The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture (Technologies: Studies in Culture & Theory)

MacPhee, Graham

ISBN 10: 0826459269 / ISBN 13: 9780826459268

Published by The Athlone Press, 2002

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture (Technologies: Studies in Culture & Theory)
• Publisher: The Athlone Press
• Publication Date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0826459269
• ISBN 13: 9780826459268
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

Visual technology saturates everyday life. Theories of the visual-now key to debates across cultural studies, social theory, art history, literary studies and philosophy-have interpreted this new condition as the beginning of a dystopian future, of cultural decline, social disempowerment and political passivity. Intellectuals-from Baudelaire to Debord, Benjamin, Virilio, Jameson, Baudrillard and Derrida-have explored how technology not only reinvents the visual, but also changes the nature of culture itself. The heartland of all such cultural analysis has been the city, from Baudelaire's flaneur to Benjamin's arcades. The Architecture of the Visible presents a wide-ranging critical reassessment of contemporary approaches to visual culture through an analysis of pivotal technological innovation from the telescope, through photography to film. Drawing on the examples of Paris and New York-two key world cities for over two centuries-Graham MacPhee analyzes how visual technology is revolutionizing the landscape of modern thought, politics and culture.

About the Author

Graham MacPhee is Professor of English at West Chester University. He is the author of Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), co-editor of Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective (Berghahn, 2007) and the editor of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press).