Product Description

This broad-ranging text offers a comprehensive outline of how visual images, language and discourse work as `systems of representation'.

Individual chapters explore: representation as a signifying practice in a rich diversity of social contexts and institutional sites; the use of photography in the construction of national identity and culture; other cultures in ethnographic museums; fantasies of the racialized `Other' in popular media, film and image; the construction of masculine identities in discourses of consumer culture and advertising; and the gendering of narratives in television soap operas.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42959 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Customer Reviews

the best introduction to "the construction of meaning"
This book is one of the six textbooks used in the D318 course at the Open University (Media, Culture and Identity). It is also the best introduction to "signifying practices", the "construction of meaning", the "formation of social knowledge or meaning". Stuart Hall did a great job. The book has the rare and unusual quality of 1) making you terribly interested in the debates presented 2) creating the "thirst" to read more and thus build a fairly large and very representative bibliography. I have thus far read some 8 titles which are suggested in the reference lists at the end of each of the 6 chapters.

The breadth, the intelligence, the detail, the quality of the debates presented all show that if you take the D318 course from the Open University you will most probably become a lot more qualified than if you attend traditional universities anywhere in the world. Absolutely amazing quality. superb and highly recommended.

Brilliant Cultural Studies Book
This book has complex cultural theories described in an understandable way with nice excercises and comprehensive cases. Stuart Hall is a wonderful author and a brilliant mind.