Review by Choice Review
In Castillo and Egginton's Medialogies, modern ideologies of reality are reconstructed and dissected via media views of the real. The authors posit that "inflationary" media exist when "the scope of their representation of the world threatens the confines of their culture's prior notions of reality." Following the views of postmodern theorists that the media now represent a hyperreal world, one that is constructed/configured by media impressions of reality, the authors see the media as arbiters and editors of a world presented as a commodity to a public. They wed such perspectives to the growth of modernism, individualism, science's power to render things objectively, and the agency of artists to render the world subjectively. They chart the growth of narrative perspectives on reality from early modernism and the works of Cervantes where authors theatricalize their literary worlds. These constructions of commodity-spectacles arise out of early modernist ideas of economic and political freedoms. Extending into today's politics, politicians like Trump copy images of America's past to apply to America's future. Media participate in acts of transformative reality, a series of codes parsing the world for personal consumption, making the real world I-world. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Stuart Lenig, Columbia State Community College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
