Norman K. Denzin is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Communications, College of Communications Scholar, and Research Professor of Communications, Sociology, and Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. One of the world’s foremost authorities on qualitative research and cultural criticism, he is the author or editor of more than 30 books, including The Qualitative Manifesto; Qualitative Inquiry Under Fire; Reading Race; Interpretive Ethnography; The Cinematic Society; The Alcoholic Self; and a trilogy on the American West. He is past editor of The Sociological Quarterly, co-editor of six editions of the landmark SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, co-editor (with Michael D. Giardina) of 18 books on qualitative inquiry, co-editor (with Yvonna S. Lincoln and Michael D. Giardina) of the methods journal Qualitative Inquiry, founding editor of Cultural Studies?Critical Methodologies and International Review of Qualitative Research, editor of four book series, and founding director of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.
"His discussions of the films are always interesting. . . . Denzin's book is in the forefront of the movement that, following the pioneering work of the feminists, takes cinema studies increasingly toward the political. --W. A. Vincent in Choice "Cinema not only created the spectator in its own eye; it created what the eye of the spectator would see. . . . That is really the starting point of 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 1900s. . . and presently washes through the minds of western audiences. [Focusing on Foucault] Norman K. Denzin's scholarly book puts together an account of the voyeur's career through the history of cinema, explicating it film by film and genre by genre." --Sociology Written by one of America's leading commentators in the sociology of culture, this assured and timely volume contends that the cinema has increased the tendency toward voyeurism in society. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Norman K. Denzin asserts that the cinematic gaze reflects the machinery of surveillance and power that regulates social behavior in contemporary society. The cinema makes its key players voyeurs who spy on the lives of others, but it also turns the audience into voyeurs who eagerly follow the lives of screen characters as if they were real. The effect of the cinema in the social construction of everyday life has rarely been explored with such penetration and clarity. Surveying an extraordinary array of material from film and film literature, Denzin's work is both methodologically sophisticated and theoretically provocative. A perfect resource for students of social theory and film and cultural studies; this ingenious book offers provocative reading for a vast interdisciplinary audience.
