Heather Urbanski (ed.): Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric (2010)

Is it true that, in this era of digitization and mass media, reading and writing are on the decline? In a thought-provoking collection of essays and profiles, 30 contributors explore what may instead be a rise in rhetorical activity, an upsurge due in part to the sudden blurring of the traditional roles of creator and audience in participatory media. This collection explores topics too often overlooked by traditional academic scholarship, though critical to an exploration of rhetoric and popular culture, including fan fiction, reality television, blogging, online role-playing games, and Fantasy Football. Both scholarly and engaging, this text draws rhetorical studies into the digital age.

Publisher McFarland & Co Inc Pub, 2010
ISBN 0786437200, 9780786437207

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Peter Burke: Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978)

Long neglected by historians, the concept of cultural history has in the last few decades come to the fore of historical research into early modern Europe. Due in no small part to the pioneering work of Peter Burke, the tools of the cultural historian are now routinely brought to bear on every aspect of history, and have transformed our understanding of the past.First published in 1978, this study examines the broad sweep of pre-industrial Europe’s popular culture. From the world of the professional entertainer to the songs, stories, rituals and plays of ordinary people, it shows how the attitudes and values of the otherwise inarticulate shaped – and were shaped by – the shifting social, religious and political conditions of European society between 1500 and 1800.

Publisher Harper & Row, 1978
ISBN 0-06-131928-7
366 pages

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Kodwo Eshun: More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction (1998)

Less a critical survey than a manifesto for the neuron-altering powers of “breakbeat science,” this ingenious book traces the development of sampladelia from the “jazz fission” era of ‘68-’75 (with excellent analyses of George Russell’s and Herbie Hancock’s sonic experiments), through the Parliament/Funkadelic groovescapes of the late ’70s (including close scrutiny of Pedro Bell’s subversive cover art), through Electro (early ’80s synth oriented hip hop) and Detroit Techno, to the present Jungle milieu of time stretching and spatio-acoustics. Eschewing a traditional music-crit vocabulary in favor of a riffing, neologistic verbal poetics, Eshun perfectly captures the sci-fi convolutions of the music he describes, and makes an infectious case for the birth of a new audio-paradigm.

Publisher    Quartet Books, 1998
ISBN    0704380250, 9780704380257
Length    239 pages

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Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (eds.): Western Music and Its Others. Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (2000)

This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind.

The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant examples, among them musical modernism’s idealizing or ambivalent relations with popular, ethnic, and non-Western music; exoticism and orientalism in the experimental music tradition; the representation of others in Hollywood film music; music’s role in the formation and contestation of collective identities, with reference to Jewish and Turkish popular music; and issues of representation and difference in jazz, world music, hip hop, and electronic dance music.

Written by leading scholars from disciplines including historical musicology, sociology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and film studies, the essays provide unprecedented insights into how cultural identities and differences are constructed in music.

Publisher University of California Press, 2000
ISBN 0520220846, 9780520220843
Length 360 pages

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Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.): The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed. (2002)

This thoroughly revised and updated second edition of The Visual Culture Reader brings together key writings as well as specially commissioned articles covering a wealth of visual forms including photography, painting, sculpture, fashion, advertising, television, cinema and digital culture. The Reader features an introductory section tracing the development of visual culture studies in response to globalization and digital culture, and articles grouped into thematic sections, each prefaced by an introduction by the editor and conclude with suggestions for further reading.

Edition 2
Publisher Routledge, 2002
ISBN 0415252229, 9780415252225
Length 737 pages

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Angharad N. Valdivia (ed.): A Companion to Media Studies (2005)

A Companion to Media Studies is a comprehensive collection that brings together new writings by some of the most respected canonical and contemporary media studies scholars to provide an overview of the theories and methodologies that have produced this most interdisciplinary of fields.

* Brings together new writings by some of the most respected canonical and contemporary media studies scholars in the most comprehensive collection on media studies to date.
* Tackles a variety of central concepts and controversies, organized into six areas of study: foundations, production, media content, media audiences, effects, and futures.
* Provides an accessible point of entry into this expansive and interdisciplinary field.
* Includes the writings of renowned media scholars, including McQuail, Schiller, Gallagher, Wartella, and Bryant.

Publisher Wiley-Blackwell, 2005
ISBN 1405141743, 9781405141741
Length 590 pages

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Tia DeNora: After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (2003)

Theodor W. Adorno placed music at the centre of his critique of modernity and broached some of the most important questions about the role of music in contemporary society. One of his central arguments was that music, through the manner of its composition, affected consciousness and was a means of social management and control. His work was primarily theoretical however, and because these issues were never explored empirically his work has become sidelined in current music sociology. This book argues that music sociology can be greatly enriched by a return to Adorno’s concerns, in particular his focus on music as a dynamic medium of social life. Intended as a guide to ‘how to do music sociology’ this book deals with critical topics too often sidelined such as aesthetic ordering, cognition, the emotions and music as a management device and reworks Adorno’s focus through a series of grounded examples.

•Hands on guide to how to do music sociology • First book to explore Adorno’s work within context of empirical music sociology and reassess his legacy • Develops a new approach to music sociology drawing on current musicological and sociology concerns

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2003
ISBN 052153724X, 9780521537247
Length 176 pages

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Tia DeNora: Music in Everyday Life (2000)

The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music’s structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies – an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector – as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics it develops a theory of music’s active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organisation in late modern societies.

• The first book to show how music is used in daily life as a structuring device • Novel in its application of recent perspectives from the sociology of technology and material culture • Develops recent concern with the aesthetic dimension of social action

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2000
ISBN 052162732X, 9780521627320
Length 181 pages

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Chris Jenks (ed.): Visual Culture (1995)

In Visual Culture the ‘visual’ character of contemporary culture is explored in original and lively essays. The contributors look at advertising, film, painting and fine art journalism, photography, television and propaganda. They argue that there is only a social, not a formal relation between vision and truth. A major preoccupation of modernity and central to an understadning of the postmodern, ‘vision’ and the ‘visual’ are emergent themes across sociology, cultural studies and critical theory in the visual arts. Visual Culture will prove an indispensable guide to the field.

Publisher Routledge, 1995
ISBN 0415106230, 9780415106238
Length 269 pages

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Art Silverblatt: Genre Studies in Mass Media: A Handbook (2007)

The study of various types of programming is essential for critical analysis of the media and also offers revealing perspectives on society’s cultural values, preoccupations, behavior, and myths. This handbook provides a systematic, in-depth approach to the study of media genres–including reality programs, game shows, situation comedies, soap operas, film noir, news programs, and more. The author addresses such questions as: Have there been shifts in the formula of particular genres over time? What do these shifts reveal about changes in culture? How and why do new genres–such as reality TV shows–appear? Are there differences in genres from one country to another?

Combining theoretical approaches with concrete examples, the book reinforces one’s understanding of the importance of genre to the creation, evolution, and consumption of media content. Each chapter in this reader-friendly book contains a detailed discussion of one of the theoretical approaches to genre studies, followed by Lines of Inquiry, which summarizes the major points of the discussion and suggests directions for analysis and further study. Each chapter also includes an example that illustrates how the particular theoretical approach can be applied in the analysis of genre. The author’s careful linkage of different genres to the real world makes the book widely useful for those interested in genre study as well as media and culture, television studies, film studies, and media literacy.

Publisher M.E. Sharpe, 2007
ISBN 076561670X, 9780765616708
Length 258 pages

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Sean Cubitt: Eco Media (2005)

For the last twenty years ecology, the last great political movement of the 20th century, has fired the imaginations not only of political activists but of popular movements throughout the industrialised world. EcoMedia is an enquiry into the popular mediations of environmental concerns in popular film and television since the 1980s. Arranged in a series of case studies on bio-security, relationships with animals, bioethics and biological sciences, over-fishing, eco-terrorism, genetic modification and global warming, EcoMedia offers close readings of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, Miyazake’s Princess Mononoke, The Perfect Storm, X-Men and X2, The Day After Tomorrow and the BBC’s drama Edge of Darkness and documentary The Blue Planet. Drawing on the thinking of Flusser, Luhmann, Latour, Agamben and Bookchin, EcoMedia discusses issues from whether animals can draw and why we like to draw animals, to how narrative films can imagine global processes, and whether wonder is still an ethical pleasure. Building on the thesis that popular film and television can tell us a great deal about the state of contemporary beliefs and anxieties, the book builds towards an argument that the polis, the human world, cannot survive without a three way partnership with physis and techne, the green world and the technological.

Contents
1. Introduction: Secular Virtues
2. Mediating Middle Earth: Talking to Trees in The Lord of the Rings
3. Drawing Animals: Zoomorphism in Princess Mononoke
4. The Blue Planet: Virtual nature and natural virtue
5. Ecology as Destiny: The Perfect Storm and Whale Rider
6. Edge of Darkness: eco-terrorism and the public sphere
7. Are we not men? X-Men, X-2 and GM apologetics
8. Always Take the Weather: green media in global context
9. Conclusions: biopolitics and ecommunication

Publisher Rodopi, 2005
ISBN 9042018852, 9789042018853
Length 168 pages

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Richard Maxwell (ed.): Culture Works: The Political Economy of Culture (2001)

Tears down the imaginary walls separating culture, economics, and politics.

When we read best-selling books, go to movies, visit art museums, go dancing, take in a game, we customarily ignore the political economy that hammers these features of culture into shape; normally, at such times, we’re not thinking about corporate board room votes, lobbyists, public funding for the arts, the end of the Cold War, stock swaps, intellectual property, or the class divisions of public space. This book aims to change that by offering readers a number of ways to link cultural experience to political economy—to become aware of the ways in which political and economic realities and decisions determine the outlines of spaces and activities in everyday life.

Unsettling and provocative, Culture Works tears down the imaginary walls separating culture, economics, and politics. Writing across the established borders between anthropology, sociology, art history, economics, communication and media studies, political theory, and performance, the authors seek to show how particular economies and power relations work in familiar and central cultural experiences: art, beer, advertising, dance, sport, shopping, the Web, and media. Their essays provide a series of lucid, critical accounts of various aspects of the political economy of culture and its attendant issues of production, consumption, corporatization, and the struggle for meaning. A refreshing example of a politics of writing and critical thinking that cultural studies and political economic analysis can produce when working together, the result will change the ways in which readers experience, consider, and understand culture works.

Contributors: David L. Andrews, Michael Curtin, Susan G. Davis, Danielle Fox, Chad Raphael, Anna Beatrice Scott, Ben Scott, Inger L. Stole, Thomas Streeter.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2001
ISBN 081663601X, 9780816636013
Length 259 pages

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Douglas Kellner: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Post-modern (1995)

Media Culture develops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television, music and other artifacts to discern their nature and effects, argueing that media culture is the dominant form of culture which socializes us and provides materials for identity, social reproduction and change. Through studies of Reagan and Rambo, horror films and youth films, rap music and African American culture, Madonna, fashion, television news and entertainment, MTV, Beavis and Butt-Head, the Gulf-War as cultural text, cyberpunk fiction and postmodern theory, Kellner provides a series of lively studies that both illuminate contemporary culture and provide methods of analysis and critique.

Many people today talk about cultural studies, but Kellner actually does it, carrying through a unique mixture of theoretical analyses and concrete discussions of some of the most popular and influential forms of contemporary media culture. Criticizing social context, political struggle, and the system of cultural production, Kellner develops a multi-dimensional approach to cultural studies that broadens the field and opens it to a variety of disiplines. He also provides approaches to the vexed question of the effects of culture and provides perspectives for cultural studies.

Publisher Routledge, 1995
ISBN 0415105706, 9780415105705
Length 357 pages

Keywords and phrases
Beavis and Butt-Head, cyberpunk, Madonna, cultural studies, Rambo, Frankfurt School, Neuromancer, Top Gun, Miami Vice, Malcolm X, rap music, Spike Lee, Marxism, horror films, Ice-T, feminism, masculist, media culture, multiperspectival, Poltergeist films

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Douglas Rushkoff: Media virus!: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (1996)

Bold, daring, and provocative, Media Virus! examines the intricate ways in which popular media both manipulate and are manipulated by those who know how to tap into their power. Douglas Rushkoff shows that where there’s a wavelength, there’s a way to “infect” those on it – from the subtly, but intentionally, subversive signals broadcast by shows like “The Simpsons,” to the O.J. media frenzy surrounding the Nicole Brown Simpson murder case, chase, and trial. What does it all mean? Unless you’ve been living in a cave that isn’t cable-ready, you’re already infected with the media virus. But don’t worry, it won’t make you sick. It will make you think.

Publisher Ballantine Books, 1996
ISBN 0345397746, 9780345397744
Length 344 pages

Keywords and phrases
memes, meta-media, Ren & Stimpy, counterculture, smart drugs, Beavis and Butt-head, Negativland, L.A. Law, zines, Futureculture, Swamp Thing, Rodney King, Amy Fisher, Genesis P-Orridge, cyberpunk, Ice-T, flyposters, R. U. Sirius, Willie Horton, NYPD Blue

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Theodor W. Adorno: The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (2001)

The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno’s thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodified and standardized all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria by his many detractors. In today’s world, where even the least cynical of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno’s work takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture.

Editor J. M. Bernstein
Publisher Routledge, 2001
ISBN 0415253802, 9780415253802
Length 210 pages

Key terms: fascist, mass music, virme, culture industry, mass media, Dialectic of Enlightenment, mass culture, ego ideal, Adorno, acmally, critical theory, jazz, reified, psychoanalysis, astrology, Simone Weil, Freud, Erich Fromm, Gillian Rose

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