Review
`Denzin's analysis is closely argued and well supported by his choice of texts' -
The Lecturer `If in The Cinematic Society, Norman Denzin successfully turns film criticism into a criticism of the human sciences, it is because The Cinematic Society takes as its frame of reference those movies in which the voyeur is the prominent figure - movies which Denzin suggests constitute a "reflexive cinema".... Thus while [the book] may seem to some only to be a book of movie reviews, it is a profoundly important piece of sociology precisely in the way it draws on relexive cinema to make a case for a reflexive postmodern sociology. This is not to say that the readings of the various movies are not themselves of interest; indeed they provide the clues for realizing that ours is no longer a cinematic society. The many mechanical devices that appear in these movies and that provide the context in which voyeurism becomes reflexive, point to the coming to dominance of telecommunication that not only poses profound changes in sociology - changes that must bring sociology even beyond the reflexive voyeurism of much postmodern ethnography. Denzin's singular effort to make sociologists attend to the relationship of sociology and the mass media find their clearest expression in The Cinematic Society, the best of his most recent works. Indeed, this is a book that should be worked with, worked through, because it provides a guide to the future of sociology' - Symbolic Interaction
`Professor Denzin's enthralling examination of the evolution of the aesthetic of the voyeur's gaze in cinema, which began with the Peeping Tom films of the 1900's and continues with sex lies and videotape, Silence of the Lambs and the proto-pornographic wave which presently washes through the minds of Western audiences.... Denzin's scholarly book puts together an account of that voyeur's career through a century of cinema, explicating it film by film and genre by genre' - InterMedia
`Adopting as a central premise the notion that the constitution of subjectivity occurs through the gaze of the Other, and locating the voyeur as the anti-hero of cinematic society, Denzin enters into a brilliant analysis of multiple forms of the voyeur's gaze' - Peter McLaren, University of California, Los Angeles
About the Author
Norman K. Denzin is Distinguished Professor of Communications, College of Communications Scholar, and Research Professor of Communications, Sociology and Humanities, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books, including
The Qualitative Manifesto,
Qualitative Inquiry Under Fire, and
Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. He is past editor of
The Sociological Quarterly, co-editor of
Qualitative Inquiry, founding editor of
Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, editor of
International Review of Qualitative Research, editor of
Studies in Symbolic Interaction, and founding Director of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.
