Communications and Culture - Böcker

Art theory', understood as those forms of aesthetics, art history and criticism which began in the Enlightenment and culminated in 'high modernism', is now at an end. These essays, examining the interdependencies of advertising, film, painting and photography, constitute a call for a 'new art theory' - a practice of writing whose end is to contribute to a general 'theory of representations': an understanding of the modes and means of symbolic articulation of our forms of sociality and subjectivity.

This interdisciplinary book explores women's narratives in a wide variety of media and genre, from soap opera and film to the post-modern novel and Shakespearian drama. Adopting an innovative feminist perspective, it focuses particularly on the themes of hybridity and monstrosity in language and the body. In doing so, it raises issues to do with closure and temporal and spatial dislocation, drawing on themes of passion, paranoia and desire.

Neither a manifesto nor a one-sided critique, this new book introduces a number of original essays exploring various aspects of that contemporary cultural phenomenon named postmodernism. These essays are prefaced by an introductory essay which sets out the major lines of a debate which is about nothing less than the current shape and future prospects of our society.

An introduction to and critique of the latest trends in critical theory.

The social sciences are still predominantly modernist disciplines and, as such, products of the Enlightenment. Postmodernism and the Social Sciences examines the nature and potential of this postmodernist challenge in each of the major social sciences.

The social sciences are still predominantly developments of the Enlightenment, extensions of the conceptions and methods of Newtonian science. Recently a number of social theorists have brought the presuppositions of Enlightenment thinking under critical scrutiny and have called into question the basis of much social scientific thinking. Despite the seriousness of this postmodernist challenge, its nature and dimensions remain unclear especially to those in the modernist mainstream. The essays in this book are designed to call attention to the challenge and in a manner accessible to those not so familiar with the more theoretical writings of postmodernism. The essays range over the social sciences and ask what the implications of postmodernism thinking are for the modernist disciplines of social anthropology, sociology, geography, social psychology, international relations and economics. An introductory essay provides a survey of the beginnings of postmodernism in literary theory and in the study of art and architecture and raises questions about the translation of the vocabulary of postmodernism into the social sciences.