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Everyday life and cultural theory : an introduction / Ben Highmore.

By: Highmore, Ben, 1961-.
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookPublisher: London ; New York : Routledge, 2002Description: viii, 200 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. + pbk.ISBN: 0415223032 (pbk.); 0415223024; 9780415223034.Subject(s): Life | Civilization, Modern -- 20th century | Culture -- Philosophy -- History -- 20th centuryDDC classification: 306
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Item type Current library Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
General Lending MTU Crawford College of Art and Design Library Lending 306 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Checked out 15/02/2024 00194791
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Everyday Life and Cultural Theory provides a unique critical and historical introduction to theories of everyday life. Ben Highmore traces the development of conceptions of everyday life, from the cultural sociology of Georg Simmel, through the Mass-Observation project of the 1930s to contemporary theorists such as Michel de Certeau.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 179-193) and index.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

  • Illustrations (p. vi)
  • Preface and acknowledgements (p. vii)
  • 1. Figuring the everyday (p. 1)
  • 2. Arguments (p. 17)
  • 3. Simmel: Fragments of everyday life (p. 33)
  • 4. Surrealism: The marvellous in the everyday (p. 45)
  • 5. Benjamin's trash aesthetics (p. 60)
  • 6. Mass-Observation: A science of everyday life (p. 75)
  • 7. Henri Lefebvre's dialectics of everyday life (p. 113)
  • 8. Michel de Certeau's poetics of everyday life (p. 145)
  • 9. Postscript: Everday life and the future of cultural studies (p. 174)
  • Bibliography (p. 179)
  • Index (p. 194)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

For both graduate and undergraduate students, this is an excellent survey, albeit with one idiosyncrasy: the large, central chapter on the fascinating but anomalous "mass-observation." This severs the discussion of Simmel and Benjamin from that of Lefebvre and de Certeau--whereas the chapter on surrealism could have served as a point of linkage. Besides a summary chapter, there is a superb introduction motivating the entire project. For Highmore (Univ. of the West of England), the everyday is the discovery of an "avant-garde sociology," contemporaneous with modernity, and so emerges as a topic definitive of "cultural studies" itself. Perhaps this goes part way toward explaining why "everyday life" is not a topic recognized by most academic philosophers. This volume helps, however, with one of the central stumbling blocks: the failure to acknowledge Simmel (alongside Frege and Husserl) as a founding father of a distinct stream of modernist thought. Continued ignorance of Simmel's philosophical import means that the topics and thinkers discussed here will remain balkanized among aesthetics, critical theory, and cultural studies. Superior in focus to Michael E. Gardiner's Critiques of Everyday Life (2000), Highmore's work finds a closer companion in David Frisby's Fragments of Modernity (1985). Recommended for upper-division undergraduates and above. D. W. Sullivan Metropolitan State College of Denver

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Ben Highmore is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at the University of the West of England

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