HON392: Honors Seminar

This collection brings together an exciting group of established and emerging scholars to consider the history of feminist film theory and new developments in the field and in film culture itself. Opening the field up to urgent questions and covering such topics as new experimental film, the digital image, consumerism, activism, and pornography, Feminisms will be essential reading for scholars of both film and feminism.

`This collection of classic essays in the study of visual culture fills a major gap in this new and expanding intellectual field. Its major strength is its insistence on the importance of three central aspects of the study of visual culture: the sign, the institution and the viewing subject. It will provide readers, teachers and students with an essential text in visual and cultural studies′ - Janet Wolff, University of Rochester Visual Culture provides an invaluable resource of over 30 key statements from a wide range of disciplines, including four editorial essays which place the readings in their historical and theoretical context. Although underpinned by a focus on contemporary cultural theory, this Reader puts the study of visual culture and the rhetoric of the image at centre stage. Divided into three parts: Cultures of the Visual; Regulating Photographic Meaning; and Looking and Subjectivity, the Reader enables students to make hitherto unmade connections between art, film and photography history and theory, history, semiotics and communications, media studies, and cultural theory. Visual Culture sets the agenda for the study of Visual Culture and will be essential reading for researchers and students alike.

Visual Cultures is the first study of the place of visuality and literacy in specific nations around the world, featuring authoritative, insightful essays on the value accorded to the visual and the verbal in Japan, Poland, China, Russia, Ireland, and Slovenia. Focusing on the national instead of the global, distinguished art critic James Elkins offers a critique of general histories of visuality, such as those of Martin Jay or Jean Baudrillard, as well as a critique of local histories of visuality, as in Third Text and other postcolonial studies. The content is not only analytic, but also historical, tracing changes in the significance of visual and verbal literacy in each nation. Visual Cultures also explores questions of national identity and the many issues Elkins raises suggest a wealth of promising avenues for future research.

An Introduction to Visual Culture provides a wide-ranging introduction to the now established interdisciplinary field of visual culture. Mapping a global history and theory of visual culture, An Introduction to Visual Culture asks how and why visual media have become so central to everyday life. This new, completely updated second edition has been adapted to match the challenges of interpreting globalization since the publication of the first edition a decade ago. Improved text design and colour images throughout make it an even more valuable teaching tool. Brand new features in the second edition include Key Image studies from Holbein#65533;s The Ambassadors, to Blade Runner and the Abu Ghraib atrocities; and a Key Words section in each chapter, discussing vital critical terms and the debates that surround them. In this innovative, thoroughly revised and extended edition, Nicholas Mirzoeff explores: an extensive range of visual forms from painting, sculpture, and photography to television, cinema, and the Internet the centrality of #65533;race#65533; and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and the body in shaping visual culture the importance of images of natural disaster and conflict, such as Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing war in Iraq.

Since publication of the first edition in 1974, Film Theory and Criticism has been the most widely used and cited anthology of critical writings about film. Extensively revised and updated, this fifth edition is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in film theory and criticism. Featuring both classic texts and cutting-edge essays from almost a century of thought and writing about the movies, it includes 23 articles new to this edition and new introductions for the individual sections. The sections themselves have also been reformulated to help lead students into aricher understanding of what the movies have and can accomplish both as individual works and as contributions to what has been called the art form of the twentieth century. Building upon the wide range of selections and the extensive historical coverage that marked previous editions, this new compilation stretches from the earliest attempts to define the cinema to the most recent efforts to place film in the context of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, andto explore issues of gender and race. Selections represent four periods in the development of film theory: the "classic formalist" era from film's beginnings roughly to the 1950s; the period of film's societal implications from 1950 to the seventies; the time of emerging theories beginning in theseventies that includes semiotic and structuralist models, approaches from cultural history, Marxist theory, psychoanalytic analysis, and feminist theory; and most recently, the period in which theories are merged into larger perspectives for understanding individual films as well as film ingeneral.