Making Sense of Media

Key Texts in Media and Cultural Studies

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by Arthur Asa Berger

Blackwell Publishers

Due/Published September 2004, 208 pages, paper

ISBN 1405120177

Making Sense of Media helps readers understand the mass media and the texts they carry. Written for the beginning student in media studies who wishes to become acquainted with the ideas of some of the significant figures in this increasingly important field, this book deals with ideas found in nineteen books that will provide useful insights and concepts for anyone interested in the study of the media.From Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes to bell hooks and Stuart Hall, each chapter in Making Sense of Media provides a discussion of certain fundamental concepts found in key texts. In addition, each chapter offers a short article, by the author, that deals with some idea or theory in the book being discussed. Making Sense of Media includes useful charts, boxed features, exercises, and comic illustrations by the author. .

Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Media in Our Lives:
1. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics:
In Practice: King Andrew the First
2. Roland Barthes, Mythologies:
In Practice: A Semiotic Analysis of a Sea Shell
3. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By:
In Practice: Love is a Game
4. Aristotle, Poetics:
In Practice: Theories on Comedy
5. Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction to Poetics:
In Practice: What Happens in Hamlet
6. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale:
In Practice: Understanding Genres
7. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance:
In Practice: Write Your Own Romance Novel
8. Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck:
In Practice: Hypotheses on Pac-Man and Video Games
9. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination:
In Practice: Parody and Laughter
10. Yuri Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema:
In Practice: The “1984” Macintosh Commercial
11. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form:
In Practice: Rashomontage
12. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature:
In Practice: The Prisoner and “The General”
13. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World:
In Practice: Cells and Terror
14. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life:
In Practice: Resistance Through Ridicule
15. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media:
In Practice: The Financial Times
16. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism:
In Practice: A Postmodern Perspective on Madonna
17. Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, Aaron Wildavksy, Cultural Theory:
In Practice: Political Cultures and Popular Culture
18. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation:
In Practice: Krazy Kat and “Racial” Memory
19. Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation”:
In Practice: 9/11 as Representation
20. Afterword: A Confessional:

Bibliography
Index