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Understanding Representation
- Jen Webb - University of Canberra, Australia
December 2008 | 176 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
"This is an extraordinarily lucid book. I am not sure that there is anyone who can do this sort of thing better than Jen Webb. It is a gift to students; extremely accessible yet complex and sophisticated in its treatment of theories and concepts of representation."
-Jim McGuigan, Loughborough University
Understanding Representation offers an accessible, engaging, and genuinely interdisciplinary introduction to the concept of representation. Drawing together the ideas, practices, and techniques associated with the subject, this book puts them in historical context and demonstrates their relevance to everyday life. Topics include linguistic and political representation, art and media, and philosophical and cognitive approaches.
Key Features
Helping readers develop a sophisticated attitude toward meaning and understand the relationship between truth and identity, Understanding Representation is an essential introduction to what is meant by 'representation'.
-Jim McGuigan, Loughborough University
Understanding Representation offers an accessible, engaging, and genuinely interdisciplinary introduction to the concept of representation. Drawing together the ideas, practices, and techniques associated with the subject, this book puts them in historical context and demonstrates their relevance to everyday life. Topics include linguistic and political representation, art and media, and philosophical and cognitive approaches.
Key Features
- Explains complex theories with a highly readable and refreshing writing style
- Demonstrates the techniques and perspectives offered by semiotics, discourse analysis, poetics, politics, narratology, and visual culture
- Covers the new ideas, practices, and media environments that have emerged since the work of Barthes, Eco, and Foucault
- Teaches readers how to interrogate and interpret the world of signs in which they live
Helping readers develop a sophisticated attitude toward meaning and understand the relationship between truth and identity, Understanding Representation is an essential introduction to what is meant by 'representation'.
Introduction
Resemblance, Representation and Reality
Language and Representation
Representation and the Subject/The Subject of Representation
Representation and the Political World
Representation in the Consciousness Industries: Art and the Mass Media
Conclusion: Representation and Ethics: The Problem of the Gap
Understanding Representation has been recommended to the students of Issues in Representation. The book perfectly demonstrates perceptions and meanings regarding the common sense of the act of representation and what also exists beyond common sense. The structure of the book and its particular emphasis on language and politics will help students to understand representation as an object and as a process and will help them to contextualise the importance of the philosophical work contained in Images: A Reader
Creative, Critical and Communication Studies, School of Humanities, Greenwich University
October 19, 2009
