides an introduction to the most important theoretical and historical underpinnings of contemporary gender criticism as it examines a range of thought-provoking issues: role reversal, the tension between feminism and femininity, the "crisis" of masculinity, gender hybridity, the appeal of bad girls, romance, and changing family structures. Through this introductory analysis, Jowett shows that Buffy presents a contradictory mixture of "subversive" and "conservative" images of gender roles and as such is a key example of the complexity of gender representation in contemporary television.
Customer Reviews:
You don't know what you are, what you will become..........2006-04-27
This book was my first introduction to serious gender-studies criticism. I found it to be a well written and illuminating foray into both the academic discipline and the show. The character studies are very satisfying. I recommend the book both to academically inclined fans of the program and to readers who are knowlegeable about the show and are curious about contemporary criticism. There is now a good selection of insightful works, both book-length and essays, using Buffy as a platform to discuss cultural, social, and religious issues. I wish all academic studies were as lucid as this one.
Despite not finding the gender studies approach helpful, a very good discussion of BUFFY.......2006-03-30
I have very mixed feelings about this largely excellent book about BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. The author, Lorna Jowett, is obviously an exceptionally well-informed student of BUFFY and knows the show backwards and forwards. The book bristles with insights about the show and about individual characters, as opposed to the narrative structure as a whole, on which I find the book much less helpful. In a way this is to be expected, since in focusing on gender issues, you focus on the individual characters that incarnate gender-related traits and characteristics. I have read pretty much every serious and all academic books that are currently in print on BUFFY and at this point to learn new things about the show is getting progressively more difficult; nonetheless, I learned a great deal from the book. I'm going to say a couple of critical things in a second, but before I do I want to emphasize that I definitely found reading this to be a rewarding experience and I think any fairly literate BUFFY fan who has some experience in reading academic books is going to both enjoy this and learn from it, regardless of whether they agree with the approach or not. So I want to be clear: despite a disagreement with the central approach of the book, I found this to be an exceptionally rewarding read. The book is also graced with a large bibliography that will aid serious readers in compiling BUFFY-related bibliographies.
Before proceeding, I need to say something about my own stance towards women's issues. Although I'm a guy, I'm a fairly serious student of the history of women's issues, to the point where I am currently engaged in a writing project about women's issues (specifically about the possibility of future empowerment of women through higher education-women are increasingly comprising the majority of both undergraduate and graduate students in America-and redefinition of women in popular culture). My own perspective, however, is very much from concepts drawn not from gender studies but from political and moral philosophy. I see the oppression of women by any means as primarily a justice issue and not a gender issue. One cannot ignore the history of the way male-dominated structures of power have repressed women, but my own belief is that this is most profitably done by analyzing it through questions of justice and fairness. For a variety of reasons, I feel that this is far more to the point. The reason I point this out is that the opposition to a gender studies approach that I'm about to articulate could easily be misrepresented as an anti-female approach, which simply is not the case. I take considerable pride in the fact that several highly educated feminists have told me that they wish all men viewed women's issues the way that I do. (And I hope that wasn't damning me with faint praise.)
I simply can't follow Jowett in any part of the book where she begins to dissect characters on gender-related distinctions. Since this is a considerable part of the book, I acknowledge that I have a problem with much of the book's content, though as I mentioned above I learned a great deal, simply because not everything she says is parasitic upon gender distinctions. I don't have room here to explain why I find gender distinctions in this kind of discussion unhelpful. I believe that the vast majority of individuals engaged in gender studies would acknowledge that the traits that they ascribe to femininity or masculinity are largely accidents of history, pertinent to a particular society or even most societies, but not universal. For almost every trait that a particular society attributes primarily to one gender, there are cultures or societies or tribes that completely subvert that. We know, for instance, of societies where men take primary care of the young and others where women are the leaders. Or we know of more complex arrangements, such as in some Native American tribes, where men were the leaders, but the leaders were chosen by women. In other words, there are no traits that are necessarily and permanently feminine or masculine. One has to tie such concepts to a particular society. Nonetheless, many who write in gender-specific terms frequently fall into a pattern whereby what they are writing about sounds more definite than this. Jowett is often guilty of this. She writes in a way whereby "feminine" and "masculine" qualities seem to be less marks of society than of men and women. In other words, they seem almost more like natural rather then acculturated qualities. I don't think she would defend that in the end, but nonetheless like most she can sound that way. For my part, I have never understood what is to be gained by coding any quality as female or male, feminine or masculine. For instance, the notion of "caring." Jowett writes of coding "caring" as feminine or aggression as "masculine." Even when one grants that in our particular society there may be a greater propensity for men to be aggressive and women to be caring, we can all also think (at least I can) of men who are far more caring than most women and many women who are more aggressive than most men. "Caring" may be more prevalent among women, but in the end it really emerges more as a human quality than a quality in any but a highly contingent way tied to a particular gender. And that is true for almost any quality that one tries to tie to any gender labeling.
Put the question another way: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be feminine and not masculine? No matter what content you ascribe to this, you can easily end up with "masculine" women and "feminine" men. I'm simply not sure what is to be achieved by such "coding." I don't find it especially empowering in either political or moral analysis. I'm quite interested in models for normative behavior and I find moral discourse to be far more helpful in this regard. If I find someone's behavior rude and aggressive, I find it more to the point to talk about how this indicates a lack of respect and empathy, not whether it is feminine or masculine.
Likewise with BUFFY. One of the reasons I have been so impressive by BUFFY is that I think it may possibly have achieved one of Joss Whedon's stated goals in creating the show: to create a cultural icon. All finer distinctions aside, there is little doubt that Buffy is a power symbol of female empowerment in popular culture. Pre-BUFFY very, very few women got to be the heroes in their own stories on TV, and if they did, it was always in a domestic context. Once you get past Emma Peel and Wonder Woman, about the only strong women on TV were career women like Mary Tyler Moore. Post-BUFFY there has been an explosion of strong female characters, including Xena (pre-TV show BUFFY but post-film), Sydney Bristow of ALIAS, Max Guevara on DARK ANGEL, Aeryn Sun, Zhaan, Chianna, and others on FARSCAPE, and Veronica Mars. I find discussions of how this has or can affect the way that women are perceived to be endlessly fascinating. I fully believe that the effect of BUFFY on the actual possibilities for women in our society has not yet been appreciated. In raising my daughter as a single father I was acutely aware as she grew up how few strong female characters there were in movies and TV. It is beside the point to point out that normal women aren't super empowered like Buffy, technologically enhanced like Max, or warriors like Xena. Normal men aren't super empowered like Superman or Spiderman, or preternaturally gifted fighters like Bruce Lee, or super warriors like Rambo. The point, rather, is that whereas before BUFFY it was unheard of to have remarkable women on TV though it was possible to have remarkable men, now we think nothing of a new female hero. And the acceptance of these new women heroes is a small indication of the way that society is accepting an enlarged role for women. But one doesn't have to resort to gender distinctions to get at any of this.
My belief is that gender studies all too often is a rather abstract game that is played among other gender studies specialists. It is not nor is it ever likely to be a discipline that resonates with the broader public. The kinds of gender distinctions made here don't hit people where they live or even think. I think it is immensely important for scholars like Carolyn Merchant to talk about ways that specifically masculine modes of thinking have informed our thinking about nature, but I find her the exception rather than the rule in the field. My suspicion is that Jowett would code me as a heterosocial, heterosexual "New Man," but I'm left without a good sense of what that really means.
To accept all the premises of the book, one needs to be converted to gender studies first. And I'm afraid that the book in that regard fails. But as I said at the outside, on BUFFY-related matters the book is often a glittering success. It also is a wonderful testimony of how exceptionally rich and multi-faceted the show is. I've had some debates with some of my friends who know I love BUFFY but haven't watched the show themselves. They wonder why I love BUFFY more than shows they wrongly imagine more "intelligent" than it, like THE SOPRANOS or SIX FEET UNDER. Yet neither of these shows has generated anything even remotely like the sustained intellectual debates surrounding BUFFY. Lorna Jowett's book is a wonderful illustration of how good BUFFY really is, for how could a silly teen drama (which non-initiates often imagine the show to be) generate such a remarkably intelligent book?
Book Description
The Popular Culture Primer is an introductory text that traces the history of popular culture and cultural studies. Besides covering the traditional subjects such as the influence of the Frankfurt School and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, this book will cover the cultural studies of science and technology and other subjects that are generally ignored in introductory texts, such as science fiction, fan cultures, and childhood studies. It looks at the impact that these topics have on our understanding of education and popular culture. The Popular Culture Primer is an essential assigned text for any classroom devoted to teaching the history and importance of the subject.
Average customer rating:
- Fantastic Illustrations!!!
- Cute, but not altogether honest
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Steven Cerio's ABC Book: A Drug Primer
Steven Cerio
Manufacturer: Green Candy Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 General
| Instructional & How-To
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
Cartooning
| Comics & Graphic Novels
| Subjects
| Books
Popular Culture
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Cultural
| Anthropology
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
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Reference
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
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General
| Sociology
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Culture
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Alcoholism
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| Health, Mind & Body
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Drug Dependency
| Recovery
| Health, Mind & Body
| Subjects
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ASIN: 1889539074 |
Customer Reviews:
Fantastic Illustrations!!!.......1999-01-25
This clearly isn't a book for light hearted drug legalization activists. It's neither pro nor con, but does seem to offer a darker look at the effects of drug use. This book is just pure fun, with phenomenal illustrations from Steven Cerio.
Cute, but not altogether honest.......1998-11-26
I found this book extremely amusing... A different drug for every letter, and a really nice illustration for each drug. I don't necessarily agree with all the comments made, but I would still recommend this to any light-hearted legalization activist.
Average customer rating:
- Dark, but funny vision of post-9/11 America
- how America is dealing with its fears
- Great book!
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Portents of the Real: A Primer for Post-9/11 America
Susan Willis
Manufacturer: Verso
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Popular Culture
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Anthropology
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
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General
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General
| Sociology
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Culture
| Sociology
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
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Terrorism
| Current Events
| Nonfiction
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September 11
| Current Events
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
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21st Century
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
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Similar Items:
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Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates
ASIN: 1844670236 |
Book Description
The renowned cultural theorist reveals the deeper meanings of popular cultural phenomena in post 9/11 life in America.
The intellectual atmosphere in America following the event known as 9/11 was such that opinion deviating from the officially sanctioned narrative of good vs. evil was actively discouraged, the majority of the media toeing President Bush's war-mongering line. Thus it was left largely to European philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Slavoj Zizek to think through the international consequences of this era-defining moment. However, behind the official smoke screen, certain American intellectuals maintained a critical distance from the propaganda and sought to understand the forces at work within US society.
In this perceptive work, Susan Willis examines a series of phenomena peculiar to post-9/11 America, including the Washington DC snipers, the Stars 'n' Stripes fever, and the anthrax hoaxes, arguing that even minor or seemingly aberrant cultural manifestations bear interpretation and reveal meaning which is inherently inimical to officially promulgated versions of the current climate of fear. As a "primer," this is an ambitious project that seeks to lay the ground for a renaissance of critical thought in America.
Customer Reviews:
Dark, but funny vision of post-9/11 America.......2006-02-13
Willis stitches together such disparate phenomena as the obsession with the flag, sexual fantasies about Osama Bin Laden, anthrax, and Kirk Jones' daredevil leap into Niagra Falls to uncover the psychological underbelly of the US immediately after 9-11. She demonstrates how much of US culture needs to be looked at sideways to be properly understood. For example, the sniper John Allen Muhammad, in his relation to John Lee Malvo, strangely epitomizes the black father figure whose supposed absence is constantly lamented in the media. The book feels so subversive that you understand why so many establishment types declared 'irony is dead' after 9/11. On the other hand, this doesn't mean that Willis understands any better than the rest of us how to get out of this ditch US culture has driven into.
how America is dealing with its fears.......2005-07-06
Willis has an exceptionally sharp eye for how the fears of Americans churned up by 9/11 are glossed over or disguised and thus mollified by elaborate symbolisms, specious hopes and optimism, and other exercises in delusion and denial. She not only has a sharp eye, but also ranges widely over popular culture for examples of this. Any reader will run across new instances of errant patriotism, infantile trust, political ignorance, and rational concerns mutated into mythic horrors. And for the generally familiar instances such as the Washington D. C. sniper murders and the anthrax scares, the author brings out new facets of these. Willis discloses what the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse reveals about aspects of American society; and sees the values (e. g., the exclusionary social ideal of the white Protestant male) and activities of the Ku Klux Klan mirrored in the posturing, mores, and policies of the Bush White House. Surely controversial, but Willis's critique raises issues the country will have to deal with positively if it is to have a role of world leadership and stop the disintegration of the domestic social fabric.
Great book!.......2005-07-06
Portents of the Real is a wonderful cultural analysis of events and phenomena that took place after 9/11. I don't find cultural studies to be a particularly exciting field in general, but Willis' book is clever, well-written, and kept me interested all the way through. It gave me a new perspective on what's going on in our country, and I think it's a must.
Average customer rating:
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American Affect in the Postmodern Era: A Primer
Steven Carter
Manufacturer: Hamilton Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
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Popular Culture
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General
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General
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Culture
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Postmodernism
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ASIN: 0761832505 |
Book Description
How is terrorism transformed into media entertainment? What is the connection between affirmative action and narcissism? Why has pathos become an endangered-perhaps an extinct-species in the contemporary American psyche? In American Affect in the Postmodern Era: A Primer, Steven Carter addresses these and other questions that have helped to define American popular culture since the nineteen-sixties.
Average customer rating:
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Educacion, cultura y sociedad en Calatayud durante el primer tercio del siglo XX, 1902-1931
Jose Angel Urzay Barrios
Manufacturer: Institucion "Fernando el Catolico"
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
Spain
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History
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Spanish
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España
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Teoría
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ASIN: 8478202226 |
Average customer rating:
- Good ... but how do you use the color bar coding?
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Family Fun Activity Book: A Music Primer
Walt Disney
Manufacturer: Hal Leonard Corp
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Popular
| Songbooks
| Theory, Composition & Performance
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Songbooks
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Accessories:
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philosophy hope in a jar daily moisturizer
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Braun IRT 4020 ThermoScan Ear Thermometer
ASIN: 0793507553 |
Book Description
In this terrific introduction to music basics, Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and other beloved Disney characters teach kids the principles of music through songs, games, puzzles, coloring pages and other fun activities. This deluxe full-color edition features favorite songs from Disney movies and theme parks, including: Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo * Chim Chim Cher-ee * Feed the Birds * It's a Small World * Let's Go Fly a Kite * Mickey Mouse March * The Siamese Cat Song * Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious * The Unbirthday Song * Under the Sea * Winnie the Pooh * Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah * and more. Also includes solutions to the puzzles. The Disney Family Fun Activity Book is ideal for music classes, or fun for the entire family!
Customer Reviews:
Good ... but how do you use the color bar coding?.......2000-03-25
This is a very good music primer which has 16 original Disney songs and 4 non-Disney (or Disney-adopted) songs (Mary Had A Little Lamb, etc - simple rhythms to introduce the notes). It would seem that this book was prepared by the Hal Leonard staff since it does a very good job of covering all the basic music elements (staffs, notes, repeats, rests, ties, flats, sharps, et al). The illustrations for explaining whole, half, quarter and eighth notes are clear. It also has a few activity pages (coloring pages, connect the dots, crosswords and more) and 9 simple quizes. The notes are identified by letter and color bar coding to allow younger children to play the tunes. However, unlike a similar book by Hal Leonard ("Kid Songs: EZ Play Today"), this Disney primer did not have any stickers for your keyboard to make use of the color coding. I should also note that the color coding used by the Disney primer is different from the coding used by "Kid Songs"; so even if you have the stickers from the latter, they will be of little use with the former. That notable shortcoming aside (which is why I struck out a star), it is still a very good music primer which, thanks to the attraction of the Disney characters, should make learning music more enjoyable (or palatable). It works for my daughter.
Book Description
Written by a pioneer of this theoretical approach, this astonishing book promises to question the whole direction of social sciences methodology and makes essential reading for social sciences and humanities researchers and postgraduates. It revolves around three key functions:
- it introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audience
- it questions the whole direction of social sciences, methodologically, epistemologically and ontologically
- it provides more productive approaches to the social sciences.
A groundbreaking and comprehensive introduction to this key topic, Thrift's outstanding work brings together for the first time a body of work that has come to be known as non-representational theory. Although well-known in the social sciences, these theories have never before been assembled in one volume. Thrift's noteworthy book therefore, makes a significant contribution to the literature in this area.
Books:
- Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
- Dog Train: A Wild Ride on the Rock-and-Roll Side (Book & CD)
- Every Day, Everywhere: Global Perspectives on Popular Culture
- Every Day, Everywhere: Global Perspectives on Popular Culture
- Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends (Cultural Exegesis)
- Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age (The Road and American Culture)
- Firefly: The Official Companion: Volume Two
- Fitzpatrick's Color Atlas & Synopsis of Clinical Dermatology
- Food and Society in Classical Antiquity (Key Themes in Ancient History)
- For Women Only: What You Need to Know about the Inner Lives of Men
Books Index
Books Home
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Fabric of This World: Inquiries into Calling, Career Choice, and the Design of Human Work
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Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures
