The Contest Of Meaning

Photography's great success gives the impression that the major questions that have haunted the medium are now resolved. On the contrary, the most important questions about photography are just beginning to be asked. These fourteen essays, with over 200 illustrations, critically examine prevailing beliefs about the medium and suggest new ways to explain the history of photography. They are organized around the questions: What are the social consequences of aesthetic practice? How does photography construct sexual difference? How is photography used to promote class and national interests? What are the politics of photographic truth? The Contest of Meaning summarizes the challenges to traditional photographic history that have developed in the last decade out of a consciously political critique of photographic production. Contributions by a wide range of important Americans critics reexamine the complex—and often contradictory—roles of photography within society. Douglas Crimp, Christopher Phillips, Benjamin Buchloh, and Abigail Solomon Godeau examine the gradually developed exclusivity of art photography and describe the politics of canon formation throughout modernism. Catherine Lord, Deborah Bright, Sally Stein, and Jan Zita Grover examine the ways in which the female is configured as a subject, and explain how sexual difference is constructed across various registers of photographic representation. Carol Squiers, Esther Parada, and Richard Bolton clarify the ways in which photography serves as a form of mass communication, demonstrating in particular how photographic production is affected by the interests of the powerful patrons of communications. The three concluding essays, by Rosalind Krauss, Martha Rosler, and Allan Sekula, critically examine the concept of photographic truth by exploring the intentions informing various uses of "objective" images within society.

New Historicism has been one of the major developments in literary theory over the last decade, both in the USA and Europe. In this book, Wilson and Dutton examine the theories behind New Historicism and its celebrated impact in practice on Renaissance Drama, providing an important collection both for students of the genre and of literary theory.

This book analyzes how the English as a Second Language (ESL) pedagogic genre has been re-contextualized in the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press National College English Teaching Contest (SFLEP) for presentation to the contest judges and audience. Departing from prior research on contest discourse, it focuses on the role of teaching contests in re-contextualizing educational practices. Moreover, it addresses the processes of genre blurring and solidification at work in new discourse events. The results presented here serve to frame teaching contest discourse in a fuller contextual configuration and will help contest sponsors, participants, and audience members better understand this popular social event and its relations to real-world teaching practices, while simultaneously helping teachers to understand the relevance of such contest practice. Moreover, the research methods will benefit those linguists who are interested in researching other types of event discourses.

This book identifies ten linguistic traps in our everyday language usage and provides philosophical justification for a method of determining internally consistent definitions of groups of related terms that avoid all ten traps. Various examples and applications of this method are given throughout. The book demonstrates how the seemingly straightforward matter of our understandings of the meaning of words can have major implications for the exercise of power. This book illustrates how this insight originated from management research into project governance that found lack of agreement on the definition of that term, as well as on many other important management terms. To resolve this, the impacts of evolution, philosophy and linguistics upon our everyday language usage were investigated. The research documented in this book found that the human tool called language works well for describing physical objects but has difficulty producing a common understanding of the meaning of concepts - a problem not restricted to the management field. That field is simply a microcosm that exposes a much more widespread linguistic usage problem affecting our personal, religious and political lives; one that existed at the time of Plato and Aristotle and has laid hidden for millennia. This book includes a lexicon of 70 commonly used but confused or contested management terms, as well as a further 18 such project management terms, all developed by applying its definitional method. The terms include governance, power, ethics, leadership and their associated groups of terms. The book explores how disagreement can be resolved using these new clear definitions and extends this into an analysis of who ‘good’ ethics are good for. It also incorporates a section on “how to speak management and actually know what you are talking about”, written in the style of an ‘idiots guide’ or ‘guide for dummies’. This identifies common, everyday circumstances in which lack of agreed definitions cause avoidable confusion and provides the book’s focus on conflict dissolution rather than on conflict resolution.

The Native American Contest Powwow introduces Cultural Tethering Theory to convey the importance of the contest powwow in the celebration and preservation of Native American culture. The book addresses the concepts of culture, cultural change, acculturation, assimilation, and illustrates how competitive powwows align with and differ from competitive sporting events. Authors Steven Aicinena and Sebahattin Ziyanak go on to explain how the modern intertribal contest powwow evolved and why modern Native American cultures are experiencing an erosion of traditional values, a rapid loss of traditional languages, dysfunctional changes in social organization, limited opportunity to transmit culturally valued knowledge, and reduced opportunities for youths to observe culturally appropriate behavior. The authors also examine Native American identity and explore who can legitimately claim to be a Native American under current laws and customs. Additional topics addressed include blood quantum, cultural knowledge, cultural participation, being Indian, and playing Indian. Finally, the authors describe the difference between being Native American and playing Indian in powwow and pseudo-cultural powwow environments.

This book includes some 200 complete entries from the award-winning Dictionary of Women Artists, as well as a selection of introductory essays from the main volume.