Cantitate/Preț
Produs

New Mythologies in Design and Culture: Reading Signs and Symbols in the Visual Landscape

Autor Rebecca Houze
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 18 mai 2016
Taking as its point of departure Roland Barthes' classic series of essays, Mythologies, Rebecca Houze presents an exploration of signs and symbols in the visual landscape of postmodernity. In nine chapters Houze considers a range of contemporary phenomena, from the history of sustainability to the meaning of sports and children's building toys. Among the ubiquitous global trademarks she examines are BP, McDonald's, and Nike. What do these icons say to us today? What political and ideological messages are hidden beneath their surfaces? Taking the idea of myth in its broadest sense, the individual case studies employ a variety of analytic methods derived from linguistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, and art history. In their eclecticism of approach they demonstrate the interdisciplinarity of design history and design studies. Just as Barthes' meditations on culture concentrated on his native France, New Mythologies is rooted in the author's experience of living and teaching in the United States. Houze's reflections encompass both contemporary American popular culture and the history of American industry, with reference to such foundational figures as Thomas Jefferson and Walt Disney. The collection provides a point of entry into today's complex postmodern or post-postmodern world, and suggests some ways of thinking about its meanings, and the lessons we might learn from it.
Citește tot Restrânge

Toate formatele și edițiile

Toate formatele și edițiile Preț Express
Paperback (1) 19450 lei  6-8 săpt.
  Bloomsbury Publishing – 18 mai 2016 19450 lei  6-8 săpt.
Hardback (1) 77583 lei  6-8 săpt.
  Bloomsbury Publishing – 18 mai 2016 77583 lei  6-8 săpt.

Preț: 19450 lei

Preț vechi: 22450 lei
-13% Nou

Puncte Express: 292

Preț estimativ în valută:
3722 3840$ 3150£

Carte tipărită la comandă

Livrare economică 04-18 martie

Preluare comenzi: 021 569.72.76

Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780857857620
ISBN-10: 0857857622
Pagini: 272
Ilustrații: 11 colour and 25 bw illus
Dimensiuni: 156 x 234 x 13 mm
Greutate: 0.5 kg
Editura: Bloomsbury Publishing
Colecția Bloomsbury Academic
Locul publicării:London, United Kingdom

Caracteristici

First book that takes into consideration cultural moments and designs and uses them a form a wider discussion of how design is shaped

Notă biografică

Rebecca Houze is Associate Professor of Art History at Northern Illinois University, USA, where she teaches courses on the history of design and the decorative arts. She is the co-editor, with Grace Lees-Maffei, of 'The Design History Reader' (Bloomsbury 2010).

Cuprins

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Green: Thoughts on Sustainability2. Gateway: Transportation, Triumph, and Striking Gold3. Bull's-Eye! A Meditation on Targets4. I is for Indian: Learning to Read Race in America5. The False Mirror: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Uncanny6. Red State Blue State: Totem and Taboo7. DS: Touchscreen Goddess8. Just Do It: Imperative and Empowerment in the Athletic Shoe9. The Grid: Design in PlaySelect BibliographyIndex

Recenzii

From the arches of McDonald's to the bull's eye of Target, signs and symbols have rich stories to tell. In these smart, engaging essays, Rebecca Houze unlocks the tensions that dwell just beneath the surface of commercial iconography.
Rebecca Houze has unpacked some of today's most commonly known yet often misunderstood symbols, objects and eye-kons of our times. Through the design lens, she gives our everyday objective world an engagingly new and vividly clear perspective.
New Mythologies tells the much-needed political and ideological histories of the symbols embedded in the brand logos of our time. In doing so with the engaging style of a storyteller, Rebecca Houze's book is both a pleasurable and necessary study of contemporaneity and the visual landscape that sustains it.
In this book Rebecca Houze weaves a wonderfully vivid thread of meaning through things we thought we knew - from McDonald's golden arches to the Nintendo DS - analyzing their visual and cultural cues. In the processshe elucidates their significance and their relevance to us all.
This extraordinary book leads the reader through a series of case studies that illuminate our contemporary world of ideological signification. Rebecca Houze begins with Roland Barthes's Mythologies, then elegantly weaves into her text all that has come after: brands and anti-brands, globalism, sustainability, consumption studies, and design history.
Inspired by Roland Barthes's classic Mythologies, designer and historian Rebecca Houze has produced a lively collection of essays on the ideological workings of visual codes in our contemporary world. Her topics range broadly--from analyzing the designations for "red" and "blue" states, reading children's primers, looking at graphic motifs in signage and brands, and examining the seductive force of products designed to optimize global consumption. Her insights are highly informed, critically sophisticated, and beautifully researched, and the essays show just how important it is to have designers read the graphically coded world for us. New Mythologies is a model of design writing and research.