Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book provides a guide to understanding advertising culture. It shows how the logic of commodities permeates the ways we think about ourselves, our relationships and our desires.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Subjectivity in a Bottle: Commodity Form and Advertising Form
• 2 Advertising and the Production of Commodity Signs
• 3 The Mortise and the Frame: Reification and Advertising Form
• 4 Legitimation Ads: The Story of the Family and how it Saved Capitalism from Itself
• 5 Commodity Feminism
• 6 This is not an Ad
• 7 Levi's 501s and the `Knowing Wink': Commodity Bricolage
• 8 The Postmodernism that Failed
• References

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

A rather disjointed Marxist/semiotic analysis, largely derived from other works and not, as the publisher claims, a "benchmark" for students of advertising culture. It is hard to discover the logic linking diverse chapters, which add little to groundwork laid by Jean Baudrillard, John Berger, Susan Douglas, Erving Goffman, Janice Winship, and other students of commodities, societies, or signs. Missing is important cross-cultural scholarship (e.g., Ted Polhemus, Bernard Rudofsky) on body image and representation. The strongest argument--concerning rerouting of subcultures and social movements into commodity-consumption discourse--is marred by a historical insistence on recency. A single contradictory footnote (p. 153) traces current practice to the 1920s; this context belongs in the body of the analysis, not on its margins. The book is valuable for bringing diverse literatures together. It is insufficient for theory-making, however, merely to claim that advertisements represent ideology and/or values and to identify advertisers' self-evident premise of commodity-making. V. Alia; University of Western Ontario