Search results for ""author professor emeritus paul duncum""
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Popular Pleasures: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Popular Visual Culture
Today’s many popular aesthetic pleasures have a very long history. Paul Duncum considers the historical critical discourses, and socio-political issues raised by aesthetic pleasures in fifteen thematic chapters. Using illustrative examples from the past, present, and across cultures, he challenges the idea of any decline of cultural standards and argues that no grounds exist for cultural pessimism. Refusing to condemn popular culture on the basis of taste, he reserves critique for the socio-political ideologies aesthetics invariably serve. Art history, film, cultural studies, and philosophical aesthetics are each employed to show that the sensory/emotional lures of today’s popular culture are mostly identical to those of premodern fine art. They include the violent, the horrific, the sentimental, the exotic, the erotic, and the humorous. Some of these pleasures derive from our evolutionary biology; they are all an important part of what it means to be human, and central to understanding contemporary society. Examples are wide-ranging, including British seaside postcards, Disney films, Nazi propaganda, burlesque, modern advertising, as well as many exemplars of fine art. The book reveals fresh insights for all those studying visual culture, art history, aesthetics, media studies, and media and art education.
£85.00
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Images of Childhood: A Visual History From Stone to Screen
Drawing on a rich legacy of pictorial evidence, Images of Childhood examines historical constructions of childhood and how they reinforce or challenge the prevailing view of childhood as a state of innocence. Each chapter explores how visual elements such as framing, points-of view, and lighting, as well as clothes, accessories, and body language, help to construct our many different conceptions of children: from members of the family unit and assumed gender roles; to schooling and aesthetic objects; through to their economic value and use in political propaganda. Skillfully navigating a multitude of perspectives on this topic, Paul Duncum considers both how our ideas, beliefs and values have changed throughout history and how some have remained unchanged. He also explores the cultural notion of “the child within” and how this has contributed to the way adults perceive children. The result is a text far broader in scope than any other in its field, as art history is interweaved with contemporary popular culture to explore how we visually represent childhood. In doing so, the book highlights the real-life implications that these representations have on children’s rights.
£24.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Picture Pedagogy: Visual Culture Concepts to Enhance the Curriculum
Contemporary societies are saturated with pictures. They are globally a part of everyday life, and they are seductive, offering values and beliefs in such highly pleasurable forms that it is often difficult to resist their power to persuade. Yet interpreting pictures is largely neglected in schools. Picture Pedagogy addresses this head on, showing that pictures can be used as a powerful form of classroom pedagogy. Duncum explores key concepts and curriculum examples to empower you to support students to develop a critical consciousness about pictures, whether teaching art, media, language or social studies. Drawing on the interpretive concepts of representation, rhetoric, ideology, aesthetic pleasure, intertextuality and the gaze, Duncum shows how you can develop your students’ skills so that their power as viewers can match the power of pictures to seduce. Examples from the history of fine art and contemporary popular mass media, including Big Data and fake news, are drawn together and shown to be appealing to the same aesthetic pleasures. Often these pleasures are benign, but also problematic, helping to promote morally questionable ideas about a range of topics including gender, race and sexual orientation, and this is explored fully.
£25.99