21L.015 INTRODUCTION TO MEDIA STUDIES: COURSEPACK
READINGS
I CORE CONCEPTS
INTRODUCTION
Core Definitions (2/6)
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (MIT
Press, 1994): 3-47
- Scott Bukatman, "William Gibson's Typewriter," in Flame
Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press, 1994):
71-89
THEORIES OF MEDIA AND CULTURE
Core definitions (2/11)
- Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,"
in The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973): 412-53
- Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture (Oxford
University Press, 1983): 87-98, 203-207
- Laura Kipnis, "Disgust and Desire: Hustler Magazine,"
in Bound and Gagged: Ponography and the Politics of Fantasy (Grove
Press, Inc., 1996): 122-160
Core definitions (2/13)
- Max Horckheimer and Theodor Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception," in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Continuum
Publishing Co., 1972): 29-43
- Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (U of
Minnesota Press, 1986): 13-44, 45-56
CASE STUDY: THE CHANGING FUNCTIONS OF RADIO
Radio as a Central Medium (Invention-1950)
(2/20)
- William Boddy, "The Rhetoric and Economic Roots of the American
Broadcasting Industry," Cinetiacts 6 (1979): 37-54
II FUNCTIONS OF MEDIA
CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
From Orality to Literacy
(2/25)
- Walter Ong, "Some Psychodynamics of Orality," in Orality
and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Routledge, 1982): 31-77
- Homer, The Odyssey of Homer I (Harper Collins, 1991): 121-51
From Print to The Digital Age
(2/27)
TBA
COMMUNITY AND COMMUNICATION
Television in the Broadcast Era
(3/4)
- Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (NY,
Schocken Books, 1975): 9-43.
- John Fiske and John Hartley, "Bardic Television," in Reading
Television (London, Methuen, 1978): 85-100
- David Thorburn, "Television Melodrama" in Newcomb, ed., Television:
The Critical View (NY: Oxford UP, 1994): 537-62.
- David Thorburn, "Television As An Aesthetic Medium," Critical
Studies in Mass Communication 4,2 (June 1987): 161-173.
- David Thorburn, "Is TV Acting a Distinctive Art Form?" New
York Times, 14 August 1977, Sec. 3,: 19.
Telecommunities and Transnationalism
(3/6)
- Introduction and other selections from Brian Wallace & Cynthia
Schneider, Global Television (MIT Press, 1989): 7-11, 59-67, 79-93
- Michèle Mattelart, "Can Industrial Culture be a Culture
of Difference?: A Reflection On France's Confrontation with the U.S. Model
of Serialized Cultural Production," in Cary Nelson & Lawrence
Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (U of
Illinois Press, 1984): 429-45.
RECORDING HISTORY AND MEMORY
Photography and the Advent of Modernity
(3/11)
- Charles Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1859," in Art in Paris
(1845-1862): Salons and Other Exhibitions (Cornell University Press,
1965): 291-98
- Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography" [1931],
in Classic Essays in Photography (Leete's Island Books, 1980): 199-217
- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
in Illuminations (Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch & Co., 1969): 217-51
Truth and Fabrication in the Digital
Age (3/13)
- William Mitchell, "How To Do Things With Pictures," in The
Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (MIT Press,
1992): 189-223
- William Mitchell, "When Seeing Is Believing," Scientific
American, February 1994: 44-49
- William Mitchell, "The Parable of the Pizza Parlor," Scientific
American, 272.5 (1995): 92
AMUSEMENT AND ENTERTAINMENT
The Magician and the Storyteller: Two
Models (3/18)
- Jonas Mekas, Selections from Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American
Cinema, 1959-1971, Macmillan Co, NY, 1972. Articles copyright, the
Village Voice, New York. [Section beginning "1969 | 1970 | 1971"
in Coursepack]
- Michael Roemer, "Stories Connect Us," "Fictive Figures
Must Think They Are Free." Chs. 2-3 of Michael Roemer, Telling
Stories: Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative.
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD., 1995.
- "Stalking Woozles"
- William Arrowsmith, "Blow-Up." In William Arrowsmith, Antonioni.
Simulated Environments: From the Panorama
to IMAX (3/20)
- Scott B. Wilcox, "Unlimiting the Bounds of Painting," Introduction
to Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the 'All-Embracing'
View (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1988): 13-42
- Paul Arthur, "In the Realm of the Senses: IMAX-3D and the Myth
of Total Cinema," Film Comment, January 1996: 78-81
- André Bazin, "The Myth of Total Cinema," in Mast &
Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism, 3rd edition (Oxford U Press, 1985):
21-25
SPRING BREAK
TELLING STORIES
The Detective Across Media
(4/1)
- Edgar Allen Poe, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," in Tales
of Mystery and Imagination (Everyman's Library, 1908): 379-410
- Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,"
in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Collier, 1984): 137-57
- Steven Marcus, Introduction to Dashiel Hammett's The Continental
Op (Vintage Books, 1974): vii-xxix.
Reality TV (4/3)
- Bill Nichols, "At the Limits of Reality (TV)," "The
Ethnographer's Tale," in Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning
in Contemporary Culture (Indiana U Press, 1994): 43-63, 158-59
- Arlindo Castro, "Reality-TV Brazilian Style" (unpublished
manuscript).
-
POWER AND PERSUASION
Propaganda (4/8)
- D. Welch, "The Conquest of the Masses," in The Third Reich
(Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc., 1993): 8-49
Cultural Resistance and Documentary
(4/10)
- Hamid Naficy, "Narrowcasting and Nationality: Middle Eastern TV
in LA," AfterImage 20.7 (1993): 8-12.
-
III MEDIA IN TRANSITION
MEDIA IN THE RENAISSANCE
Early Print Culture (4/15)
- William Caxton, Preface to the Book of Encyclos [1490], in The Oxford
Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose (Oxford U Press, 1985): 233-35
- Elizabeth Eisenstein, "Some Features of Print Culture," in
The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge
U Press, 1984): 42-91
Theatre and Theatricality
(4/17)
- Russ McDonald, selections fromThe Bedford Companion to Shakespeare
(St. Martin's Press, 1996): 40-45, 58-59, 74-81, 96-99
- A.B. Dawson, "Performance and Participation," in Shakespeare,
Theory and Performance (Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc., 1996):
29-45
- Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (U of California
Press, 1981): 1-15
MEDIA AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
Early Cinema (4/24)
- Henry Jenkins, "A Regular Mine, A Reservoir, A Proving Ground,"
in What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and The Vaudeville Aesthetic
(Columbia U Press, 1992): 59-95
- Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions," in Thomas Elsaesser,
ed. Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film
Institute, 1990): 56-62
- Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment," Art and Text
34 (Spring 1989): 114-33
- Vanessa Schwartz, "Cinematic Spectatorship Before the Apparatus,"
in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (Rutgers U Press, 1995):
87-113
MEDIA IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Narrative Form in Digital Media
(4/29)
- Joseph Weizenbaum, "ELIZA: A Computer Program for the Study of
Natural Language," Communications of the ACM 9.1 (1966): 36-45
- Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement
to Calculation (W.H. Freeman Publishers, 1976): 188-91
Communication and Community
(5/1)
- George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical
Theory With Technology (Johns Hopkins U Press, 1992): 1-70
- George P. Landow, "Reconfiguring Narrative," in Hypertext:
101-19
IV MEDIA INSTITUTIONS
CASE STUDY: THE CHANGING FACE OF THE FILM INDUSTRY
The Hollywood Studio (5/6)
- Ethan Mordden, "MGM," ch. 2 of The Hollywood Studios (Simon
& Schuster, 1988): 154-70
- Rick Altman, extract from The American Film Musical (Indiana
U Press, 1985): 334-44
- Thomas Schatz, "MGM: Life After Thalberg," in The Genius
of the System (Pantheon Books, 1988): 252-70
Media Conglomerates (5/8)
- Eileen Meehan, "Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman! The Political Economy
of the Commercial Intertext," in The Many Lives of the Batman (Routledge,
1991): 47-65
GRASSROOTS MEDIA
Culture Jamming (5/13)
- Mark Dery, "Culture Jamming" Open Magazine Pamphlet Series
(1993): 1-17
Fandom (5/15)
- Henry Jenkins, "Welcome to Bisexuality, Captain Kirk: Slash and
the Fan-Writing Community," in Textual Poachers: Television Fan
and Participatory Culture (Routledge, 1992): 185-222
- Henry Jenkins, "Out of the Closet and Into the Universe: Queers
and Star Trek" in Science Fiction Audiences: Watching
Doctor Who and Star Trek (Routledge, 1995): 237-65
mroberts@mit.edu