Description
Product Description
This text involves students in understanding and using the "tools" of critical social and literary theory from the first day of class. It is an ideal first introduction before students encounter more difficult readings from critical and postmodern perspectives.Nealon and Searls Giroux describe key concepts and illuminate each with an engaging inquiry that asks students to consider deeper and deeper questions. Written in students' own idiom, and drawing its examples from the social world, literature, popular culture, and advertising, The Theory Toolbox offers students the language and opportunity to theorize rather than positioning them to respond to theory as a reified history of various schools of thought. Clear and engaging, it avoids facile description, inviting students to struggle with ideas and the world by virtue of the book's relentless challenge to common assumptions and its appeal to common sense.Updated throughout, the second edition of The Theory Toolbox includes a discussion of new media, as well as two new chapters on life and nature.
Review
They're back! Nealon and Sarls Giroux still pack more thoughtful questions and more useful information into the second edition of their 'toolbox' than multi-volume encyclopedias. If you can find a better guide for both beginners and more advanced students to the major intellectual challenges of our time, go ahead and buy it. Meanwhile, the readers of this handy (and witty) little text will already be writing the works that will be discussed in the third edition. -- John McGowan, The Ruel W. Tyson Jr. Distinguished Professor of Humanities, University of North Carolina; coeditor of The Norton Anthology
The Theory Toolbox is essential and required reading in my undergraduate and graduate architectural history and theory courses. The book is particularly useful as an excellent introduction to basic concepts that students in humanities, science, and design need to engage in meaningful discussion of culture and society. Through timely examples from popular culture and working questions that stimulate active discussion both in the classroom and in the online environment,
The Theory Toolbox is my go-to guide for critical concepts as it inspires and engenders critical thinking and reasoned dialogue for the beginning theory student. -- Renata Hejduk, Arizona State University
Students find
The Theory Toolbox isn't about learning theory through narrow interpretive lenses but thinking critically through theorizing and questioning perspectives. -- Richard Bower, Cayuga Community College
As a first introduction for the perplexed and confused to critical and cultural theory, there's no better place to start than
The Theory Toolbox. The addition of chapters on Life and Nature in this second edition are welcome. They are written as engagingly and insightfully as the rest of the book, and as with the rest, these chapters tease out the ways in which the natural order is made to seem natural through biopower and the defense of an uncritical line between humanity and animality. With its clear, concise, and accurate accounts of often complex theories, instructors will find this an excellent addition to any theory course; with its provocative working questions and up-to-date, funny examples, students will find this book to be illuminating and exhilarating. -- Bruce B. Janz, University of Central Florida
Students quickly learn to employ theoretical concepts in their own work. The authors support this development by examining theory in relation to material that may at first seem familiar but that the authors then encourage the students to question in complex ways. The new chapters introduce important emerging areas of scholarship that students and instructors should find appealing. -- Tracy Neal Leavelle, Creighton University
I have used
The Theory Toolbox several times in my Communication Theory classes, and the response from my students was extremely positive. The the
Features
- Rowman Littlefield Publishers