Seminar in Media Studies
COMM 502 Seminar in Media Studies, Autumn 1999
Mondays, 6– 8:30 p.m.
University of Illinois, Chicago, BSB 1169
Kevin G. Barnhurst, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Communication
Office BSB 1148A. Hours by appointment (312) 413-3231
Description
This seminar provides an in-depth, intensive examination of theories, perspectives, and approaches to media studies. The assignments include roughly a dozen one-page summaries of research and theory readings, a midterm examination, and a term paper.
Purposes
To investigate the symbolic social practices that communication media help sustain.
To examine the political, economic, and cultural implications of those practices.
To understand the history of how scholars have conceptualized and studied the modern media.
These are general objectives; the seminar offers neither information or facts per se. It is an extended conversation about a series of interesting texts we will read together, that will enable us to critically analyze and research modern media of communication. The course is interactive, with reading, discussion, reflection, and critical thinking equally emphasized, and expected of you. The seminar will help you examine the way we live day to day and the ways we organize and conduct our media-saturated society.
Readings
Expect to read one short book (or several chapters) for each class. The reading assignments for each meeting include several books, chapters, and research articles. To manage the extensive readings, each member of the seminar will take responsibility to read a share of the week’s assignment and prepare a detailed summary to present during the class meeting. We will divide up the readings at least two weeks in advance.
For the assigned reading, each member will prepare a one-page handout including the following: Full bibliographical citation, one or more key concepts (principal terms the author invented or employed), a one-sentence nutshell statement that summarizes the main point or argument of the reading, a list of as many as seven one-sentence summaries of secondary ideas and supporting evidence, and full bibliographic citations on a few of the principal sources the author cites.
Paper
The term paper can tackle any topic in media studies. Seminar members choose a topic of interest in consultation with the other members, then do a thorough survey of the theoretical literature, identifying in the process a question, issue, or gap in the research. The paper includes a statement of the issue, a description of the relevant literature, and a justification explaining why the issue matters, and a short indication of further study needed to help resolve it.
Exam
The take-home exam takes place late in the semester. Several short essay questions draw from all the readings covered in the seminar. Questions generally present an issue or social problem related to the media and leave open several options for answers drawing on any seminar member’s areas of interest and strength. In other words, the exam is comprehensive but also flexible.
Grades
Course grades follow this formula: Participation, 20 percent; Reading summaries, 35 percent; Midterm exam, 25 percent; Term paper, 20 percent.
Outline
Aug. 23. Introduction to the Course
Delia, Jesse. "Communication Research: A History." In Handbook of Communication Science, pp. 20–98. Ed. Charles R. Berger and Steven H. Chaffee. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1987.
Aug. 30. Enlightenment and Eighteenth Century Media
Heyer, Paul. "The Eighteenth Century." Communications & History: Theories of Media, Knowledge, and Civilization, pp. 3–48. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book iii. 1690. Any edition.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Essay on the Origin of Languages. 1773. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
Innis, Harold. "The English Publishing Trade in the Eighteenth Century." The Bias of Communication, pp. 142–55. 1951.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964.
Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
Foucault, Michel. "Speaking." The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, pp. 78–124. New York: Pantheon, 1971.
Sept. 6. Labor Day, no class
Sept. 13. Nineteenth Century Rise of the Social Sciences
Weber, Max. "Politics as a Vocation" and "Science as a Vocation." From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, pp. 96-99, 129–56. Ed. and Trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford, 1958.
Schutz, Alfred."Subjective and Objective Meaning" and "Transition to the Analysis of the Constituting Process." The Phenomenology of the Social World, pp. 31–44. Trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967.
Comte, Auguste. "Population Increase and the Law of Three Stages." Sociological Theory, 4th ed., pp. 592–94. Ed. L. Coser and B. Rosenberg. New York: Macmillan, 1976.
Marx, Karl. "Alienated Labor" and "The Materialist Conception of History." The Portable Karl Marx, pp. 131–46, 163–71. Ed. Eugene Kamenka. New York: Penguin, 1983.
Durkheim, Emile. "Sociology in France in the Nineteenth Century." Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, pp. 3–22, 230. Ed. Robert N. Bellah. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
Sept. 20. The Great War and Its Aftermath
Lasswell, Harold. "Propaganda." Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan, 1937.
Lippmann, Walter. "The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads," "The Self-Centered Man," and "The Self-Contained Community." Public Opinion, pp. 3–20, 161–74. New York: Macmillan, 1927. (Chapters 1, 16, and 17).
Rayce, Josiah. "Provincialism." Race Questions and Other American Problems, (Chapter 3).
Bourne, Randolph S. "Twilight of the Idols." War and the Intellectuals: Essays, 1915–1919. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Mock, James R. Words that Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Relations, 1917–1919. New York: Russell & Russell, 1968.
Sept. 27. The Chicago School of Sociology
Matthews, Fred H. "The Search for Theoretical Understanding: News and the Crowd" and "Urbanism and the Pathos of Modern Man: The Contours of Park’s Sociology." Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School, pp. 31–56, 121–56. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977. (Chapters 2 and 5).
Dewey, John. "Search for the Great Community." The Public and Its Problems, pp. 143–84. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1927. (Chapter 3).
Park, Robert E. The Crowd and the Public, and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. (Select)
Cooley, Charles H. "Communication." Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. New York: Schocken Books, 1963. (from Part II).
Blumer, Herbert. "Schemes of Life." Movies and Conduct. 1933. New York: Arno Press, 1970. (Chapter 10)
Rock, Paul E. "Symbolic Interactionism as an Understated Sociology." The Making of Symbolic Interactionism. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1979.
Oct. 4. Early Social Science Research in the United States and Britain
Lashley, Karl S., and John B. Watson. A Psychological Study of Motion Pictures in Relation to Venereal Disease Campaigns. Washington, D.C., 1922.
Charters, W. W. Motion Pictures and Youth. New York: Macmillan, 1931.
Mass Observation. Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930s.
Madge, Charles. First Year’s Work, 1937–1938, by Mass-Observation.
Munsterberg, Hugo. The Film: The Silent Photoplay in 1916,A Psychological Study. 1916. New York: Dover, 1970.
Fenton, Frances. The Influence of Newspaper Presentations Upon the Growth of Crime and Other Antisocial Activity. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1911.
Oct. 11. Emergence of the Dominant Paradigm: The Columbia School and Yale Program
Lazarsfeld, Paul, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet. The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948.
Lazarsfeld, Paul. "An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir." The Intellectual in Europe and America, 1930–1960. Ed. Fleming and Bailyn. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Hovland, Carl I., Arthur A. Lumsdaine, and Fred D. Shefield. Experiments in Mass Communication. Studies in the Social Psychology in World War II, American Soldier Series, Vol. 3. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949.
Merton, Robert. "The Focused Interview."
Lazarsfeld, Paul. Radio and the Printed Page. 1940. New York: Arno Press, 1971.
Barton, Allen. "Paul Lazarsfeld and the Invention of the University Institute for Applied Social Research. In Organizing for Social Research. Ed. Burkart Holzner and Jiri Nehnevajsa. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1982.
Oct. 18. The Critical Theory Response
Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder & Herder, 1972.
Gitlin, Todd. "Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm." Mass Communication Review Yearbook, Vol. 2, pp. 73–122. Ed. G. Cleveland Wilhoit and H. DeBock. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1981.
Sproule, J. Michael. "Propaganda Studies in American Social Science: The Rise and Fall of the Critical Paradigm." Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 60–78.
Lazarsfeld, Paul. "Administrative and Critical Communications Research." Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 2–16.
Oct. 25. The Rise of the Limited Effects Model
Katz, Elihu, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Communication. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955.
Schramm, Wilbur. Men, Messages, and Media. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. (Chapters 1, 2, and 7–14)
Klapper, Joseph T. The Effects of Mass Communication. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Prime Time." Colored People: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Chaffee, Steven H., and J. Hockheimer. "The Beginnings of Political Communication Research in the United States: Origins of the ‘Limited Effects’ Model." (Old Urbana R-file)
Nov. 1. Mainstream Research Challenges to the Minimal Effects Model
Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, our Social Skin. (also an R-file: "Return to the Concept of Powerful Mass Media") Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Blumler, Jay, and Elihu Katz. The Uses of Mass Communication: Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1974.
McCombs, Max, and Shaw. "The Agenda-Setting Function of the Mass Media." Public Opinion Quarterly
Iyengar, Shanto, and Donald R. Kinder. News that Matters: Television and American Opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Gerbner, George, et al. "The Demonstration of Power." Journal of Communication
Greenberg, Bradley, and Joseph Dominick. "Race and Social Class Differences in Teen-Agers’ Use of Television Violence." Journal of Broadcasting (1969).
Nov. 8. The Mass Culture Debates of the 1940s and 1950s
MacDonald, "A Theory of Mass Culture," Rajassiere, "In Defense of Television," and Fiedler, "The Middle Against Both Ends." In Mass Culture. Ed. Boernard Rosenberg and David M. White. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957.
Kronenberger, Howe, and Riesman. From the symposium, Our Country and Our Culture. Partisan Review XIX (1952): 2–5.
Nov. 15. The Rebirth of Cultural Studies in the 1970s
Balsamo, A. "Public Pregnancies and Cultural Narratives of Surveillance." Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women, pp. 80–115. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Clarke, J., Stuart Hall, T. Jefferson, and B. Roberts. "Subcultures, Cultures, and Class." In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, pp. 9–78. Ed. Stuart Hall & T. Jefferson. London: HarperCollins Academic, 1976.
duGay, Paul, Stuart Hall, et al. "Making Sense of the Walkman." Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, pp. 8–40. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997.
Eckman, A., and Maria Mastronardi. "Feminist Approaches to Sexual Violence: A Discursive Analysis." In Communication and Disenfranchisement: Social Health Issues and Implications, pp. 233–272. Ed. E. Berlin Ray. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1996.
Grossberg, Lawrence. "The Formations of Cultural Studies: An American in Birmingham." Strategies 2 (1989): 114–110. Reprinted in Bringing It all Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies, pp. 195–233. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems." In Culture, Media, Language, pp. 15–47. Ed. Stuart Hall, D. Hobson, et al. London: Hutchinson, 1980.
McRobbie, A. "Settling Accounts with Subculture: A Feminist Critique. 1980. Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen, pp. 16–34. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991.
Carey, James W. "Communication as Culture." Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin-Hyman, 1989.
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life. 1957. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971.
Clarke, John. "Introduction." New Times and Old Enemies: Essays on Cultural Studies in America. New York: HarperCollins Academic, 1991.
Nov. 22. Take-home Exam, no class
Nov. 29. The 1980s Ferment, New Technology, and the Future of Media Studies
Theme Issue: Ferment in the Field. Journal of Communication 33.3 (Summer 1983).
Whitney, D. Charles. "Ferment in the Field," Communication Research 12.1 (January 1985): 133–43.
Ong, Walter. Orality & Literacy. London: New Accents, 1982.
Jones, Steve, ed. Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995.
Sterne, Jonathan. "Thinking the Internet: Cultural Studies vs. The Millennium." In Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net, pp. 257–83. Ed. Steve Jones. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1999.
Dec. 6. Term papers due