SC224: Week-by-Week
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Select the week you're interested in (above) to browse for appropriate supplementary course materials. If you have any queries and suggestions about the contents of this page please do not hesitate to contact the web officer by emailing sociology@essex.ac.uk
2. Media Effects
The study of contemporary culture is inconceivable without a paying attention to the role of ‘the media’ – a term that usually refers to mass media such as television and the national press. But what are the ‘effects’ of the mass media and can the problem be framed in such ways at all?
Set ReadingDenis McQuail (1977) “The Influence and Effects of Mass Media” in James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woollacott (eds) Mass Communication and Society. London: Edward Arnold.
Primary Sources
S. Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis eds. Culture, Media, Language. London: Routledge.
Other Readings
Philip Elliott “Uses and Gratifications Research: A Critique” in Media Studies: A Reader
Stuart Hall et al (1980) “Media Studies” in S. Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis eds. Culture, Media, Language. London: Routledge.
Tony Bennett (1982) “Theories of the media, theories of society” in M. Gurevitch et al. Eds. Culture, Society, and the Media. London: Methuen.
3. From Media Effects to the Circuit of Communication
The work on the media carried out in the seventies in Birmingham by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) has shaped a good deal of work on contemporary culture. Today’s lecture focuses on a key contribution to the field by British scholar Stuart Hall (‘Encoding/Decoding’). This essay argued for a way of looking at the media as a set of segmented and connected processes, where the moments of production, distribution and reception retain their autonomy in a circuit of communication. Hall will also introduce us to a key notion of much contemporary media and cultural theory: that meaning and language are important elements of media power; that the media should always be related to the larger culture within which they are produced and consumed; and that the meanings encoded in media messages are not fixed and univocal, but inherently contradictory and polysemic.
Case Study: The News
Recommended ReadingStuart Hall “Encoding/Decoding” in Media Studies: A Reader (also in The Cultural Studies Reader).
Other ReadingsStuart Hall (1992)”Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” in Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg Cultural Studies. London Routledge
Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts “The Social production of News.”
David Morley and Charlotte Brusndon (1999) The Nationwide Television Studies. London: Routledge
Ien Ang (1989) Watching Dallas: soap opera and the melodramatic imagination. Routledge
Elaine Baldwin et al. (1999) “Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding” in Introducing Cultural Studies. London:Prentice Hall, pp. 86/91
Douglas Kellner (1995) “Theory Wars and Cultural Studies” in Media Culture.
Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg (1992) “Cultural Studies: An Introduction” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
Iain Craib (1984) Modern Social Theory. London and New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf. (chapter 11)
Ien Ang (1996) “Gendered Audiences” in Living Room Wars. London: Routledge.
4. Signification
The term ‘signification’ refers to the process by which meaning is produced through signs. Because of the key importance of meanings to cultural theory, the latter has always been concerned with formalizing its understanding of signification by giving it a rigorous theoretical base. The most important theoretical approaches to the study of cultural and social meanings are based in semiotics – or the science of signs according to early twentieth century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. In particular, we will look at how semiotic cultural analysis in the sixties and seventies aimed to break down the process by which shared meanings are produced in advertising and photography. While early semiological analysis were basically little more than attempts to ‘uncover’ the ideology of mass culture, later work focused on the ‘polysemy’ of media texts – that is on the capacity of texts to carry more than one meaning.
Set ReadingRoland Barthes (1993) ‘Myth Today’ in S. Sontag ed. A Roland Barthes Reader. Vintage Books
Other Reading
Primary sources
Roland Barthes (1967) Elements of semiology. London: Cape
Roland Barthes (1977) Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press
Roland Barthes (1998) “Rhetoric of the Image” in N. Mirzoeff (ed) The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge (also in J. Evans and S. Hall eds. Visual Culture: the Reader and in S. Hall Representation)
Roland Barthes (1998) “Myth Today” in J. Evans and S. Hall eds. Visual Culture: the Reader, Sage and OUP. (also in S. Hall Representation)
Roland Barthes (1972) Mythologies. London: J. Cape
Roland Barthes (1990) S/Z. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1990) “Signs and Language” in Alexander and Seidman (eds) Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates.
Other Readings
L. Grossberg et al. (1998) “Meaning” in Media Making: Mass Media and Popular Culture. Sage
Annette Kuhn “The Power of the Image” in Media Studies: A Reader
Marisa Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (2001) “Practices of Looking: Images, Power and Politics” in Practices of Looking: An Introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press.
Ellen Seiter “Semiotics, Structuralism, and Television” in Robert C. Allen (ed) Channels of Discourse, Reassembled. London: Routledge.
Elaine Baldwin et al. (1999) “Signs and Semiotics” in Introducing Cultural Studies. London:Prentice Hall, pp. 50-58
Dominic Strinati (1995) “Structuralism, semiology and popular culture” in An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture
Stuart Hall (1997) “Saussure’s Legacy” and “From Language to Culture: Linguistics to Semiotics” in S. Hall ed. Representation
Case Studies
Raymond Williams ‘Advertising: The Magic System” in Media Studies: A Reader
Sean Nixon ‘Advertising, magazine Culture, and the New Man” in Media Studies: A Reader
Mica Nava and Orson Nava ‘Discriminating or Duped? Young People as Consumers of Advertising/Art” in Media Studies: A Reader
Douglas Kellner (1995) “Madonna, Fashion and Image” in Media Culture
David Croteau and William Hoynes (1997) “Advertising and Consumer Culture” in Media/Society: Industries, Images and Audiences. Pine Forge Press, 1997.
Judith Williamson (1981) Decoding advertisements : ideology and meaning in advertising. London : M. Boyars.
5. Representation
A considerable amount of work in media studies concerns the study of representation, but what do we mean when we say that the media either ‘represent’ or ‘misrepresent’ reality? Today we look at different theories of representation by we mainly focus on contemporary cultural theories of representation that understand reality as constructed by and through media discourse. What does it mean to talk about ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ images’? What type of representation is a stereotype and how does it work?
Case Study: Blackspoitation Movies (Screening of Isaac Julien’s documentary on seventies Black Hollywood Cinema)
Set Reading
Stuart Hall (1997) “The Work of Representation” in Representation. OUP/Sage.
And
Stuart Hall (1996) “New Ethnicities” in D. Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
Other Readings
Primary SourcesEdward Said (1978) Orientalism. London: Routledge
Homi Bhabha (1994) “The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism.” In The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. (also in J. Evans and S. Hall eds. Visual Culture: the Reader)
Critical Interventions
Richard Dyer (1993) The matter of images : essays on representations. London : Routledge.
Michele Wallace (1993) “Negative images: towards a black feminist cultural criticism” in S. During ed. The Cultural Studies Reader.
bell hooks (1992) Black looks : race and representation. London : Turnaround, 1992
Richard Dyer “The Role of Stereotypes” in Media Studies: A Reader
John Berger (1973) Ways of Seeing . BBC press
Summaries and Definitions
Liesbet van Zoonen (1991) “Feminist Perspectives on the Media” ” in James Curran and Michael Gurevitch Mass Media and Society. Edward Arnold
Douglas Kellner (1995) “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture” in G. Dines et al. Gender, race and class in the Media. Sage.
Applied theory
Corinne Squire ‘Empowering Women? The Oprah Winfrey Show” in Media Studies: A Reader
Simon Frith 'Music and Identity' in Hall & du Gay (eds.) (1996) Questions
of Cultural Identity (Sage)
Douglas Kellner “Black Voices from Spike Lee to Rap” in Media Culture
Tricia Rose (1994) Black noise. rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Wesleyan University Press
Graeme Turner (1990) British Cultural Studies: An introduction. Routledge
Stuart Hall (1995) “The Whites in Their Eyes: Racist Ideology and the Media” in G. Dines et al. Gender, race and class in the Media. Sage.
G. Dines et al. Gender, race and class in the Media. Sage. (part 5 By day/Prime Time TV; Part VII Rap Music)
Douglas Kellner Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (section ‘the politics of representation’)
6. Sex and the gaze
A fundamental dimension of culture involves its relation to psychic processes that bring into play our unconscious fantasies and identifications. A key dimension of our psychic life, and one that finds a significant expression within our cultural practices, is sexuality. The study of the relationship between culture, images, and sexuality started in earnest with the work of British cinema journal Screen, whose scholars used Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to understand how spectators are drawn into the filmic structure; how sexed gender effects are produced by different technologies of vision; and the visual appeal of primal libidinal drives, such as voyeurism, fetishism and sadism. In particular we will look at the structures of vision and identification produced by the cinematic experience and their different mobilisation of feminine and masculine subjectivities.
Case Study: Hollywood films: action heroes and romantic heroines
Set Readings
Laura Mulvey ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. (also in L. Mulvey The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality. Routledge 1992).
Primary sources
Lacan, Jacques, “The Mirror Stage” in Easthope, A. ed. Contemporary Film Theory, Longman 1993
Jacques Lacan (1998 )The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. edited by Jacques-Alain Miller ; translated by Alan Sheridan. London : Vintage
Sigmund Freud (1959) Collected Papers. New York: Basic Books (especially lectures on femininity)
Summaries and definitionsE. Ann Kaplan (ed) (1990) Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Routledge
Annette Kuhn (1994) Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. New York: Verso.
Laplanche and Pontalis,(1973) The Language of Psychoanalysis . Hogarth
Kaja Silvermann “The Subject of Semiotics” in J. Evans and S. Hall eds. Visual Culture: the Reader
Sean Nixon “Spectatorship and Subjectivisation” in Hall, Stuart ed. Representation, Sage 1997, pp.315-23
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (1992) “Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television” in Robert C. Allen (ed) Channels of Discourse, Reassembled. London: Routledge.
Marisa Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (2001) “Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge” in Practices of Looking: An Introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press.
Barbara Creed (2000) “Film and Psychoanalysis” in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson eds Film Studies: Critical Approaches. Oxford University Press.
L. Grossberg et al. (1998) “The Interpretation of Dreams” in Media Making: Mass Media and Popular Culture. Sage
Case studies
Constance Penley (1992) “Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Study of Popular Culture” in Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Cultural Studies
John Fiske (1987) “Subjectivity and Address” and “Gendered Television: Feminity/Masculinity” in Television Culture. London: Routledge.
Lola Young (1990) “A Nasty Piece of Work: A Psychoanalytic Study of Sexual and Racial Difference in Mona Lisa” in J. Rutheford ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference.
7. Cultural Identity
Psychoanalytic theories of identification haven’t just been drawn upon to explain the sexed nature of the gaze, but also more generally the modalities that inform the production of cultural identities. Why is it that we identify with cultural identities such as being British or Italian or Mexican? What does it mean to have more than one cultural identity (as in the experience of increasing number of people in contemporary multicultural societies)? The notion of cultural identity presupposes a dynamic relation between meanings and identification, but also a politics of cultural difference – as it has been elaborated within Black and Asian cultural criticism in the eighties and nineties.Set Reading
Stuart Hall “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” in S. Hall and P. du Gay eds. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage
And
Cornel West (1993) “The new cultural politics of difference” in S. During The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge.
Other Readings
J. Rutheford (ed) Identity. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Paul Gilroy (1993) The Black Atlantic. London: Verso.
Stuart Hall (1992) “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacy” in L. Grossberg et al (eds). Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. (also in D. Morley and K. Chen Stuart Hall)
David Morley and Kevin Robins (2001) eds. British Cultural Studies: geography, nationality and identity. Oxford University Press.
bell hooks (1992) Black looks : race and representation. London: Turnaround.
S. Hall and P. du Gay (1996) eds. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage
Jonathan Friedman (1994) Cultural identity and global process. London: Sage.
Douglas Kellner (1995) Media culture : cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmodern. London: Routledge.
8. Technologies of the Self
Michel Foucault’s work offers us an alternative perspective to psychoanalysis in relation to the analysis of the psychic life of culture. Among Foucault’s many contributions to the study of culture, we find its concept of ‘technologies of the self’ – that is literally techniques by which our sense of subjective experience is produced and reinforced. Foucault’s qualm with psychoanalysis was that it was still based on a ‘repressive’ theory of sexuality – that is that it assumed a sexuality that was repressed and thus in needs of some kind of liberation through the famous ‘talking cure’. Foucault’s historical emphasis, however, understood the self (including sexuality) as an effect of technologies of power. In his historical work on sexuality, Foucault focused on a particularly important technology of the self – the ‘confession’, to which psychoanalysis is indebted and to which our contemporary popular culture keeps returning to.
Case studyTalk Shows
Set ReadingExtracts from
Michel Foucault (1981-1990) The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. Penguin Books
Other Readings
Primary SourcesMichel Foucault (1979) Discipline and Punish. Penguin Books
Michel Foucault (1997) Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. New York: New Press
Michel Foucault (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972-1977. (ed. by Colin Gordon). New York: Pantheon Books
Michel Foucault (1986) Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984. (ed. By Sylvčre Lotringer). New York: Autonomedia.
Dreyfus H. and Rabinow, P. (1982) Michel Foucault: Beyond Hermeneutics and Structuralism Brighton: Harvester.
Jean Baudrillard Forget Foucault New York: Semiotext(e)
Summaries and DefinitionsW. McHoul and W. Grace (1993) A Foucault primer : discourse, power and the subject. Melbourne : Melbourne University Press.
Philip Barker (1998) Michel Foucault : an introduction. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, c1998
Geoff Danaher, Tony Schirato and Jen Webb (2000) Understanding Foucault. London: Sage
Judith Butler (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge (esp. chapter on Foucault)
9. Affect
A recurrent and key problem in our understanding of culture is that of ‘the body’ – that is of the role of sensation and affect and its relation to meanings, texts and discourse. While cultural studies has mainly concentrated on culture as a site of signification and identification, some contemporary cultural theorists have brought up the question of the ‘autonomic remainders’ of the body’s activity as an important focus. In particular, such writers have focused on the importance of ‘affect’ – that is of the capacity of the body to affect and be affected by images and sounds. Today we will focus on the challenge to cultural theory by recent work on affect.
Case studySeptember 11 as media event
Set ReadingBrian Massumi (2003) “The Autonomy of Affect” in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press.
Other ReadingsPrimary Sources
Gilles Deleuze (1988) Spinoza.Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus. Athlone Press (esp. chapter on the Body Without Organs)
Gary Genosko (ed) (2001) Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. (three volume collection: read index and look up chapters of interest)
Michel Foucault "Power Affects the Body" in Foucault Live.
Critical Interventions
Steven Shapiro (1993) The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Barbara M. Kennedy (2001) Deleuze and Cinema. The Aesthetics of Sensation. Edinburgh University Press
10. Media Hot and Cold
Finally, to conclude this section, we look at how media in themselves, rather than simply as conveyors of signified content, shape our subjectivities by altering our sense ratios (as in the linear and explosive nature of print or the cool and distracted perception of television). Marshall McLuhan’s controversial work suggested that media are environments within which we move and that their main effect on culture does not lie in what they say but in what they do to our bodies.
Set ReadingExtracts from
Marshall McLuhan (1997) Essential McLuhan edited by E. McLuhan and F. Zingrone. London: Routledge
Other ReadingsGary Genosko (1999) McLuhan and Baudrillard: the Masters of Implosion.Routledge.
Paul Levinson (2001) Digital McLuhan : a guide to the information millennium. Routledge.
Scott Lash (2003) Critique of Information. Sage
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (1997) eds. Digital Delirium. New York: St Martin’s Press
William Bogard (2000) “Distraction and Digital Culture” in Ctheory: An International Journal of Theory, Technology and Culture.
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=131
© 2003 University of Essex All rights reserved