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Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works
Bringing together a range of core texts into one volume, this acclaimed anthology offers the definitive resource in culture, media, and communication.
755 pages, Paperback
First published February 16, 2001
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378 people want to read
About the author
Meenakshi Gigi Durham
10 books17 followersMeenakshi Gigi Durham, is the (joint) professor of gender, women’s and sexuality studies at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Meenakshi Gigi Durham's work centers on media and the politics of the body, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, race, and youth cultures. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies. She was named a CLAS Collegiate Scholar in 2012.
Her work has appeared in leading academic journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Theory, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and Women's Studies in Communication. She is the author of The Lolita Effect (Overlook, 2008) and the co-editor, with Douglas M. Kellner, of Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks (Blackwell, 2001, rev. 2006). Her work has earned her widespread public recognition, including media appearances on the BBC, Irish National Television, Iowa Public Radio, Illinois Public Radio, The Dr. Phil Show, and the documentary "Miss Representation," which was aired on the Oprah Winfrey Network.
She serves on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals, including Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of Communication. She also served on the advisory board for the Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents and the Media. Her essay, "Grieving," published in the Harvard Review in 2010, has been selected for inclusion in the 2011 Best American Essays anthology. She is the recipient of a Faculty Scholar Award from The University of Iowa. In 2013, she was awarded a faculty administrative fellowship in the UI's Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development. She was the 2014 recipient of the International Communication Association's Teresa Award, the Feminist Scholarship Division's highest award for achievement in research.
She teaches classes in gender and media, critical theories of the media, and magazine writing. Her professional journalism experience includes reporting, editing, and design for various newspapers and magazines including The Pensacola News-Journal, The Times of India, and Science Today. She coordinated a statewide public information campaign on family involvement in education for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. She served as publications editor for the University of Wisconsin System from 1992–94.
Before coming to Iowa in the Fall of 2000, she taught magazine journalism at the University of Texas at Austin for six years, where she was the recipient of an honorable mention for the campus-wide Gilbert Teaching Excellence Award in Women's and Gender Studies.
Meenakshi Gigi Durham's work centers on media and the politics of the body, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, race, and youth cultures. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies. She was named a CLAS Collegiate Scholar in 2012.
Her work has appeared in leading academic journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Theory, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and Women's Studies in Communication. She is the author of The Lolita Effect (Overlook, 2008) and the co-editor, with Douglas M. Kellner, of Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks (Blackwell, 2001, rev. 2006). Her work has earned her widespread public recognition, including media appearances on the BBC, Irish National Television, Iowa Public Radio, Illinois Public Radio, The Dr. Phil Show, and the documentary "Miss Representation," which was aired on the Oprah Winfrey Network.
She serves on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals, including Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of Communication. She also served on the advisory board for the Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents and the Media. Her essay, "Grieving," published in the Harvard Review in 2010, has been selected for inclusion in the 2011 Best American Essays anthology. She is the recipient of a Faculty Scholar Award from The University of Iowa. In 2013, she was awarded a faculty administrative fellowship in the UI's Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development. She was the 2014 recipient of the International Communication Association's Teresa Award, the Feminist Scholarship Division's highest award for achievement in research.
She teaches classes in gender and media, critical theories of the media, and magazine writing. Her professional journalism experience includes reporting, editing, and design for various newspapers and magazines including The Pensacola News-Journal, The Times of India, and Science Today. She coordinated a statewide public information campaign on family involvement in education for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. She served as publications editor for the University of Wisconsin System from 1992–94.
Before coming to Iowa in the Fall of 2000, she taught magazine journalism at the University of Texas at Austin for six years, where she was the recipient of an honorable mention for the campus-wide Gilbert Teaching Excellence Award in Women's and Gender Studies.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 1, 2014
The best thing about this book is that it really is what it says it is – key works on media and cultural studies. This is a remarkable collection. Many of the things you would expect to be here are here. For example, there is Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – probably the most important twenty pages ever written on the subject. This is the second time I’ve read it over the last wee while and it is a remarkable piece of writing. It is the theoretical background for Berger’s Ways of Seeing – something else to go onto your to read list, if it isn’t there already.
There is also Habermas’s The Public Sphere – although, not Nancy Fraser’s critique of it, which would have been worth adding if this book wasn’t already over 700 pages long. There is some Adorno on The Culture Industry, McLuhan on the medium being the message, a wee bit of Barthes from Mythologies, a very little Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall – two people I really do need to read more of, some Chomsky on his propaganda model and some Bourdieu on television – a book I’ve reviewed elsewhere. There is even a really lovely piece by bell hooks on ‘eating the other’.
BUT, and as I think you can see already, it would be insane to try to review this book. There is just too much, far too much. All the same, I’m going to talk about Baudrillard and his idea of the Simulacra. This is one of those ideas that you hear all of the time but rarely have it explained in a way that makes sense. Baudrillard is the philosopher who is somewhat famous – as much as philosophers ever get to be famous, for having said that the Gulf War never happened. His most famous book also appears in an early scene in first Matrix movie, one that literally owes quite a debt to Baudrillard.
Okay, so, simulacra? Basically, it is a copy of a copy – to which there was never an original – and that this is one of the main ways that we should come to understand our post-modern world. Yep, I know, sounds like nonsense, but this is actually a really important idea and one you kind of do need to get a handle on.
There are lovely introductions to the various parts of this book and the introduction to the bit on postmodernism explains simulacra with both a kind of quote from Baudrillard about Nixon and Disneyland, but also with what I think is a stunningly clear explanation using plastic surgery. The introduction says that today we have lots of women who go to plastic surgeons asking to be made to look like someone from a magazine photograph – but the person in the magazine has been photoshopped. That is, there was no original, just a hyper-real image and it is this hyper-real image that we seek to emulate. When Plato spoke about the problems of art being involved in art being a copy of a copy, I suspect he had no idea of just how far down that particular road we might find ourselves.
Now, it is really important to think this through. What he is not saying is that the world doesn’t exist, in the way Plato does. That, clearly, would be nuts. He is not a solipsist. The point is that the world really does exist and so do the representations of the world that we create. The photoshopped image has an all-too-real existence – so real that we are prepared to suffer agonies to become that image. That is ‘real’, that is hyper-real. In much the same way that Disneyland is also real – I mean, people pay a fortune to go there and the place is designed as a kind of hyper-real fantasy of small town America. A fantasy land where dreams come true. But this is also true of not just the ways in which we seek to realise our fantasies – but also of the realisations of our nightmares. What can it mean that the Gulf War didn’t exist? Surely we saw it night after night on our TV screens, we’ve seen the parades of coffins come home draped in flags. If that isn’t real, what the hell is reality?
Like I said, he isn’t saying it isn’t real, he is saying it never happened. The Gulf War isn’t really any of those things – at least, not the Gulf War we got to witness on our television sets. That Gulf War certainly never happened. That Gulf War was a mission accomplished, one that was fought because Saddam Hussein wanted to kill George Bush’s daddy. It was a war fought with pin point accuracy that limited Iraqi deaths because we are so damn humane – that war never happened – even while we were watching it night after night on our television sets it never happened. And the problem is that now the hyper-reality of that war means that the fundamental unreality of the narrative we have been spun can’t keep up, can’t make sense, of what is going on in the country itself. I mean, the narrative that was spun to justify going to war with Hussein in the first place was that Al Qaeda, the guys that brought you 9/11, had been supported in some secret, off-hand way by Hussein, so that to crush Al Qaeda we needed to crush Hussein first. Except now we have photographs of John McCain shaking hands with ISIS crazies. And it seems that ISIS was kicked out of Al Qaeda because they were too nuts. And, just to prove you really couldn’t make this shit up, after spending a trillion dollars or so in blasting the bejesus out of Iraq to save the world from Al Qaeda, it looks like the looniest fringe group of Al Qaeda is going to literally take over large swags of Iraq – machine gunning people along the way with abandon. There was no ‘patriotism’ involved in this war, just a hyper-real, Hollywood version of a Clint Eastwood film enacted on TV, even containing a scene where the US President lands a plane on a battle ship.
Killing 100,000 odd Iraqi civilians, using depleted uranium casing to give them ongoing cancers, smashing up their infrastructure, bombing power and water plants – and all while believing (and I don’t for a moment doubt they really did believe) we would be welcomed as liberators show how far reality and Reality have moved apart from each other.
And we will do it all again. While we believe in the simulacrum, the world will just have to conform to that. Simulacra are beautiful lies that become true because we force the world to fit to them. Like the woman getting the facelift – the knives are real, the Botox is real, the money she hands over is real, it is just that the photo of the blonde 50 year old woman that looks twenty-something isn’t real in the way the women under the knife wants to believe she is. The bombs, too, were real, the shattered lives were real, the torture in the gaols we set up was real, but the dream of a democratic Iraq, that was a bizarre fantasy based on wishful thinking and worse. A simulacrum we used to stoke the fantasy that we are the good guys, that we always do what is right, that our motives are pure and are dreams are true.
Like I said, there is too much to this book to even begin to really review it properly. All the same, it provides a wonderful introduction to what are many key texts in an area that has incredibly interesting things to say to us about the world we live in.
There is also Habermas’s The Public Sphere – although, not Nancy Fraser’s critique of it, which would have been worth adding if this book wasn’t already over 700 pages long. There is some Adorno on The Culture Industry, McLuhan on the medium being the message, a wee bit of Barthes from Mythologies, a very little Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall – two people I really do need to read more of, some Chomsky on his propaganda model and some Bourdieu on television – a book I’ve reviewed elsewhere. There is even a really lovely piece by bell hooks on ‘eating the other’.
BUT, and as I think you can see already, it would be insane to try to review this book. There is just too much, far too much. All the same, I’m going to talk about Baudrillard and his idea of the Simulacra. This is one of those ideas that you hear all of the time but rarely have it explained in a way that makes sense. Baudrillard is the philosopher who is somewhat famous – as much as philosophers ever get to be famous, for having said that the Gulf War never happened. His most famous book also appears in an early scene in first Matrix movie, one that literally owes quite a debt to Baudrillard.
Okay, so, simulacra? Basically, it is a copy of a copy – to which there was never an original – and that this is one of the main ways that we should come to understand our post-modern world. Yep, I know, sounds like nonsense, but this is actually a really important idea and one you kind of do need to get a handle on.
There are lovely introductions to the various parts of this book and the introduction to the bit on postmodernism explains simulacra with both a kind of quote from Baudrillard about Nixon and Disneyland, but also with what I think is a stunningly clear explanation using plastic surgery. The introduction says that today we have lots of women who go to plastic surgeons asking to be made to look like someone from a magazine photograph – but the person in the magazine has been photoshopped. That is, there was no original, just a hyper-real image and it is this hyper-real image that we seek to emulate. When Plato spoke about the problems of art being involved in art being a copy of a copy, I suspect he had no idea of just how far down that particular road we might find ourselves.
Now, it is really important to think this through. What he is not saying is that the world doesn’t exist, in the way Plato does. That, clearly, would be nuts. He is not a solipsist. The point is that the world really does exist and so do the representations of the world that we create. The photoshopped image has an all-too-real existence – so real that we are prepared to suffer agonies to become that image. That is ‘real’, that is hyper-real. In much the same way that Disneyland is also real – I mean, people pay a fortune to go there and the place is designed as a kind of hyper-real fantasy of small town America. A fantasy land where dreams come true. But this is also true of not just the ways in which we seek to realise our fantasies – but also of the realisations of our nightmares. What can it mean that the Gulf War didn’t exist? Surely we saw it night after night on our TV screens, we’ve seen the parades of coffins come home draped in flags. If that isn’t real, what the hell is reality?
Like I said, he isn’t saying it isn’t real, he is saying it never happened. The Gulf War isn’t really any of those things – at least, not the Gulf War we got to witness on our television sets. That Gulf War certainly never happened. That Gulf War was a mission accomplished, one that was fought because Saddam Hussein wanted to kill George Bush’s daddy. It was a war fought with pin point accuracy that limited Iraqi deaths because we are so damn humane – that war never happened – even while we were watching it night after night on our television sets it never happened. And the problem is that now the hyper-reality of that war means that the fundamental unreality of the narrative we have been spun can’t keep up, can’t make sense, of what is going on in the country itself. I mean, the narrative that was spun to justify going to war with Hussein in the first place was that Al Qaeda, the guys that brought you 9/11, had been supported in some secret, off-hand way by Hussein, so that to crush Al Qaeda we needed to crush Hussein first. Except now we have photographs of John McCain shaking hands with ISIS crazies. And it seems that ISIS was kicked out of Al Qaeda because they were too nuts. And, just to prove you really couldn’t make this shit up, after spending a trillion dollars or so in blasting the bejesus out of Iraq to save the world from Al Qaeda, it looks like the looniest fringe group of Al Qaeda is going to literally take over large swags of Iraq – machine gunning people along the way with abandon. There was no ‘patriotism’ involved in this war, just a hyper-real, Hollywood version of a Clint Eastwood film enacted on TV, even containing a scene where the US President lands a plane on a battle ship.
Killing 100,000 odd Iraqi civilians, using depleted uranium casing to give them ongoing cancers, smashing up their infrastructure, bombing power and water plants – and all while believing (and I don’t for a moment doubt they really did believe) we would be welcomed as liberators show how far reality and Reality have moved apart from each other.
And we will do it all again. While we believe in the simulacrum, the world will just have to conform to that. Simulacra are beautiful lies that become true because we force the world to fit to them. Like the woman getting the facelift – the knives are real, the Botox is real, the money she hands over is real, it is just that the photo of the blonde 50 year old woman that looks twenty-something isn’t real in the way the women under the knife wants to believe she is. The bombs, too, were real, the shattered lives were real, the torture in the gaols we set up was real, but the dream of a democratic Iraq, that was a bizarre fantasy based on wishful thinking and worse. A simulacrum we used to stoke the fantasy that we are the good guys, that we always do what is right, that our motives are pure and are dreams are true.
Like I said, there is too much to this book to even begin to really review it properly. All the same, it provides a wonderful introduction to what are many key texts in an area that has incredibly interesting things to say to us about the world we live in.
December 8, 2016
Fantastic book and a fantastic class! Media studies will more likely than not be my major here!
December 27, 2016
To be precise, for anyone who is hooked onto Media Studies, this is it!!
December 13, 2018
There is a *lot* to digest in these pages, and this is a truly great thing. Each of the major subdivisions feature some truly foundational texts, most of which read as fresh as ever and are truly a joy to engage with. Some of the later works have aged a bit due to their discussions of the potential of the internet, but they can't be blamed for that; and the earlier segments on mass culture and entertainment continue to raise important, relevant questions that simply cannot be ignored. I enjoyed my time with this text and the multitude of texts that it contains within it, and am sure that I'll return to many of these pieces throughout my life and career.
May 15, 2017
Excellent collection of influential essays in the fields of media and cultural studies. A textbook I'm glad I purchased and plan on referencing it frequently in the future.
Read
March 1, 2022*Textbook. Read about 200 or so pages.
October 22, 2007
I was able to pull out numerous things from this that pertained to misappropriation and the reinterpretation of various art forms in a global framework.
Many of the articles appeared more directed to the media element to be useful for cultural studies, but there were also more than enough articles that I found engaging enough to read, despite the fact that they were of little use to my thesis.
I gave this book a high rating because several articles are well-formulated approaches to concepts I had been trying to summarize for some time now.
Many of the articles appeared more directed to the media element to be useful for cultural studies, but there were also more than enough articles that I found engaging enough to read, despite the fact that they were of little use to my thesis.
I gave this book a high rating because several articles are well-formulated approaches to concepts I had been trying to summarize for some time now.
February 19, 2008
very good reference text-- key readings in cultural studies that are not abridged or excerpts (to my knowledge!), unlike the "visual studies reader" edited by stuart hall. useful context pieces @ the beginning of each section to help situate the set of readings in relation to each other.
March 25, 2016
Interesting compilation of theoretical papers on media and culture. I wouldn't suggest reading it in one stretch as you need some time to digest the information. "The medium is the message" piece from Mc Luhan can be found in it.
August 17, 2007
required readings for media majors! but "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" deserves more attention just like Marx and Walter Benjamin.
Want to read
October 29, 2010sepertinya bakalan jadi refrensi yg keren
Want to read
August 3, 2012Tracked this down via interlibrary loan specifical for Part IV: The Politics of Representation, but there are a number of essays in other sections that look promising as well.
November 20, 2008
such a dork - i love this book so much.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews