Alec McHoul
Alexander William McHoul is a British-Australian sociologist.
He is an emeritus professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia.
Early life and education
McHoul was born in Wallasey, a town on the Wirral Peninsula, England. In 1973, he graduated from the University of Lancaster, with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Literature and Linguistics and, in 1974, a Master of Arts. In 1975, he moved to Australia. In 1978, he received a PhD from Australian National University, with a thesis titled Telling how texts talk: from readings of Wittgenstein, Schutz, ethnomethodology and the sociology of literature to the analysis of readings.Criticism and Culture
McHoul's work spans a range of academic fields such as linguistics, cultural theory, continental philosophy and literary theory. Robert Eaglestone, for example, says of McHoul's' Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics: 'The book is no less... an attempt to work in at least three fields at once, and McHoul seems at home dealing with analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, semiotics, and linguistics'. Douglas Ezzy says, 'His theoretical range is wide, drawing on Wittgenstein, Saussure, ethnomethodology phenomenology'..Work
Books
Telling How Texts Talk: Essays on Reading and Ethnomethodology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982- Wittgenstein on Certainty and the Problem of Rule in Social Science. Toronto: Toronto Semiotic Circle, 1986Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis. London: Macmillan, 1990; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject. Melbourne University Press, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1998; University College London Press, 1995; New York University Press, 1997, 1998; University of Otago Press, 1998
- Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics. University of Nebraska Press, 1996Popular Culture and Everyday Life. London: Sage, 1998, 1996Beyond Help: A Consumer’s Guide to Psychology. Ross–on–Wye: PCCS Books, 2003
Edited volumes
How to Analyse Talk in Institutional Settings: A Casebook of Methods. London and New York: Continuum, 2001Translation
- Jean–Marie Floch, Visual Identities. London and New York: Continuum, 2000. Translation of Identités visuelles. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995.