Promotional culture : advertising, ideology, and symbolic expression /

The concept that holds together this wide ranging essay is ^D["promotion^D]"--a process that includes advertising and its practices. To the author's thinking, promotion is a broad process, which ^D["crosses the line between advertising, packaging, and design, and is applicable. . .to activities beyond the immediately commercial.^D]" Focusing on the impact of promotion on the objective side of culture (that which is articulated, produced, circulated, or expressed), Wernick explores such topics as the imaging of consumer products (using Wedgwood's Portland Vase as a case study to illustrate the fusing of symbolic manufacture and advertising), advertising as ideology, (re-)imaging gender and cars, promotional reflexivity (intertextuality), politics (analyzing a political advertisment used by Poland's Solidarity), and the promotional university. The final chapter examines the promotional condition of contemporary culture. Throughout, the thesis explored is ^D["that the range of cultural phenomena which, at least as one of their functions, serve to communicate a promotional message has become, today, virtually co-extensive with our produced symbolic world.^D]" Extensive notes. For graduate students and sophisticated readers familiar with postmodern theories and approaches to cultural criticism.