About the Book
Designed for the critical media studies curriculum, The Media Studies Reader is an entry point into the major theories and debates that have shaped critical media studies from the 1940s to the present. Combining foundational essays with influential new writings, this collection provides a tool box for understanding old and new media as objects of critical inquiry. It is comprised of over 40 readings that are organized into seven sections representing key concepts and themes covered in an introductory media studies course: culture, technology, representation, industry, identity, audience and citizenship. Critical introductions frame each section to help students place each reading in context and within a broader scholarly dialogue. Rather than relegating the issue of difference to just one section, each section includes scholarship that foregrounds the politics of gender, ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, and geopolitics. Longer readings were selectively edited for conciseness and accessibility, and to maximize breath of coverage. A map of a rapidly growing---and changing---field, The Media Studies Reader is an invaluable resource to students as well as established scholars.
Table of Contents:
Section I: Media/Culture
1. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, in Dialectic of Enlightenment
2. Tania Modleski, "Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women"
3. George Lipsitz, "Popular Culture: This Ain’t no Sideshow"
4. Baretta Smith-Shomade, "Eyes Wide Shut: Capitalism, Class and the Promise of Black Media"
5. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy"
6. Lev Manovich, "The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production"
Section II: Media/Technology
7. Susan Douglas, "The Turn Within: The Irony of Technology in a Globalized World"
8. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
9. Lisa Gitelman, "Reading Music, Reading Records, Reading Race"
10. Lynn Spigel, "The Domestic Economy of Television Viewing in Postwar America"
11. Anna McCarthy, "From Screen to Site"
12. Leopoldina Fortunati, "The Mobile Phone: Towards New Categories and Social Relations"
Section III: Media/Representation
13. Stuart Hall, "The Work of Representation"
14. John Berger, "Ways of Seeing"
15. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, "Stereotype, Realism, and the Struggle over Representation"
16. Anne McLintock, "Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising"
17. Andrew Wernick, "The Promotional Condition of Contemporary Culture"
18. Nick Couldry, "Liveness, ‘Reality,’ and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone"
Section IV: Media/Industry
19. Herbert Schiller, "The Corporation and the Production of Culture"
20. Michael Curtin, "On Edge: Culture Industries in the Neo-Network Era"
21. Tom McCourt and Patrick Burkart, "When Creators, Corporations and Consumers Collide: Napster and the Development of Online Music Distribution"
22. Marwan Kraidy, "The Cultural and Political Economies of Hybrid Media Texts"
23. Toby Miller and Marie Claire Leger, "Runaway Production, Runaway Consumption, Runaway Citizenship: The New International Division of Cultural Labor"
24. Tizania Terranova, "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy"
Section V: Media/Identity
25. Stuart Hall, "Who Needs Identity?"
26. David Morley and Kevin Robins, "Under Western Eyes: Media, Empire and Otherness"
27. Sarah Banet-Weiser, "What’s Your Flava: Race and Postfeminism in Media Culture"
28. Judith Halberstam, "Oh Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings"
29. Laura Grindstaff, "Class, Trash and Cultural Hierarchy"
30. P. David Marshall, "The Promotion and Presentation of the Self: Celebrity as Marker of Presentational Media"
Section VI: Media/Audience
31. Ien Ang, "On the Politics of Empirical Audience Research"
32. Lawrence Grossberg, "The Affective Sensibility of Fandom"
33. bell hooks, "The Oppositional Gaze"
34. Jack Bratich, "Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies"
35. Mark Andrejevic, "The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure"
36. Mizuko Ito, "Japanese Media Mixes and Amateur Cultural Exchange"
Section VII: Media/Citizenship
37. Peter Dahlgren, "Mediating Democracy"
38. Stuart Cunningham, "Popular Media as Public ‘Sphericules’ for Diasporic Communities"
39. Jeffrey Jones, "A Cultural Approach to the Study of Mediated Citizenship"
40. Lauren Berlant, "The Theory of Infantile Citizenship"
41. Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, "Makeover Television, Governmentality and the Good Citizen"
42. Hector Amaya, "Citizenship, Diversity, Law and Ugly Betty"
About the Author :
University of Minnesota, USA
Review :
"A one-stop shop, this superb collection is chock-full of seminal essays. A wonderful service to the field of Media Studies." —Jonathan Gray, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Situating the study of media in cultural, technological, industrial, political and reception contexts, The Media Studies Reader unifies pieces of canonical scholarship with a well-chosen selection of newer work. This collection has a real sense of scale, scope and timeliness, and it will be an indispensable guide to the evolution of thought in Media Studies." —Diane Negra, Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture and Head of Film Studies, University College Dublin
