The contemporary young reader learns from a very early age to read and interpret through a broad range of media. Literacies Across Media explores how a group of boys and girls, aged from ten to fourteen, make sense of narratives in a variety of formats, including print, electronic book, video, DVD, computer game and CD-ROM. This book records these young people over a period of eighteen months as they read, view and play different texts, demonstrating variations and consistencies of interpretative behaviour across different media.
Margaret Mackey analyses how the activities of reading, viewing and playing intertwine and affect each other's development. Her in-depth research shows young readers developing strategies for interpreting narratives through encounters with a diverse range of texts and media. The study breaks new ground in its illustration and exploration of the impact of cross-media fertilisation on how young readers come to an understanding of how to make sense of stories.
Literacies Across Media offers both a vivid account of a group of young readers coming to terms with texts and a radical perspective on the growth of a generation of young readers. It is thought-provoking, fascinating and highly informative reading not only for theoreticians interested in the reading process, but also teachers, librarians, parents and anybody involved with young people and their texts.
The book is an attempt to restore a missing, or at least neglected, chapter, in Western intellectual history. The "Hermetic Tradition" in the title is the set of beliefs about the supposed Hermes Trismegistus which Renaissance Europe inherited from the Church Fathers. They variously saw him as an ancient Prophet, and the real source of Plato's philosophy, and perhaps the disciple of Abraham or Moses, maybe even their teacher; or as a wicked tool of Satan. When Greek manuscripts of supposed Hermetic texts became available in Florence, the Medici put a priority on translating them, instead of Plato or Plotinus, and Marsilio Ficino obliged, launching a wave of excitement among some European thinkers.
This useful guidebook will introduce students to a range of key thinkers who have sought to question the contemporary situation, and will enable readers to begin to approach the primary texts of postmodern theory and culture with confidence.
Language and Social Contexts: explores how social contexts affect language use, enabling students to see how context has a direct effect on how texts are written, read and understood. Key Features: covers the key skills and topics, including the importance of social contexts, transcripts and live data, representation, power, gender and regional dialect analyses a wide variety of spoken and written texts, from conversations and text messages to wedding invitations, road signs, police warnings and advertisements offers a step-by-step guide to approaching texts and data and suggestions for structuring a response can be used as both a course text and a revision tool.
