Review of Cultures of Vision: Images, Media and the Imaginary (Indiana University Press, 1995)

Thank God that modern academia, with its penchant for assembling books from previously published articles, can also still boast scholars like Burnett, who think about both what they teach and what they see. Resisting the temptation to pin down, classify and put aside — the etymological approach to cultural studies which semiology and structuralism between them have bequeathed us — Burnett has here assembled and refined half a lifetime's reflections on everything from a headless statue in a Montreal park to the American sitcom Seinfeld. In an approach similar to that of Roland Barthes (to whom the author makes repeated reference), Burnett argues that our relationship to images goes beyond 'seeing' or even 'hearing' them, drawing us into a complex web of 'spectatorship', in which personal history extends and amplifies the image. The result is challenging in the sense that it makes you think and makes you want to argue back. Required reading.

Critical Approaches to Culture, Communications + Hypermedia is a set of resources on the World Wide Web developed by Ron Burnett in Vancouver, Canada. All rights reserved. ©Ron Burnett 2009