Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 1. Video Icons & Values: An Overview Alan M. Olson 2. Video Ergo Sum Jeremy Murray-Brown 3. Television and the Shaping of Cognitive Skills Renee Hobbs 4. The Emperor Has Only Clothes: Toward a Hermeneutic of the Video Text Lenore Langsdorf 5. The Electronic Golden Calf Gregor Goethals 6. Power and Pleasure in Video Texts Robert Scholes 7. In Video Veritas: The Mythic Structures of Video Dynamics E. David Thorp 8. Selling Out Max Headroom Rebecca L. Abbott 9. What is "Soul"? Dick Hebdige 10. An Afterword: Beyond Lamentation Christopher and Debra Parr Notes Selected Bibliography Contributors Index

About the Author

At Boston University, Alan M. Olson is Chairman ad interim, of the Department of Philosophy, and author of Hegel and the Spirit: Philosophy as Pneumatology. Christopher Parr is a New Zealand poet doing research in Religion and Literature. Debra Parr is researcher on modern and postmodern American landscapes in the Department of English.

Reviews

"The strong point of this book is that it is extraordinarily well written. The literature base that it operates from is literary criticism, and philosophy, a very fertile approach. The problem or topic is very important; it is a response to the Bloom and Hirsch criticism of American Culture. How can we retrieve a historically based culture from the onslaught of irreverence of chronology, or the cultural depth of its references?" - Charles Simpson, State University of New York, Plattsburg