Making Sense Of Media - Key Texts In Media And Cultural Studies

Making Sense of Media is a lively and accessible text that helps readers understand mass media and the texts they carry. Designed expressly for those interested in gaining a solid understanding of the media and how they work, it is an indispensable book.

• Offers a lively, accessible, and concise textbook to help readers understand mass media and their texts
• Covers seminal figures, concepts and scholarship in mass media studies, including Vladimir Propp, Mikhail Bakhtin, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and Stuart Hall
• Explores the ideas found in nineteen significant books that will provide useful insights and concepts for anyone interested in the study of the media
• Features chapter-by-chapter short articles by the author, that address an idea or theory in the particular book being discussed
• Includes charts, boxes features, exercises, and illustrations to round out analyses and engage the beginning student

Arthur Asa Berger is Professor Emeritus in the Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts Department at San Francisco State University. His many publications include: Signs in Contemporary Culture (1984; 2nd edn., 1998); Seeing is Believing: An Introduction to Visual Communication (1989; 2nd edn., 1998); Media Analysis Techniques (1992; 3rd edn., 2004); Essentials of Mass Communication Theory (1995); Narratives in Popular Culture, Media and Everyday Life (1997); and Media and Communication Research Methods (2000).

Preface.

Acknowledgments.

Introduction: The Media in Our Lives.

1. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics.

2. Roland Barthes, Mythologies.

3. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

4. Aristotle, Poetics.

5. Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction to Poetics.

6. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale.

7. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance.

8. Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck.

9. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination.

10. Yuri Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema.

11. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form.

12. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature.

13. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World.

14. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

15. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media.

16. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

17. Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, Aaron Wildavksy, Cultural Theory.

18. Bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation.

19. Stuart Hall, "The Work of Representation".

20. Afterword: A Confessional.

Bibliography.

Index