The human science of communicology Book

Communicology is the study of human discourse in all of its forms, ranging from human gesture and speech to art and television. communicology also represents the dominant qualitative research paradigm in the discipline of human commuication, especially in the applied areas of mass communication, philosophy of communication, and speech commuication. Lanigan's work exemplifies the theory of communicology by offering the bold and original thesis that Michel Foucault's thematic study of the Discourse of Desire and Power is an elaboration of the problematic discourse explicated in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's interrogation of Freedom and Terror. Various chapters cover such topics as art versus science, culture and communication, modernity versus postmodernity, feminism versus humanism, research methodology, and the Capta versus Data distinction for research validity. Actual examples of research cover the aesthetics of painting and sculpture, radio and television, rhetorical criticism of oral and written texts, and the East-West perspective on crosscultural encounter--all using the approach of semiotic phenomenology.Two special features of this book make it a worthy purchase for the teacher and scholar alike. First, Lanigan provides an Encyclopedic Dictionary that illustrates and defines the the theory and method of the Human Sciences in general and the discipline of Communicology in particular. Used for several years by teachers in a number of universities, this dictionary has become a classic among students before its first-time publication here. Second, Lanigan analyzes and illustrates what has been missing for years in the study of Foucault's work: a definition (with appropriate illustrative figures and tables) of Foucault's method of Archaeology and Genealogy (Criticism) for research in the human sciences, especially in the study of human discourse.