Introducing Cultural and Media Studies: A Semiotic Approach

This second edition of the popular introductory textbook Tools for Cultural Studies, has been thoroughly revised and updated for a new generation of students taking introductory courses in cultural studies and cultural analysis at a tertiary level. It provides a solid grounding in the key terms and theories necessary for the study of popular culture and media texts. Without underestimating the complexity of the social, this text encourages a critical and inventive attitude to cultural theory and, through its practical step-by-step approach, is very confidence-building.

Literature & Fiction

Thwaites, Tony

Davis, Lloyd

Mules, Warwick

History & Criticism

Red Globe Press

This core textbook offers a concise, direct and easy-to-use introduction to how semiotics can be employed to understand culture. It adopts a practical and versatile approach to cultural analysis, beginning not with an abstract body of theory but with a number of examples of social sign use which are examined critically using basic semiotic terms and concepts to build up the reader’s analytic vocabulary in a practical way. This book is designed to be read in several ways. First of all, it offers a structured approach to its subject with successive chapters reconsidering and building upon issues raised in earlier chapters. The layout of the text supports alternative pathways through the material, however. Written principally with the undergraduate student reader in mind, this is the essential research tool for students and lecturers. It is the ideal international starting-point for a very wide range of courses both in cultural and media studies and related subjects such as film studies, literature and sociology.

An introductory textbook for tertiary courses in cultural studies, communications studies, and social semiotics. It aims to equip the student with the conceptual materials necessary for advanced undergraduate study in these fields. Where other textbooks in his area ask the student first to learn and then to apply a body of theoretical work, Tools for Cultural Studies begins by identifying a number of aspects found in actual situations of social sign use, and examines how these may be thought through in the most effective ways. Rather than treat its materials as elements of a single overall theory of communication, it develops a flexible set of conceptual tools for a practical analytic competence. As well as pointing out the complex nature of the social, it encourages a critical and inventive attitude to cultural theory itself.

Tools for Cultural Studies: An Introduction

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Palgrave

Reading Freud: Psychoanalysis as Cultural Theory (Core Cultural Theorists series)

Cultural theory has found a renewed interest in psychoanalysis, bringing many new readers to Freud and his work. This book is an introductory guide to Freud and brings together for the first time an overview of Freud′s work which enables the reader to see quickly where and in which texts Freud develops his main ideas. This book is now the definitive guide to the content of Freud′s texts: what′s there and where to find it.

Philosophy

Sage Publications Ltd.

Cultural theory has found a renewed interest in psychoanalysis, bringing many new readers to Freud and his work. This book is an introductory guide to Freud and brings together for the first time an overview of Freud's work which enables the reader to see quickly where and in which texts Freud develops his main ideas. This book is now the definitive guide to the content of Freud's texts: what's there and where to find it.

"No one yet has made Joyce's sponging ways so very, very interesting, or so important. Tony Thwaites takes the notions of promise, debt, mortgage, and signature forward to where no critic has yet gone, and back into the Joyce works to their new illumination. [He] demonstrates in lucid and engaging prose how the promise--a deferral founded on a certain notion of both past and future--structures Joyce's works."--Eloise Knowlton, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MichiganIn arguing that James Joyce's writing is structured everywhere by the peculiar temporalities of the promise--the not yet of speculation--and the signature that carries it, Tony Thwaites casts new light on a number of debates in Joyce studies and narrative theory.  He maintains that to read Joyce is to be caught up in the pleasures of the promise but also by the frustrations of knowing that a promise remains a promise only as long as it doesn't (yet) deliver. In both the personal experience of reading Joyce and in Joyce’s life, with its perpetual cycles of debt and wasteful spending, the promise is where things remain open to the future. Not only in the convoluted history of its publication but also in the structures of the writing, Joyce's work involves intricate delays, overbiddings, speculations, and promises. Through readings ranging from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, Thwaites expands his analysis of this temporality into a discussion of the temporalities of fiction and the effects of the subject in language.  Through this approach, Thwaites reframes a number of familiar critical debates and issues--Joycean aesthetics and history, the "mythic" parallels of Ulysses, the relationship of the interior monologue to literary realism, the vexed figure of the narrator, and the endless effects of signature and countersignature throughout the works.Tony Thwaites writes on modernist literature, literary theory, and cultural studies, and teaches at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

Joycean Temporalities: Debts, Promises, and Countersignatures (Florida James Joyce)

University Press of Florida

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Books by Thwaites, Tony

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Thwaites, Tony. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Introducing Cultural and Media Studies: A Semiotic Approach

Introducing Cultural and Media Studies: A Semiotic Approach

Tools for Cultural Studies: An Introduction

Reading Freud: Psychoanalysis as Cultural Theory (Core Cultural Theorists series)

Reading Freud: Psychoanalysis as Cultural Theory (Core Cultural Theorists series)

Joycean Temporalities: Debts, Promises, and Countersignatures (Florida James Joyce)