Children And Television - A Semiotic Approach

There are insights of interest and value to all in these pages. This book develops a fresh and insightful approach to the questions of children and television. Drawing on recent work in linguistics and semiotics, Hodge and Tripp analyse the rich and ambiguous messages of television and cartoons and examine the ways in which these messages are interpreted by children. The authors convincingly show that children are sophisticated viewers: they have a shrewd sense of fact and fantasy and are active interpreters of plot.

Robert Hodge is an Australian academic, author, theorist and critic. While best known as a semiotician and critical linguist, his work encompasses a wide, interdisciplinary range of fields including cultural theory, media studies, chaos theory, Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, post-modernism and many other topics both within the humanities as well as science. He is currently a professor at the University of Western Sydney.

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Born in Perth, Western Australia in 1940, Hodge studied English at the University of Western Australia, and graduated with first class honours in 1961. He went to Cambridge University in 1965 on a scholarship and completed a BA in 1967 and a PhD in 1972 on Intellectual History. Thereafter his working career as a lecturer and later professor took him to the University of East Anglia, Norwich 1972-1977, Murdoch University, Perth from 1977–1993, and the University of Western Sydney 1993-.

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His line of research has taken him from studies in ancient Greek and literature, through to linguistics, to semiotics, and towards a range of topics around cultural, media, social and political criticism. Hodge's increasingly interdisciplinary approach has grown to include history, chaos theory, critical management studies, Aboriginal issues and others. Of his twenty five published books, the most well known include 'Social Semiotics', 'Language as Ideology', and 'Myths of Oz'. Other output includes numerous articles published in journals and speeches at international conferences.