Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Praise for the first edition
"The selection is judicious and valuably supplemented by thorough commentaries that contextualise and clarify the debates and issues and the importance of each excerpt. Though today there may be many readers in and around cultural and media studies, Easthope and McGowan's remains vital..." Times Higher Educational Supplement

This Reader introduces the key readings in critical and cultural theory. It guides students through the tradition of thought, from Saussure's early writings on language to contemporary commentary on world events by theorists such as Baudrillard and Žižek. The readings are grouped according to six thematic sections: Semiology; Ideology; Subjectivity; Difference; Gender and Race; and Postmodernism.

The second and expanded edition of this highly successful Reader reflects the growing diversity of the field.

Essays by: Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Homi K. Bhabha, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Simone de Beauvoir, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Frederick Engels, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Colin MacCabe, Pierre Macherey, Karl Marx, Kobena Mercer, Laura Mulvey, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Edward Said, Slavoj Žižek.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Foreword (p. ix)
• Acknowledgements (p. xi)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• Section 1 Semiology
• Introduction (p. 3)
• 1.1 from Course in General Linguistics (p. 5)
• 1.2 'The Great Family of Man' from Mythologies (p. 12)
• 1.3 from A Theory of Literary Production (p. 15)
• 1.4 from 'The Narrative Structure in Fleming' (p. 24)
• 1.5 from 'Realism and the Cinema' (p. 28)
• Section 2 Ideology
• Introduction (p. 33)
• 2.1 from 'Preface', A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (p. 37)
• 2.2 from The German Ideology (p. 39)
• 2.3 from 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' (p. 42)
• 2.4 from The Second Sex (p. 51)
• 2.5 from Orientalism (p. 55)
• 2.6 from 'The "Other" Question' (p. 62)
• 2.7 from the Sublime Object of Ideology (p. 70)
• Section 3 Subjectivity
• Introduction (p. 73)
• 3.1 from Beyond the Pleasure Principle (p. 77)
• 3.2 from 'The Mirror Stage' (p. 81)
• 3.3 from Black Skin/White Masks (p. 87)
• 3.4 from 'The System and the Speaking Subject' (p. 90)
• 3.5 from Discipline and Punish (p. 94)
• 3.6 from The History of Sexuality (p. 102)
• 3.7 from The Pleasure of the Text (p. 108)
• Section 4 Difference
• Introduction (p. 113)
• 4.1 'Differance' (p. 120)
• Section 5 Gender and Race
• Introduction (p. 143)
• 5.1 'On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love' (p. 148)
• 5.2 from 'Sorties' (p. 157)
• 5.3 from 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (p. 167)
• 5.4 from 'Reading Racial Fetishism' (p. 177)
• 5.5 from Real and Imagined Women (p. 184)
• 5.6 from Gender Trouble (p. 191)
• 5.7 from '"Race", Time and the Revision of Modernity' (p. 197)
• Section 6 Postmodernism
• Introduction (p. 203)
• 6.1 from The Postmodern Condition (p. 206)
• 6.2 from Simulations (p. 218)
• 6.3 from The Inhuman (p. 221)
• 6.4 from The Gift of Death (p. 224)
• 6.5 from The Spirit of Terrorism (p. 228)
• 6.6 from Welcome to the Desert of the Real (p. 231)
• Summaries (p. 235)
• Biographical notes (p. 268)
• Bibliography (p. 272)
• Index (p. 281)