Synopses & Reviews
The World of the Image Trudy Smoke • Alan Robbins
LONGMAN TOPICS are brief, thought-provoking readers on a single complex, compelling, topic. Featuring about 30 full-length reading selections, these volumes are generally half the size and half the cost of standard composition readers.
Everywhere we look in today’s world, images are pervasive; we are immersed in a world of images–and we are relying more and more on images to understand ourselves and our world. The World of the Image, by Alan Robbins and Trudy Smoke, explores our reliance on images and the tools of analysis and description that we have to understand what we see.
Features
- Ch. 1, The Act of Seeing, explores the mysteries of vision itself and will provide students with new respect for the delicate process of seeing and insight into how we make sense of a visual world.
- Ch. 2, Mirroring Ourselves, explores notions of beauty, health, body decoration, and identity.
- Ch. 3, The Visual Surround, looks at the impact of images on us as citizens and consumers.
- Ch. 4, Images and Their Uses, provides insight into the wide range of uses to which images have been put throughout history, from cave paintings to dream-based art.
- Ch. 5, Pictures That Prod, shows how images can change our behavior.
- Ch. 6, The Image As Reality, addresses the slippery distinction between images and reality.
- All chapters provide opening quotations, introductions, biographical data about each writer, and writing and discussion prompts that both precede (Getting Started) and close each reading.
- Making Connections sections end each chapter and encourage students to find links among the readings.
Synopsis
Everywhere we look in today’s world, images are pervasive; we are immersed in a world of images–and we are relying more and more on images to understand ourselves and our world. This brief, focused reader explores our reliance on images and the tools of analysis and description that we have to understand what we see.
Table of Contents
Preface.
1. The Act of Seeing
Deborah Curtis, Seeing and Awareness
Denise Grady, The Vision Thing: Mainly in the Brain
Mark Prendergrast, When Babies Become Aware of Themselves
Annie Dillard, Seeing
James Elkins, How to Look at Nothing
2. Mirroring Ourselves
Daniel Goleman, Equation for Beauty Emerges in Studies
Susan Bardo, Never Just Pictures
Philippe Liotard, The Body Jigsaw
Donna M. Wells, Visual History and Afican American Families of the Nineteenth Century
Gina Kolata & Ivor Peterson, New Jersey Trying a New Way for Witnesses to Pick Suspects
3. The Visual Surround
Read Mercer Schuchardt, The Perfect Icon for an Imperfect Postliterate World
Thomas J. Campanella, Eden by Wire: Webcameras and the Telepresent Landscape
Ann Marie Seward Barry, Media Images and Violence
Thomas Hine, Notable Quotables: Why Images Become Icons
Robin Landa, Speaking Brand
4. Images and Their Uses
Robert Hughes, Behold the Stone Age
Edmund Carpenter, Silent Music and Invisible Art
David Gelman, Dreams on the Couch
Douglas S. Fox, The Inner Savant
Oliver Sacks, In the River of Consciousness
5. Pictures That Prod
Deborah Solomon, Once Again, Patriotic Themes Ring True as Art
Alan Robbins, Dire Image: The Art of Persuasion
Richard Goldstein, Cartoon Wars
Nina Willdorf, Reality’s Flight
Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?
6. The Image as Reality
Thomas Wheeler, The Digital Media Landscape: Liquid Imagery, Shaky Credibility
Ada Louise Huxtable, Living with the Fake and Learning to Like It
Bob Berman, Colorizing the Cosmos
Ernst Gombrich, Pygmalion’s PowerWalter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechnical Reproduction