— philosopher, historian and critic often identified as a post-structuralist interested in destabilizing meaning, undermining theoretical systems of universality, and studying ways in which knowledge is produced in particular cultural and historical moments.
In the The Order of Things, Foucault employs his method of archaeology to demonstrate how scientific knowledge is dependent on the prevailing [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘visual rhetorics’
January 2, 2009
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things
January 2, 2009
Donald Norman The Design of Everyday Things
Working from the assumption that design is an act of communication between designer and user and that in Western cultlure we live among objects of desire rather than objects of use, in The Design of Everyday Things, Norman focuses on helping his readers design objects that are understandable and usable. Good designs he claims provide [...]
January 2, 2009
Elkins, James — Visual Studies
Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction James Elkins (art historian-School of Art Institute of Chicago)
In Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, Elkins introduces readers to the emerging field of visual studies, interrogates the discipline’s current paradigm, and suggests ten ways in which the field [...]
January 2, 2009
Urban, Greg. Metaculture: How Cultures Move through the World
In this text, Urban uses the framework of circulation to investigate the ways in which culture is socially transmitted. Urban is especially interested in the role that self-reflexivity plays in the definition and the transmission of culture. In other words, he is interested in the role that metaculture plays in the acceleration of culture and [...]
January 2, 2009
Van Leeuwen, Theo — Introducing Social Semiotics
Theo Van Leeuwen Introducing Social Semiotics
In this introduction to social semiotics, Van Leeuwen presents a rich discourse to describe the ways in which various semiotic resources communicate in specific locations and practices. In addition, Part I offers practical methods by which students can begin to explore the various uses of semiotic resources, identify semiotic rules, [...]
January 2, 2009
Stafford, Barbara Maria — Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting
In Visual Analogy, Stafford attempts to resuscitate the visual method of analogy and encourage her postmodern readers to realize the numerous and valuable potentials of seeing same-ness in difference. She turns toward images themselves to explain the nature and function of the analogical procedure that takes place in our consciousness. For as she explains, there [...]
January 2, 2009
On Perspective…Elkins, Panofsky, Crary
Panofsky, Erwin Perspective as Symbolic Form
In Perspective as Symbolic Form, Panofsky traces the transformation of perspective in art from antiquity to modernity. As Panofsky explains, Renaissance perspective systemized space on the canvas. The mathematization or rationalization of space on the canvas, which utilized a central vanishing point on the canvas originating from a singular eye, [...]
January 2, 2009
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology (1967
Notes from Spivak’s preface to Of Grammatology:
In the preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Spivak offers us a way to understand the conversations that OG responds to, the dense, shifting and unstable concepts that Derrida introduces in OG, a clarification of and supplement to Derrida’s key arguments, and an overview of the text’s structure. Spivak reminds [...]
January 2, 2009
McLuhan, Marshall – Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
In the first 70 pages of Understanding Media, McLuhan theorizes about the cultural implications of the turn toward electronic technology in a growing globalized arena. He advocates for a kind of education that trains perception; afterall, in our global village, we should have a “heightened awareness of responsiblity” about the effects of media on culture [...]
January 2, 2009
Taylor, Mark C. — Hiding
–moves between theology, literature, literary criticism, art, architecture, biochemistry, neurophysiology, fashion, and technology
Synopisis taken from University of Chicago Press presssite:
The age of information, media, and virtuality is transforming every aspect of human experience. Questions that have long haunted the philosophical imagination are becoming urgent practical concerns: Where does the natural end and the artificial [...]
