Weekly Readings


FALL TERM 2005


14 Sept.
Orientation and Organization

21 Sept.
Reading Preparation: no class


28 Sept.
The Study of Popular Culture

"Introduction: Rethinking Popular Culture," " in Mukerji and Schudson, Rethinking Popular Culture: 1-61;

Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (1995);

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies; An Introduction (1990);

Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe’s Footprints; Cultural Studies in Britain and America (1990);

5 Oct.
Ideology and Popular Culture

Leo Lowenthal, "Popular Culture in Perspective," in Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (1961): 1-13;

Raymond Williams, "The Uses of Cultural Theory," in Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. Ed. Tony Pinkney (1989): 163-76;

James Carey, "Overcoming Resistance to Cultural Studies," in Carey, Communication As Culture: Essays on Media and Society (1989): 89-110;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1957);

Tony Bennett and others, eds., Culture, Ideology and Social Process (1980);

Toby Miller and Alex McHoul, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (1998);


12 Oct.
Elite Theory and Mass Culture

Richard Ohmann, "Where Did Mass Culture Come From? The Case of Magazines," in Ohmann, Politics of Letters (1987): 135-51;

Theodore W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," in The Consumer Society Reader. Ed. Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B. Holt (2000), 3-19;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (1983);

Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture,1880-1920 (1981);

D.L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars (1989);


19 Oct.
Consciousness and Media

George Lipsitz, "Buscando America (Looking for America): Collective Memory in an Age of Amnesia," in Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (1990), 257-71;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind (1982);

Stuart Ewan and Elizabeth Ewan, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (1992);

Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951);


26 Oct.
Manufacturing Consent

Dominic Strinati, "Marxism, political economy and ideology," Chapter 4 of An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture;

T.J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review 90 (June 1985): 567-93;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

William Graebner, The Engineering of Consent: Democracy and Authority in Twentieth-Century America (1987);

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988);

Brian Fawcett, Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow (1986);

2 Nov.
Capitalism, Control, and Resistance

Antonio Gramsci, "Culture and Ideological Hegemony," in Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Saidman, eds., Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates (1990), 46-54;

Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," in Mukerji and Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: 407-23;

John Fiske, "Shopping for Plesure: Malls, Power, and Resistance," in The Consumer Society Reader. Ed.Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B.Holt (2000), 306-328;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (1989);

Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1999);

Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000);


9 Nov.
Selling Cultural Goods

John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Paramount Position of Production," "The Imperatives of Consumer Demand," and "The Dependence Effect," in Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958), 101-130;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993);

Stuart Ewan, Captains of Consciousness (1976);

Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994)


16 Nov.
Shaping the American Dream

Richard Ohmann, "Advertising and the New Discourse of Mass Culture," in Ohmann, Politics of Letters (1987): 152-70;

Paul M. Hirsch, "Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems," in Mukerji and Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: 13-24;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Jim Cullen, The American Dream; A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (2003);

Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (1985);

Paul Nathanson, Over the Rainbow; the Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America (1991);


23 Nov.
Culture and Consumption

T.J. Jackson Lears, "Some Versions of Fantasy: Toward a Cultural History of Advertising, 1880-1930," Prospects: The Annual of American Cultural Studies 9 (1984): 349-402;

Lizabeth Cohen, "The Class Experience of Mass Consumption: Workers as Consumers in Interwar America," in Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History (1993), 135-160;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Richard Wightman and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption (1983);

Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption (1988);

Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2002);


30 Nov.
Consumption and Identity

Rosalind Williams, "The Dream World of Mass Consumption," in Mukerji and Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: 198-235;

Alan Thomlinson, "Introduction: Consumer Culture and the aura of the commodity," in Tomlinson, ed., Consumption, Identity, & Style; Marketing Meanings and the Packaging of Pleasure (1990);

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Alan Tomlinson, ed., Consumption, Identity, & Style; Marketing Meanings and the Packaging of Pleasure (1990);

Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (1995);

Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (1997);



WINTER TERM 2006


4 Jan.
Generational Cultures

José y Gasset, "The importance of Generationhood"; Karl Mannheim, "What Is a Social Generation?"; Lewis S. Feuer, "Generational Upheaval as a Pathological Factor in History," in Anthony Esler, ed., The Conflict of Generations in Modern History (1974): 3-14, 141-9;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (1987);

Ken Goffman, Counterculture Through the Ages; From Abraham to Acid House (2004);

Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1991);


11 Jan.
Beauty and Romance

Janice Radway, "Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies: The Functions of Romance Reading," in Mukerji and Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: 465-86;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Lois Banner, American Beauty (1983);

Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (1982);

Margaret Ann Jensen, Love’s $weet Return: The Harlequin Story (1984);


18 Jan.
Courtship and Ritual

Janice Radway, "The institutional Matrix of Romance," in Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader (1993): 438-54;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (1984);

Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteeenth-Century America (1989);

Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (1988);


25 Jan.
All That Jazz

Lewis A. Erenberg, "Things to Come: Swing Bands, Bebop, and the Rise of a Postwar Jazz Scene," in Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the age of Cold War (1989): 221-45;

Dave Laing, "Making Popular Music: The consumer as producer," in Alan Tomlinson, ed., Consumption, Identity, & Style (1990): 186-94;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Lewis A. Erenberg, Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (1998);

Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s (2000);

Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (1997);


1 Feb.
Hollywood and America

Todd Gitlin, "Movies of the Week," in Mukerji and Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: 335-6;

Mark Crispin Miller, "End of Story," in Mark Crispin Miller, ed., Seeing Through Movies (1990);

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

J. Hoberman, The Dream Life; Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (2003);

Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (1994);

Sut Jhally, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream (1992);


8 Feb.
The Culture of Television

John Fiske, "Some television, some topics, and some terminology," in Fiske, Television Culture (1987), 1-20;

Todd Gitlin, "Down the Tubes," in Mark Crispin Miller, ed., Seeing Through Movies (1990):

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Janet Thumim, ed., Small Screens, Big Ideas: Television in the 1950s (2002);

Mark Crispin Miller, Boxed In: The Culture of TV (1988);

Ella Taylor, Prime-Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America (1989);


15 Feb.
Rock and Beyond

George Lipsitz, "Land of a Thousand Dances: Youth, Minorities, and the Rise of Rock and Roll," in Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the age of Cold War (1989): 267-84;

Robert A. Wright, "’Dream, Comfort, Memory, Despair’: Canadian Popular Musicians and the Dilemma of Nationalism, 1968-1972," Journal of Canadian Studies 22 (Winter 1987-8): 27-43;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Iain Chambers, Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture (1985);

Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (new ed. 1982 [1976]);

Lucy O’Brien, She bop: the definitive history of women in rock, pop and soul (1995);


22 Feb.
WINTER BREAK: NO CLASS

1 Mar.
Taste, Style, and Fashion

John Berger, "The Suit and the Photograph," and Roland Barthes, "Written Clothing," in Mukerji and Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: 424-45;

Stuart Ewan, "Marketing Dreams: The political elements of style," in Tomlinson, ed., Consumption, Identity, & Style; Marketing Meanings and the Packaging of Pleasure (1990):

Paul O’Flynn, "T-Shirts and the Coming Collapse of Capitalism," in Gary Day, ed., Readings in Popular Culture (1990): 68-74;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Miles Orvell, The Real Thing; Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (1989);

Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style; How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture & Consciousness (2003);

Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (1997);

Stuart Ewan, All Consuming Images; The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (1988);


8 Mar.
Fame and Celebrity

Lawrence M. Friedman, "Gods, Kings, and Movie Stars," in Friedman, The Republic of Choice: Law, Authority, and American Culture (1990): 112-32;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Richard Schickel, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (1985);

Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (1994);

Tyler Cowen, What Price Fame? (2000);

P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary America (1997);


15 Mar.
The Culture of Violence

Richard Slotkin, "Introduction: The Significance of the Frontier Myth in American History", in Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1986);

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Stephen Tatum, Inventing Billy the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in America, 1881-1981 (1982);

Elliott Leyton, Hunting Humans: the Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer (1986);

Richard Tithecott, Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer (1997);


22 Mar.
The Private Self

Philip Rieff, "The Impoverishment of Western Culture," in Reiff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (1966),48-65;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979). See also Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984);

Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983);

Neal Gabler, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (1998);


28 Mar.
The Public Self

Christopher Lasch, "Authority and the Family: Law and Order in a Permissive Society," in Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Beseiged (1977), 167-189;

BOOKS FOR REVIEW:

Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: The Forces Eroding Public Life and Burdening the Modern Psyche with Roles It Cannot Perform (1997);

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1988);

Heather Menzies, No TIme: Stree and the Crisis of Modern Life (2005).