Structuralism 101 - Goodbye to Innocence

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

Below are some very basic intro articles on Semiotics and the media for those that need a refresher/recap:

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

"Beneath the cobblestones, the beach": Theory, Alternative Media, Situationism and Cultural Resistance

 

How To Talk Like A Situationist

Guy Debord - Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action (1957)

If you are interested in reading more of the Situationist International's documents, manifestos and screeds (they are always fun, engaging and inspiring) you can find an excellent selection in the anthology edited by Tom McDonough and published by MIT Press titled Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Modern day situationists have made the book available here. Of course all of the Situationist documents are also available online at the Situationist Online Archive which is a true treasure trove of material. There are many other sources for Situationist materials freely available online, a direct result of the 'proto-free culture' approach the Situationist International always promoted.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger - Constituents of a Theory of the Media (1970)

Extra:
John Downing - Radical Media in Italy

Text and Context: Reception + Masculinity

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

Stuart Hall, "Encoding-Decoding"

Construction and Performance II: Masculinity

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

Gail Dines, "King Kong and the White Woman: Hustler Magazine and the Demonization of Black Masculinity"

Claire Cain Miller, "Many Ways to Be a Girl, but One Way to Be a Boy: The New Gender Rules"
from The New York Times, Sept. 14, 2018 

That James Dean vs That Daydream Nation Look: Taylor Swift covered by Ryan Adams - Genre, Gender and Style

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. Also included is 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.

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

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

Tavi Gevinson started the style Rookie blog when she was 12. Rookie Mag (which ended publishing new material in 2018) is a treasure of 'readings' of Tween/Teen culture from a non mainstream perspective --with all of its exhilaration and limitations. The classic Tavi Gevinson article on Taylor Swift below.

Tavi Gevinson, Just Kidding, Love Sucks: Notes on Taylor Swift

Why must we hate the things teen girls love?

The tweet below is from Maynard Keenan of hard rock band Tool who had their big come back after many years in 2019. The image is self-explanatory but it's a proud retweet of the mighty power of rock identified with Thanatos from The Avengers causing Taylor Swift to disintegrate like The Avengers, signifying Tool replacing Swift's Reputation at #1 on the Billboard Charts. The order of the universe reestablished. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift)

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

Synthesizing Modernity: Teddy and Walt in The New Yorker

The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Critique of Pop Culture
by Alex Ross

Even the New Yorker catches up:

"One way or another, the Frankfurt School mode of criticism—its skeptical ardor, its relentless scouring of mundane surfaces—has spread far. When online recappers expend thousands of words debating the depiction of rape on “Game of Thrones,” or when writers publish histories of sneakers or of the office cubicle, they show intense awareness of mass culture’s ability to shape society. And in some cases the analysis takes a recognizably dialectical turn, as in Hua Hsu’s 2011 essay, for Grantland, on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s album “Watch the Throne.” A dispassionate hip-hop fan, Hua Hsu ponders the spectacle of two leading rappers making an “album against austerity,” in which they mark their ascension to a world of “MoMA and Rothko, Larry Gagosian, and luxury hotels across three continents,” and at the same time forfeit a hip-hop tradition of fantasy and protest. Citing the Kanye track “Power”—“Grab a camera, shoot a viral / Take the power in your own hands”—Hsu writes, “This version of power is entrancing—it explains an entire generation. But it also confuses ubiquity for importance, the familiarity of a celebrity’s face for true authority.” There is no telling how Adorno and Benjamin might have negotiated such contemporary labyrinths. Perhaps, on a peaceful day, they would have accepted the compromise devised by Fredric Jameson, who has written that the “cultural evolution of late capitalism” can be understood “dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.”

These implacable voices should stay active in our minds. Their dialectic of doubt prods us to pursue connections between what troubles us and what distracts us, to see the riven world behind the seamless screen. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”: Benjamin’s great formula, as forceful as a Klieg light, should be fixed as steadily on pop culture, the ritual apparatus of American capitalism, as it has been on the art works of the European bourgeoisie. Adorno asked for only so much. Above all, these figures present a model for thinking differently, and not in the glib sense touted by Steve Jobs. As the homogenization of culture proceeds apace, as the technology of surveillance hovers at the borders of our brains, such spaces are becoming rarer and more confined. I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”"

Genre and Gendered Media Spaces

The article by Gledhill & Vicky Ball is from the Stuart Hall edited Representation (2nd Ed., Sage, 1997/2013). It's a long chapter but filled with information and notions. You are responsible for pgs. 335-361 -the rest is recommended, up to you, based on your own interests and projects. You don't need to actually do the 'activities' listed in the various sections but they are at the very least good mental exercises and opportunities to think through some of the issues.

Christine Gledhill & Vicky Ball, "Genre and Gender: The Case of Soap Opera"

For an example of a political economic reflection on the media:

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

EXTRA READINGS:

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

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Film

Stills from Otto Preminger's Laura, 1944

"Woman as image, man as bearer of the look."

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

‘Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at. -John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Jill Soloway, the creator of the TV series Transparent and  I Love Dick (based on the Chris Kraus novel of the same title about having a crush on cultural critic and author Dick Hebdige which some of you might have read in previous classes). This is a talk she gave on 'The Female Gaze' at the Toronto Film Festival. We will be discussing this in relation to Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire next week.

Monopolies of Knowledge and Space/Time Bias + Hot and Cold Media Is the Message in the Global Village of the Guttenberg Galaxy

Harold Innis, "The Bias of Communication" from The Bias of Communication (University of Toronto Press, 2008; orig. 1951)

Eisenstein Diagram

Here are the 'notes' re: the taxonomy of Hot and Cold media.
+

To get a sense of what a non-deterministic historical account of the changes brought about by the printing press:

Ben Reynolds, "The Printing Press" + "Industrial Production"
from The Coming Revolution (Zero Books, 2018)

You are not responsible for the Reynolds chapters above but they are very useful and helpful.

You are, on the other hand, responsible for this Raymond Williams critique of McLuhan, in order to be done with ol' Marshall. Even though you're never really done with him.

Raymond Williams, "The Technology and the Society" from Television: Technology and Cultural Form

Below is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's 'Conference' program from 1977 where McLuhan discusses and responds to audience questions on his main theoretical ideas.

The Codes of Gender + Textuality: Semiotics

Find the link to THE CODES OF GENDER on Moodle.

• 1. Following Goffman's work, Sut Jhally talks about a number of codes that govern the way women are represented in advertising. These involve the way specific body parts, postures, positions, attitudes of women are portrayed. Speak of the ones that struck you the most and that you feel are most effective in constructing an idea of femininity in advertising.
• 2. Think of why Jhally focuses on advertising rather than more conventional media texts (such as television programs, film, music videos, etc). What is the relationship between advertising and media products? Why do you feel Jhally (and Goffman before him) decide to look at what they call the world of 'commercial realism'?

Also, to complement our discussion, the screening of Codes of Gender and the other readings here are a series of readings  on Textuality & Semiotics. These are three different takes on '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 or need a refresher, 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

Finally, in preparation for work in the next section, pay attention to the final section of The Codes of Gender, where Jhally references John Berger's "Ways of Seeing". We will talk about this as we tackle spectatorship and the problematics of 'the gaze' and watch one of the episodes of the television series Berger produced in the 1970s. 

Communications: Ritual vs. Transmission? Works vs. Acts? Message vs. Text?

from Kenneth Anger's 'Scorpio Rising'

Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
James Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication" from Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989)

Construction and Performance I: Privilege and Representation

Cultural Studies & Representation: Ideology and Hegemony

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

Power, Privilege and Discrimination

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

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)

As an introduction to the methodology that we will be following in the course please read the Kellner and the Lull.

The Peggy McIntosh 'invisible knapsack' article is an additional quick read, for your own reflections. As McIntosh thinks through the concept of 'white privilege' in society, forcing us to consider the question of privilege and the way it links to questions of power in society as well as the existence of hierarchies, please think of other forms of privilege that exist on the basis of social differences. ie. male privilege, hetero privilege, cis privilege. Can you make a list, even just a mental one, that works in similar ways to McIntosh's? In other words, that starts from the 'I can...' premise as you put yourself in the position of the privileged subject? Can you also think of what privilege means, how it is in contradiction to the values of open and democratic societies as well what forces ensure that the social relations and the meanings to social identities are reproduced so that privilege itself is maintained and perpetuated?

Please read this and we will discuss on Monday:

Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”

The philosopher and gender theorist discusses tensions in the feminist movement over trans rights.

Welcome to FALL 2020

Queering Texts: Popular Culture and LGBTQ+ Representation

Find Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's The Celluloid Closet (USA, 1996) here. 
This is required viewing for CMS 360.

Diane Raymond, "Popular Culture and Queer Representation: A Critical Perspective"
Susan J. Hubert, "What's Wrong With This Picture: The Politics of Ellen's Coming Out Party"

Alexander Doty, "Modern Family, Glee, and the Limits of Television Liberalism" 

Alexander Doty, "There's Something Queer Here"
Susan Sontag, "On Camp"
Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"

bell hooks, "The Oppositional Gaze"

Reccomended Readings:

Fred Fejes, "Advertising and the Political Economy of Lesbian/Gay Identity"
Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, "Representing Gay Men on American Television"
Bruce LaBruce, "Pee Wee Herman: The Homosexual Subtext"
Richard Dyer, "Judy Garland and Gay Men"

"I Know You Are But What Am I?"

The Social Construction of Race, Part Deux

This is the bulk of readings for the 'discourses of race' section of the course as we wade through it this week. Pay particular attention to Zook's article on the Fox Network as it invests that political economic perspective that is so well dramatized in Bamboozled as well as the Means-Coleman article on 'black sitcoms' which is a good example of textual analysis. The Herman Gray article is also important. The other articles you can use for your papers, if relevant and/or to expand on our class discussion.

Kristal Brent Zook, "The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television"
Robin R. Means-Coleman, "Black Sitcom Portrayals"
Herman Gray, "The Politics of Representation in Network Television" from Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (University of Minnesota Press, 1995/2004)

Donald Bogle, "Workplace Dramas, Ensemble Casts 1990s Style"
Chyng Fen Sun, "Ling Woo in Historical Context: The New Face of Asian American Stereotypes on Television"

This video is the  'incomplete sentence' vaudeville routine by Mantan Moreland & Ben Carter from the Charlie Chan movie The Scarlet Clue (Phil Rosen, 1945)

Below is Sarah Jones' 'Your Revolution' (with DJ Vadim) from Def Poetry Jam's Season 1 (2002)

The Social Construction of Race I

As we watch Spike Lee's Bamboozled* and discuss the film, Ash Corea's "Racism and the American Way of Media" is a good summary of the issues raised by Lee and those that you will be reading about in greater detail with the next group of articles. As a bonus, a classic article by Stuart Hall.

*Through Bamboozled please reflect on the mechanisms that Lee describes (through a satirical register) as well as how he narrativizes the power dynamics at work inside the (fictional) CNS network. How does he convey the conversion of aspects of African-American culture into a commodity within the context of a white-owned and controlled corporation? Also, as Delacroix is 'permitted' to move up in the corporate entertainment ladder by becoming show runner and head writer of a 'variety' show, what are the conditions that he needs to submit to? How does the white construction of black culture play into what he is being asked to conform to? In the end, what is the price that Delacroix has to pay according to Lee?
Finally, what does Spike Lee say about the way in which Mantan: The New Millenium Minstrel Show's genealogy in minstrel shows and blackface performance (along with the accumulation of historical artefacts) has become an empty gesture, a comedic ploy that removes the complexities of history and society and keeps racial hierarchies intact? What forms of contemporary popular culture do you think Spike Lee would consider to be operating through the same mechanisms today?
That's a whole lot of questions. Enjoy.

Ash Corea, "Racism and the American Way of Media" from Questioning the Media
Stuart Hall, "What is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture" from Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies



Clip from the 1949 film Hollywood Varieties where actors Glenn Vernon and Edward Ryan apply blackface make-up while on stage and reminisce about 'the good ol' days' --as they say-- of minstrelsy.