Text and Context: Political Economy and Reception + Jackson Katz on Masculinity

Janice Radway, "Women Read The Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context"

David Croteau & William Hoynes, "The New Media Giants: Changing Industry Structure"

Jackson Katz, "Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity: From Eminem to Clinique for Men"

EXTRA READINGS:

Stuart Hall, "Encoding-Decoding"
Sut Jhally, "Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture"

That James Dean vs That Daydream Nation Look: Taylor Swift covered by Ryan Adams and Gendered Media Spaces

Here's a nice press review of the discourses surrounding the Ryan Adams/Taylor Swift operation. I've also included a few articles from the past past, mainly Taylor Swift profiles from mainstream magazines like The New Yorker and New York Magazine. Make sure you all read the Tavi Gevinson article linked to at the bottom of the post in .pdf format. I've also included a recent article from The Atlantic about authorship in pop music and the strategies used by record companies to downplay the 'outsourcing' of pop hit manufacturing. Enjoy.

Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the Vindication of Taylor Swift

Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the mansplaining of Taylor Swift

No Blank Space, Baby: Taylor Swift Is The Soul Of Ryan Adams

Ryan Adams isn’t revealing something ‘good’ about Taylor Swift’s ‘1989.’ The album was already great.

Platinum Underdog: Why Taylor Swift Is the Biggest Pop Star in the World

You Belong with Me

How Taylor Swift made teen angst into a business empire.

Taylor Swift Is Confusing

Haters Gonna Hate: Listening to Ryan Adams’s “1989”

The Reinvention of Taylor Swift

Flavorwire Interview: Talking Taylor Swift With Tavi Gevinson

JUST KIDDING, LOVE SUCKS

NOTES ON TAYLOR SWIFT

The complete version of this article by then 16-year old Tavi Gevinson published in The Believer in 2013 is below in PDF. Tavi Gevinson started the Style Rookie blog when she was 12. Rookie Mag below is a treasure of 'readings' of Tween/Teen culture from a non mainstream perspective --with all of its exhilaration and limitations.

Tavi Gevinson, JUST KIDDING

Rookie Mag 

Why must we hate the things teen girls love?

Hit Charade: Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.

Beats 1 Ryan Adams interview about '1989' with Taylor Swift call in 'surprise'

Textuality: Semiotics

To complement the other readings, here are three different discussions of 'semiotics' and semiotic analysis and their use for cultural studies and the analysis of media representations. These are not required readings if you have encountered 'media semiotics' before. I would however suggest, to those of you who are encountering 'semiotics' for the first time, to treat these readings as required readings: your work in class, your ability to grapple with the other required readings and your final project would certainly benefit from a familiarity with the concepts presented here.

Mieke Bal, Semiotics for Beginners
Scott McCloud, from Understading Comics: Chapter 2, Semiotics
Jonathan Bignell, Media Semiotics: Introduction + The Cinema

Construction and Performance I: Privilege and Representation

Power, Privilege and Discrimination (...or...how I got woke)

Peggy McIntosh, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

Cultural Studies & Representation: Ideology and Hegemony

Douglas Kellner, "Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism and Media Culture"
James Lull, "Hegemony"

Stuart Hall, "The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media"

all readings (except the online Peggy McIntosh) are from Dines and Humez (eds), Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text-Reader; 2nd Edition(Sage, 2003)

Welcome to SUMMER I 2017/Race and Gender in Media

Complex TV and the Future of Narratives

Complex TV Basics

from Jason Mittell's Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling
--Chapter 1: Complexity in Context

Post-Classical and Post-Modern

To clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism':

Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"
As you read it relate it to the screening of Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep and be prepared to discuss the film in terms of its postmodern qualities.

Fatal Strategies & Slackers: Withdrawing or Accelerating?

Matthias Leupold, Im Kino / In the Cinema, Part II Berlin GDR, 1983

Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media"

Additional Recommended Baudrillard Readings:

Jean Baudrillard, Requiem for the Media
Jean Baudrillard, The Implosion of Meaning in the Media from Simulacra and Simulation

The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow.

Please read the section 'Disciplines and Sciences of the Individual' in Part II, particularly the first four segments (from "The Body of the Condemned" to "Panopticism")

Foucault, "The Repressive Hypothesis" from The History of Sexuality, Vol. I

Faster! Faster! Faster!


#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (Srnicek & Williams)
Steven Shaviro, "What is Accelerationism?" from No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

Bonus:
Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (Laboria Cuboniks)

+

What About 'Today'?

Christian Fuchs, "Participatory Web 2.0 as Ideology" from Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies

McKenzie Wark, The Hacker Manifesto

"Every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death"
"Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy."

Enjoy Poverty!

"Enjoy Poverty: Disclosing the Political Impasse of Contemporary Art" in Art Papers

-an interview with Renzo Martens

Paul O'Kane, "Renzo Martens: Episode III" review in Third Text, 2009

T.J. Demos, "Poverty Pornography, Humanitarianism and Neo-Liberal Globalization: Notes on Some Paradoxes in Contemporary Art"

Bonus Interview from the "Africa is a Country Blog" here.

Bonus Reading:

Susan Sontag, "Looking At War/Regarding the Pain of Others"

The 'Post' Archipelago: A Brief Intro

Young Jacques Derrida's English Comp Essay
Note the teacher's comments. Do they still apply to Jacques' adult writing? Read 'Différance' below to find out.

Some introductory readings to the various 'posts' that we will be reading in the next weeks. Having just concluded our discussion of structuralism, here is some material to bring us towards the post-structuralist theoretical framework. Remember that a good exercise for us is to read the theories in their original form. As you read get a sense of the language, of the rhetorical processes, of the way the argument proceeds. I am including here, in addition to the Roland Barthes essay on "The Death of the Author" also a brief introduction to poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonial studies (the pdf has these entries in alphabetical order but please read them in the order above). I've also included Derrida's 'Différance' --this is a bonus reading but I would urge all of you to tackle it in order to get that sense of the language mentioned above so that we may talk about it in class. Enjoy.

"poststructuralism"; "postmodernism"; "postcolonial studies" entries
from A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory; 2nd Ed. (Wiley-Blackwell)
Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" from Image/Music/Text

David Harvey, "Postmodernism" from The Condition of Postmodernity

Jacques Derrida, Différance

Women's Cinema, Women in Cinema: Visual Pleasure, Narrative and Feminism + Third Cinema

To accompany the screening of Agnes Varda's Vagabond:
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Make sure you have this read by next class. We will continue discussing Godard's Masculin/Féminin in relation to the ideological critique of the institutional mode of representation put forward by the various cinematic new-waves as well as Vagabond as a feminist text that takes off on that critique but adds sexual difference and the representation of gender to its concerns. Laura Mulvey's essay should be a key to navigating these concepts.

Take a picture of her.

Of all African film directors, Sembene is the first to confer value to images."

--Med Hondo

Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino, Towards a Third Cinema

Med Hondo, What is Cinema for us?

If you are interested in reading a brief outline of the life, ideas and struggles of Ousmane Sembene: OUSMANE SEMBENE: THE LIFE OF A REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST

Post-Rock, Subcultures and the End of Authenticity

Assuming that at this point you should be on your way to completing the Garofalo textbook, here are the reading assignments for the next couple of weeks:

On Jamaican Music:
from Dick Hebdige, Cut'n'Mix here.

On 'co-optation':
Thomas Frank's "Commodify Your Dissent" here.


On Gender:
Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, "Rock and Sexuality"
Simon Frith, "Afterthoughts"
"Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"
Find these articles here as a single PDF file.



On 'sub-cultures':
Here are the Dick Hebdige chapters from Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
Refer back to the Punk: Attitude film screening.

The Ramones, "Rockaway Beach" Live in Rome, 1980




On sampling, mash-ups and the 'postmodern turn':
Andrew Goodwin, "Sample and Hold"
E Ann Kaplan, "A Postmodern Play of the Signifier?"
Negativland, "from Wired: Negativland Interviews U2's The Edge"

Also, to clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism' please help yourself --in case you have not encountered it in your other studies-- to Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"

TV After TV: Global Media Trade, Formats and Channel Branding

Brennan, "A Political Economy of Formatted Pleasures"
Torre, "Reversal of Fortune?: Hollywood Faces New Competition in Global Media Trade"
from Oren & Shahaf (eds), Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders (Routledge, 2012)

Chap.1: "Deregulation, Differentiation and Niche Targeting: The Emergence of Branding in the Cable/Satellite Era"
Chap.2: "From Channel Brands to Service Brands: US Television Enters the Digital Era"
from Catherine Johnson, Branding Television (Routledge, 2012)

Bonus Article:
"Why HBO Passed on The Walking Dead" from Mother Nature Blog.

Also, if you are interested in the intersection of technology, creativity, production practices and televisual style make sure you follow Ben Consoli's GO Creative Podcast (and Blog). You'll find episodes in the artchive where Consoli interviews the DP for House of Cards, has an in depth conversation with Shane Reynolds, a true one-man band/jack of all trades who produces, shoots and edits his work all on his own for the Travel Network, Nat Geo and others and also speaks with Chris Manley, the cinematographer and DP for Mad Men. Great insights on how network pressures and studio concerns with the bottom line all line up with technological possibilities and stylistic choices.

Structuralism 101

"Structuralist Theories" from Selden et al. A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 3rd Edition (Prentice Hall, 1985)

Art Cinema and Modernism in Film

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1966)

On the 'art cinema' and modernism in film:
Bordwell, "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice"
from Poetics of Cinema