Completely updated, with current examples and new coverage of digital media, this popular handbook provides a range of qualitative approaches that enable students to effectively decipher information conveyed through the channels of mass communication - photography, film, radio, television, and interactive media. It aim is to help students develop critical thinking skills and strategies with regard to what media to use and how to interpret the information that they receive. The techniques i...

Using an interdisciplinary approach combining film, semiotics, social-anthropology and history, this book examines food sciences in selected films to reveal food's power to direct and impose values and beliefs, to understand how dining venues may become sites of social contests and to reveal how food communicated values and beliefs to individuals, to micro communities and to American Society.

A pioneer of LGBTQ studies dares to suggest that gayness is a way of being that gay men must learn from one another to become who they are. The genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised stereotypes—aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers—and in the social meaning of style.

In Hold It Against Me, Jennifer Doyle explores the relationship between difficulty and emotion in contemporary art, treating emotion as an artist's medium. She encourages readers to examine the ways in which works of art challenge how we experience not only the artist's feelings, but our own. Discussing performance art, painting, and photography, Doyle provides new perspectives on artists including Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Thomas Eakins, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wo...

“For anyone who writes, or seeks to understand the writing process, or wants to know more about the erudite and passionate mind of bell hooks, this is the book to read.”—The Philadelphia InquirerIn this timeless essay collection on the writing life, award-winning author and renowned thinker bell hooks shares the secrets gleaned from years of facing the blank page, pen in hand.At a time when the death of the ...

Wark brings together a wide range of artists, including Lisa Steele, Martha Rosler, Lynda Benglis, Gillian Collyer, Margaret Dragu, and Sylvie Tourangeau, and provides detailed readings and viewings of individual pieces, many of which have not been studied in detail before. She reassesses assumptions about the generational and thematic characteristics of feminist art, placing feminist performance within the wider context of minimalism, conceptualism, land art, and happenings

Toni Morrison's visionary explorations of freedom and identity, self and community, against the backdrop of African American history have established her as one of the foremost novelists of her time; an artist whose seriousness of purpose and imaginative power have earned her both widespread critical acclaim and great popular success.This guide to Morrison’s work offers:an accessible introduction to Morrison’s life and historical contextsa guide to her key w...

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is one of the most widely studied of contemporary American authors. Her novels, particularly Beloved, have had a dramatic impact on the American canon and attracted considerable critical commentary. This 2007 Companion introduces and examines her oeuvre as a whole, the first evaluation to include not only her famous novels, but also her other literary works (short story, drama, musical, and opera), her social and literary criticism, and her career as an editor ...

The grotesque - the exagggerated, the deformed, the monstrous - has been a well-considered subject for students of comparative literature and art. In a major addition to the literature of art, cultural criticism and feminist studies, Mary Russo re-examines the grotesque in the light of gender, exploring the works of Angela Carter David Cronenberg Bahktin Kristeva Freud Zizek. Mary Russo looks at the portrayal of the grotesque in Western culture and by combining the iconographic and the his...

The Feminist Spectator as Criticbroke new ground as one of the pioneering books on feminist spectatorship, encouraging resistant readings to generate feminist meanings in performance. Approaching live spectatorship through a range of interdisciplinary methods, the book has been foundational in theater studies, performance studies, and gender/sexuality/women's studies. This updated and enlarged second edition celebrates the book's twenty-fifth anniversary with a substantial new int...

Winner of the 2010 Margaret Atwood Society Best Book Prize.In Engendering Genre, renowned Margaret Atwood scholar Reingard M. Nischik analyzes the relationship between gender and genre in Atwood’s works. She approaches Atwood’s oeuvre by genre – poetry, short fiction, novels, criticism, comics, and film – and examines them individually. She explores how Atwood has developed her genres to be gender-sensitive in both content and form and argues that gender and genre are inhe...

This volume presents the latest explorations of the literary turn in ethnographic work by many of the leading people in the area. Centering on autoethnography, personal narrative, ethnographic performance, and the blending of social science and the arts, the articles collected here emphasize embodiment, experiential understanding, participatory ways of knowing, sensuous engagement, and intimate encounter. Drawing from disciplines as diverse as sociology, philosophy, performance studies, co...