{"id":2480,"date":"2013-03-11T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T10:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=2480"},"modified":"2013-03-11T11:35:52","modified_gmt":"2013-03-11T09:35:52","slug":"new-directions-in-colour-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=2480","title":{"rendered":"New directions in colour studies"},"content":{"rendered":"
New directions in colour studies<\/strong>. Ed. by Carole P. Biggam<\/strong>, Carole A. Hough<\/strong>, Christian J. Kay<\/strong>, <\/strong>and David R. Simmons.<\/strong> Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Pp. xii, 462. ISBN 9789027211880<\/a>. $158 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini<\/a><\/strong>, University of Warwick<\/em><\/p>\n

This book is a collection of thirty-five chapters, organized into seven sections and preceded by a short preface. The collection represents the work of delegates to the second conference on progress in colour studies (PICS) held in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2008. As an attentive (and critical) reader of most essays, I agree with the editors\u2019 view that the book has achieved the original objective set for the conference, which is to create a \u2018multidisciplinary forum\u2019 on color studies \u2018accessible to scholars in other disciplines\u2019 (ix). A few chapters are highly technical in language and content, but most are within reach of the educated reader.<\/p>\n

The essays on color perception are particularly interesting, including \u2018Touchy-feely colour\u2019 (Section 1), \u2018Languages of the world\u2019 (Section 2), and \u2018Colour in society\u2019 (Section 3). Other\u00a0 essays include \u2018Individual differences in colour vision\u2019 (Section 5) and \u2018Colour preference and colour meaning\u2019 (Section 6). Collectively, these essays afford the reader a fairly detailed yet accessible understanding of many facets of a truly exciting field of study, one that \u2018impacts on so many areas of human experience\u2019 (159) as diverse as architecture, art, literature, onomastics, and semantics.<\/p>\n

We learn, for example, how the current color-coding scheme (Munsell Colour Chips) excludes 95% of world\u2019s color terms (43), how colors feature prominently in Scottish surnames, and how the color blue in Francis Bacon\u2019s painting reflects the artist\u2019s pain. Rather than treating vision as \u2018the most passive of senses\u2019 (28), a phenomenological understanding of color proposes \u2018vision as active\u2019 (31) and draws a strong analogy between vision and touch, whereby \u2018the gaze is something like a grasp\u2019 (33).<\/p>\n

For approximately 4.4% of the population who have a condition called synaesthesia, the experience of color perception can be triggered by stimuli from other domains like sound, touch, and smell. The associations are both very specific and consistent over time, so, for example, \u2018a synaesthete might describe the sound of a middle C on the piano as a silver-grey ball seen in left-hand space\u2019 (311). This phenomenon is no less intriguing than the relationship between colors and the emotions that they evoke, or the colors and the adjectives used to describe them. This is why color studies encompass a wide spectrum of scholarly endeavours, and this book is engaging also for the non-specialist reader looking for an analytic and systematic approach to the understanding of one of the most common of human experiences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New directions in colour studies. Ed. by Carole P. Biggam, Carole A. Hough, Christian J. Kay, and David R. Simmons. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Pp. xii, 462. ISBN 9789027211880. $158 (Hb). Reviewed by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, University of Warwick This book is a collection of thirty-five chapters, organized into seven sections and preceded by a short […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2480"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2482,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480\/revisions\/2482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}