The Art of Self Invention
Subtitle: Image and Identity in Popular Visual Culture
Publisher: I. B. Tauris; I.B. Tauris; Distributed in the U.S.A. by Palgrave Macmillan
Published: January 22, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9781845113964
Subjects: Film theory & criticism; Human figures depicted in art; Photographs: portraits; Theatre, drama; Theory of art; General; Popular Culture - General; Performing Arts / General; Performing Arts; Performing Arts/Dance
Description: Both an exploration of the ways in which we fashion our public identity and a manual of modern sociability, this lively and readable book explores the techniques we use to present ourselves to the world: body language, tone of voice, manners, demeanor, "personality" and personal style. Drawing on historical commentators from Castiglione to Machiavelli, and from Marcel Mauss to Roland Barthes, Joanne Finkelstein also looks to popular visual culture, including Hollywood film and makeover TV, to show how it provides blueprints for the successful construction of "persona". Finkelstein's interest here is not in the veracity of the self - recently dissected by critical theory - but rather in the ways in which we style this "self", in the enduring appeal of the "new you" and in our fascination with deception, fraudulent personalities and impostors. She also discusses the role of fashion and of status symbols and how advertising sells these to us in our never ending quest for social mobility.