Brand Semiotics library

Semiotics Library

Cultural Commentary
Walter Benjamin: Illuminations. Esp. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
John Berger: Ways of Seeing
Adorno & Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Esp. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

Economic & Social Theory
David Harvey: The Condition of Postmodernity
Jean Baudrillard: The Consumer Society

Applied Semiotics
Roland Barthes: Mythologies
Umberto Eco: Faith In Fakes. Esp. Ch 1 Travels in Hyperreality
Umberto Eco: Apocalypse Postponed. Esp. Ch 2 The World of Charlie Brown, Ch 5 Orwell, or Concerning Visionary Power

Cultural History
Robert Darnton: The Great Cat Massacre. Esp. Ch 2 Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue St Severin
Kristin Ross: Fast Cars, Clean Bodies
Wolfgang Schivelbusch: The Railway Journey
Michael Pollan: The Botany of Desire
Howard Jacobson: Seriously Funny

Cultural Geography
Mike Davis: City of Quartz
Jonathan Raban: Passage to Juneau
Alain de Botton: The Architecture of Happiness

Psychology
Frieda Fordham: An introduction to Jung’s Psychology. Esp. Ch 2 Psychological Types & Ch 3 Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. (Or, read it fictionalised in Robertson Davies’ The Manticore)
Oliver Sacks: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Esp. Ch 9 The President’s Speech
Julian Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (Or, read it fictionalised in Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces)

Language, Linguistics
Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct
Bill Bryson: Mother Tongue

Evolutionary History
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
Elaine Morgan: The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis