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7 oeuvres 787 utilisateurs 4 critiques 1 Favoris

A propos de l'auteur

Stuart Ewen is professor and chair of the Department of Film and Visual Studies at Hunter College. He is also professor in the Ph.D. programs in history and sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Comprend les noms: Stuart Ewen

Œuvres de Stuart Ewen

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male
Professions
professor
Organisations
Hunter College
CUNY Graduate Center
Courte biographie
Stuart Ewen is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies at Hunter College, and in the Ph.D. Programs in History, Sociology and American Studies at The CUNY Graduate Center (City University of New York). He is generally considered one of the originators of the field of Media Studies, and his writings have continued to shape debates in the field.

He is the author of a number of influential books, including PR! A Social History of Spin (1996) and All Consuming images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (1987; 1999). The latter provided the foundation for Bill Moyers' 4-part, Peabody, Emmy, and National Education Association Awards winning PBS series, "The Public Mind." PR! was a finalist for The Financial Times Global Business Book Award in 1997, and provided the basis for a 4-part BBC Television Series, "The Century of the Self."

EwenÕs other books include Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (1976) and Channels of Desire: Mass /images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (also with Elizabeth Ewen. 1982; 1992). In the spring of 2001, Basic Books published a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Captains of Consciousness. His writings appear in French, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, German, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, Korean and Japanese translation. He has recently launched and serves as editor of two online publications: Rejected Letters to the Editor and Stereotype and Society.

His most recent book is Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality, co-authored with Elizabeth Ewen (2006). Through a series of illustrative, historically situated vignettes, Typecasting presents an incremental interpretation of modern stereotyping through the interwoven fabrics of art, science, religion and popular culture.

In June 2006, Ewen was invited to serve as lead instructor and Senior Specialist at the Russian Fulbright Foundation Summer School sponsored by Moscow State University and St. Petersburg State University. In St. Petersburg, he taught the first course on the history of American consumer culture to be offered in the former Soviet Union.

He lectures frequently at universities, museums and arts and community centers, both nationally and internationally. Among upcoming engagements, Ewen will be the keynote speaker at major international conferences in Glasgow, Scotland, Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Barcelona, Spain in the fall of 2007. He will be teaching a week-long course in media history at Moscow State University (Russian Federation) in the spring of 2008.

He is Consulting Editor of Pensar la Publicidad, a new international Spanish language journal published in Madrid. He is also on the editorial board of the Advertising & Society Review, a journal published by the Advertising Education Foundation and Johns Hopkins University Press. In honor of his role in the founding of Media Studies, EwenÕs autobiographical reverie, "Memoirs of a Commodity Fetishist," was featured as the "Scholarly Milestone Essay" in the journal, Mass Communication and Society, in 2001.

Under the nom de plume Archie Bishop, Ewen has worked as a photographer, pamphleteer, graphic artist, multimedia prankster, and political situationist for nearly thirty years. His work has been exhibited internationally. In 2003-2004, BishopÕs work was part of a traveling international exhibit, ÒToxic Landscapes,Ó funded by the Puffin Foundation, and was also featured in ÒTactical Action,Ó an exhibit at the Gigantic Art Space in Tribeca, New York.

http://fm.hunter.cuny.edu/faculty_pag...

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Critiques

In April 2021 I must have been distracted. I barely remember this one.
 
Signalé
mykl-s | 1 autre critique | Feb 21, 2023 |
Superior account of the transition from the production-centered ethos and values to the focus on consumerism, and how this was accomplished through advertising. Several strands of intellectual history that are often treated separately are woven together here into a single coherent story about a tranformational moment in American, indeed the global society, the 1920s.
½
 
Signalé
dono421846 | Jan 18, 2019 |
I've read a couple of books on early to mid twentieth century American history, and seen the fabulous 'Century of the Self.' So it's not like I'm all knowing on the subject of this book; despite that, I learned almost nothing from it. Ewen does a whole lot of summarising other people's work, and a bit of archive digging, but compared to Lears' 'Fables of Abundance,' or CoftheS, this is pretty rudimentary stuff.

It's not helped by Ewen's own massively incoherent nineties political doctrine, viz., that the solution to all problems is more democracy, where democracy means letting every individual have as much say as is humanly possible. Now, I agree with him that PR is generally used to push lies, damn lies and product, rather than to inform people. But... well, consider Walden II.

In Walden II, one man sets up a society in which everyone is conditioned to do the right thing. A visitor criticizes this for being 'unfree'; the master behaviorist asks what that could possibly mean, when everyone's getting what they want? He retorts that in this society people, who are inherently free and able to make up their own minds, are being forced to do these things, even if they want them. The behaviorist's answer is: look, you can't have it both ways. Either you think these people are capable of making up their own minds, in which case you can't get worried that I'm forcing them to do things they don't want to do; or you think these people aren't capable of making up their own minds, and then *you* have to take on a position of authority similar to mine, to lead them in a different direction.

Ewen is like the critical visitor to PR land: he thinks people are able to always make up their own minds (so, although he never says this, PR is useless). But he also thinks PR manipulates these entirely sovereign, hyper-rational people, which is bad. Well, it has to be one or the other. Either they're suggestible, and what you want isn't an end to PR, but a different kind of PR; or they're not suggestible, and PR is just a bit industry rip-off.

The sad fact is, our opinions are made up of other people's opinions. The only way to restrict the number of opinions we live in is to enact highly undemocratic laws against, say, billboards that blame the government for drought.

Less high-falutin'ly, the book effectively ends in the 1950s, for no explicit reason. The reason it ends then might be, I suspect, that in the late '50s and '60s, the PR people themselves accepted Ewen's implicit political theory: absolute individualism. Hard to criticize them then, I guess.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
stillatim | Dec 29, 2013 |
Wow! I went into this book without a clue as to what I wanted to get out of it. At first, reading about the authors, I thought I would put it down immediately. They seemed more liberal than I would care for. But once I started, I couldn't put it down until I finished. This book was really well written and holds a lot of information about how we have come to where we are as a society. Best of all, I finally learned why I'm labeled as a Caucasian. Now I really don't want to check that box.
 
Signalé
KR2 | 1 autre critique | Sep 27, 2011 |

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Œuvres
7
Membres
787
Popularité
#32,341
Évaluation
½ 3.6
Critiques
4
ISBN
21
Langues
4
Favoris
1

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