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"Symbolism in communication Europe History."
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Flowers that kill : communicative opacity in political spaces
Flowers are beautiful. People often communicate their love, sorrow, and other feelings to each other by offering flowers, like roses. Flowers can also be symbols of collective identity, as cherry blossoms are for the Japanese. But, are they also deceptive? Do people become aware when their meaning changes, perhaps as flowers are deployed by the state and dictators? Did people recognize that the roses they offered to Stalin and Hitler became a propaganda tool? Or were they like the Japanese, who, including the soldiers, did not realize when the state told them to fall like cherry blossoms, it meant their deaths?
Flowers That Kill proposes an entirely new theoretical understanding of the role of quotidian symbols and their political significance to understand how they lead people, if indirectly, to wars, violence, and even self-exclusion and self-destruction precisely because symbolic communication is full of ambiguity and opacity. Using a broad comparative approach, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney illustrates how the aesthetic and multiple meanings of symbols, and at times symbols without images become possible sources for creating opacity which prevents people from recognizing the shifting meaning of the symbols.
eBook
When Ego Was Imago
The diffusion of personal signs of identity during the twelfth century introduced individuals to mediated forms of communication. The book analyses the conditions for and the implications of their partnering with material signs and images in expressing self and accountability.
eBook
Imago exegetica : visual images as exegetical instruments, 1400-1700
Exegesis, as theologians and historians of art, religion, and literature, have come increasingly to acknowledge, has traditionally utilized visual devices of all kinds. This volume examines the many ways in which images functioned as instruments of scriptural hermeneutics in early modern Europe.
eBook
On Being Heard: A Case for Paying Attention to the Historical Ear
Rosenfeld traces the robust development of the history of sound, listening, and aural attention, while endorsing the usefulness of the general concepts of \"regimes of audition\" and \"acoustic communities.\" Although warning against technological determinism, she foregrounds the importance of new communicative devices that enhance the range and acuity of the ear and tentatively promotes the possibility of a \"grand narrative for the ear,\" at least in Western societies. In her telling, the conventional wisdom that hearing has declined in importance is unpersuasive, especially if one acknowledges the links that exist between the right to hear and be heard and modern democratic politics, demonstrated by the new public soundscape established during the French Revolution. Sensitive to the metaphoric mobilization of ideas such as le bon sens and \"common sense,\" Rosenfeld concludes by pondering the emergence of a version of prudent, discriminating judgment, still connected to the ability to listen and the right to be heard, that can challenge the more monologic notion of rational deliberation located entirely in the mind.
Journal Article
The Battle for the Mind
Most people typically think of armed conflict in physical terms, involving guns and bombs, ships and planes, tanks and missiles. But today, because of mass communication, war and the effort to prevent it are increasingly dependent on nonphysical factorsthe capacity to persuade combatants and citizens to engage in violence or avoid it, and the packaging of the information on which decision making is based. This book explores the many ways that mass communication has revolutionized international relations, whether the aim is to make war effectively or to prevent it. Gary Messinger shows that over the last 150 years a succession of breakthroughs in the realm of media has reshaped the making of war and peace. Along with mass newspapers, magazines, books, motion pictures, radio, television, computer software, and telecommunication satellites comes an array of strategies for exploiting these media to control popular beliefs and emotions. Images of war now arrive in many forms and reach billions of people simultaneously. Political and military leaders must react to crowd impulses that sweep around the globe. Nationstates and nongovernmental groups, including terrorists, use mass communication to spread their portrayals of reality. Drawing on a wide range of media products, from books and articles to films and television programs, as well as his own research in the field of propaganda studies, Messinger offers a fresh and comprehensive overview. He skillfully charts the path that has led us to our current situation and suggests where we might go next.
eBook
Making Use of the \Oil Weapon\: Western Industrialized Countries and Arab Petropolitics in 1973-1974
A thorough understanding of the Arab oil‐embargo and production cuts of 1973/74 is obscured by attempts to determine its “success“ or “failure“ on the basis of a simplistic sender/target model. By contrast, this article analyzes the embargo as a communicative process and explores how both the embargoing and the embargoed countries constantly tried to define the contents, purpose, and legitimacy of the measures. Apart from its initially stated goal of pressuring the United States, Western Europe, and Japan to support the Arab countries in the conflict with Israel, various actors in the Arab as well as in the Western world used the embargo for a multitude of different purposes. Their largely symbolic interaction is not secondary for an understanding of the historical significance of the embargo, but the attempts to make use of the “oil‐weapon” constituted its very meaning.
Journal Article
Signifying Europe
Signifying Europe provides a systematic overview of the wide range of symbols used to represent Europe and Europeanness, both by the political elite and the broader public. Through a critical interpretation of the meanings of the various symbols—and their often contradictory or ambiguous dimensions—Johan Fornäs uncovers illuminating insights into how Europe currently identifies itself and is identified by others outside its borders. While the focus is on the European Union’s symbols, those symbols are also interpreted in relation to other symbols of Europe. Offering insight into the cultural dimensions of European unification, this volume will appeal to students, scholars and politicians interested in European policy issues, cultural studies and postnational cultural identity.
eBook
The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe
This article traces the development of the hermaphrodite symbol in alchemical literature from the high Middle Ages to the early modern period. It argues that alchemical writers used themetaphor of hermaphroditism to describe the \"philosophers' stone,\" a chemical agent believed to be a combination of contradictory elemental qualities. Such writers extended the hermaphrodite metaphor to Jesus, whome they conflated with the philosophers' stone, and whom they viewed as a combination of masculine and feminine, as well as human and divine, attributes. This article also explores the \"Jesus Hermaphrodite\" metaphor in the context of approaches toward intersex people during the period.
Journal Article
Early civilization and literacy in Europe : an inquiry into cultural continuity in the Mediterranean world
No detailed description available for \"Early Civilization and Literacy in Europe\".
eBook