JOUR 7011
Proseminar in Communication Theory
Fall 2006
Tuesday, 3:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Armory 1B01
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102D Armory Phone: 492-5374 E-mail: andrew.calabrese@colorado.edu Web: http://spot.colorado.edu/~calabres
Office hours: By appointment |
102A Armory Phone: 492-4833 E-mail: stewart.hoover@colorado.edu Web: http://www.colorado.edu/journalism/mcm/mrc/
Office hours: By appointment |
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The Proseminar is a two-semester survey of the major lines of inquiry about problems of media, communication, journalism, popular culture and telecommunications. It reviews the principal domains of research and theory in the social sciences and humanities that have had the most direct relationship with media studies, demonstrating the interdisciplinary character of communication research and the terms under which it has emerged as a field in the modern academy. The seminar is for graduate students contemplating teaching and research careers in communication, media studies and telecommunications. It is required of doctoral students in the media studies track of the Ph.D. program in communication. |
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The course frames much of the rest of the doctoral experience in media studies. As a graduate seminar it is organized for a substantial amount of reading (approximately 250-300 pages per week) and a wide variety of discussion. Students are expected to bear most of the responsibility for the discussion; there will be no formal lectures, although the instructors will provide background where necessary, as well as participate in and act as facilitators for the exploration of ideas. |
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The readings listed in the syllabus are all required unless otherwise indicated. Students will be expected to have read and be prepared to discuss the readings in substantive detail for each session. For each topic area students, on a rotating basis, will be asked to provide an introductory review and summary of some of the questions posed about the readings at the head of each unit in the syllabus, and to provide detailed notes for distribution to other seminar participants. It is expected that each student will have this opportunity two or three times during each semester. Students will be evaluated on the quality of their assigned discussions and general participation; these elements will constitute 30% of the final course grade; the remaining 70% of the grade will rest on the results of two major written assignments each semester--a mid-term and final examination. These will be take-home exams in which students write essays responding to questions about the material in the relevant half of the semester's work. |
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The readings come in the form of weekly packets, which are available from Dave Martinez, and from books you must purchase. In addition, it is recommended that you purchase a general reference guide to provide supplemental background to the reading material; a good source is William Outhwaite & Tom Bottomore, eds., Blackwell's Dictionary of Twentieth Century Social Thought (Basil Blackwell, 1994). |
Course structure & purpose; discussion of assignments
Tony Bennett, “Theories of the Media, Theories of Society,” M. Gurevitch et al., Eds., Culture, Society and the Media (Metheun, 1982)
Alex Callinicos, “Enlightenment,”
in Social Theory (NYU Press, 1999)
Grounding the study of media & communication in classical social theory and the historical context of modernization (e.g., Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Freud, Tonnies, Simmel--primary & secondary sources)
How do classical social theorists envision and explain the transition from "traditional" to "modern" society? What characteristics distinguish "modern" society? What is modernization, modernity, modernism? What stances do they take toward this historical transition? In what ways are these theorists influenced by the Enlightenment? by liberalism? What are the implications of classical social theories for the study of media and communication?
Dan Schiller, "Preface" in Theorizing Communication (Oxford UP, 1996).
Robert Holton, "Classical Social Theory," Chap. 1 in B. Turner, ed., Social Theory (Blackwell, 1996).
Karl Marx:
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ("Estranged Labour," "Private Property and Communism," "The Meaning of Human Requirements," and "The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society").
Excerpts from The Grundrisse (1857-1858).
Capital, Volume 1, Part 1: "Commodities and Money."
Marshall Berman, “All That is Solid Melts Into Air,” in All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Simon & Schuster, 1982).
Howard Zinn, Marx in
Leon Bramson, “European Theories of
the Mass and Mass Society,” in The Political Context of Sociology (
Alexis de Tocqueville, "The unlimited power of the majority in the United States, and its consequences," from his Democracy in America, vol. 1.
Emile Durkheim:
"Anomie and the Modern Division of Labor"
"Suicide and Modernity"
Max Weber:
"Politics as a Vocation"
"Bureaucracy"
"The Meaning of Discipline"
Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Collier-MacMillan, 1950).
Ferdinand Tönnies, "Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft," in Community and Society (Harper & Row, 1957).
Locating communication studies in context of liberal pragmatism &
To what extent is the thought of Dewey, Lippman, Mead, et al. shaped by Enlightenment thought? by liberalism? by classical social theories? What is liberalism? What is its concept of society, of individuals, of socal structure and agency? How do these thinkers conceptualize communication and media? How do they account for processes of social change and continuity? What ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions underlie liberal pragmatism and symbolic interactionism? How do these thinkers conceive of the role of the media in modern society, particularly its relation to democracy?
Schiller, Theorizing Communication, Chapter 1
Isaac Kramnick, “Liberalism, the Middle Class and Republican Revisionism,” in Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism (Cornell, 1990)
Leon Bramson, “Europeans and
Americans on the Crowd: The Concept of Collective Behavior,” in The
Political Context of Sociology (
John Durham Peters, "John Locke, the Individual, and the Origin of Communication," Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (November 1989): 387-399
Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (Harcourt, 1922)
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Swallow, 1954)
Robert E. Park, "The Natural History of the Newspaper," Journal of Sociology 27 (November 1923): 273-289
Leon Bramson, “The Rise of American
Sociology,” in The Political Context of Sociology (
Ken Plummer, "Symbolic
Interactionism in the Twentieth Century," Chap. 8 in B. Turner, ed., Blackwell
Companion to Social Theory
George Herbert Mead, "The
Social Foundations and Functions of Thought and Communication,” Mind, Self
and Society U
Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Prentice-Hall, 1969)
Czitrom {chap. On SI)
Fukuyama, Francis. "Are We at the End of History?" Fortune, 15 January 1990, 75-76, 78.
Held, David, Alex Callinicos, and Anthony Giddens, Symposium on "Liberalism, Marxism, and Democracy," Theory and Society 22 (1993): 249-304.
"Liberalism Defined: The Perils of Complacency," The Economist (21 December 1996), 17-19.
Emergence of social scientific studies of media/communication; structural functionalism; empiricist paradigm; effects, uses & gratifications, agenda-setting, cultivation analysis (Lazarsfeld, Lasswell, Berelson, Katz, Klapper, Schramm, Gerbner, McCombs & Shaw, Blumler, McQuail, etc.)
What are the social and intellectual roots of behavioral and social effects studies in mass communication research? Who were the key figures and landmark studies? What is positivism? To what extent does it shape the ontological, epistemological and methdological assumptions of mass communication research? What continuities and/or differences exist between pragmatism & symbolic interactionism and the mass communication research approach? How does the latter conceive of the role of communication and media in society? How does it account for historical change and continuity? for the relationship between individual and society? between agency and structure? How has the study and understanding of media effects developed over time? What are some critiques of this approach to communication/media studies?
Schiller, Chapter 2, "The
Anomaly of Domination," in Theorizing Communication
Leon Bramson, “The American
Critique of the Theory of Mass Society: Research in Mass Communication,” in The
Political Context of Sociology (
Hardt, Critical Communication
Studies
Todd Gitlin, "Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm," Theory and Society 6(2) (September 1978): 205-253
Carl Hovland, Irving Janis & Harold Kelley, Communication and Persuasion: Psychological Studies of Opinion Change (Yale UP, 1953)
Ch.1: "Introduction"
Harold Lasswell, "The Structure and Function of Communication in Society," in Lyman Bryson, ed., The Communication of Ideas (Harper & Bros., 1948)
Werrett Wallace Charters, Motion Pictures and Youth: A Summary (Macmillan, 1933), pp. v-vii, 1-66
Garth Jowett, "Social Science as Weapon: Origins of Payne Studies," Communication 13 (3) (1992): 211-25
Willard Rowland, Jr., The Politics of TV Violence (Sage, 1983)
J. Michael Sproule, "Progressive Propaganda Critics and the Magic Bullet Myth," Critical Studies in Mass Communication (6) (3) (September 1989): 225-246
Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson & Hazel Gaudet, The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign (Columbia UP, 1968)
Elihu Katz & Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence (Free Press, 1955)
Joseph Klapper, The Effects of Mass Communication (Free Press, 1960)
Part Two: "The Effects of Specific Types of Media Material," pp. 159-165, 199-205, 228-233, 246-257
James D. Halloran, ed., The Effects of Television (Panther, 1970)
"Introduction: Studying the Effects of Television"
"The Social Effects of Television"
Robert M. Liebert and Joyce Spratkin, The Early Window: Effects of Television on Children and Youth 3rd ed. (Pergamon)
George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan and Nancy Signorelli, "Charting the Mainstream: Television's Contributions to Political Orientations," Journal of Communication 32(2): 441-464
Denis McQuail, "With the Benefit of Hindsight: Reflections on Uses and Gratifications Research," in Michael Gurevitch and Mark R. Levy, eds., Mass Communication Review Yearbook Vol. 5 (Sage, 1984)
Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw, "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media," Public Opinion Quarterly (36) (2) (Summer 1972): 176-187
What are the key positions and arguments of the mass culture debate? What characteristics are associated with "high culture," with "mass culture"? How are these various authors situated in relation to the debate, and in relation to the various traditions we have covered so far? To what extent is the mass culture debate relevant to contemporary study of the media and culture?
Alexis de Tocqueville, "The unlimited
power of the majority in the United States, and its consequences,"
from his Democracy in America, vol. 1.
Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Cornell UP, 1983)
F.R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (St. John's College, 1930)
C. Wright Mills, People, Power, Politics (Oxford UP, 1956)
C. Wright Mills, "The Mass Society," from The Power Elite (OUP, 1956).
David Riesman, "Storytellers as Tutors in Technique: Changes in the Agents of Character Formation," in his The Lonely Crowd (Yale UP, 1950).
Leo Lowenthal, Literature and
Mass Culture (Transaction Books, 1984)
Paul Lazarsfeld & Robert Merton, "Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action," in Rosenberg & White, eds., Mass Culture (1957)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Continuum, 1987)
Dwight MacDonald, "A Theory of Mass Culture," in B. Rosenberg & D.M. White, eds., Mass Culture (Free Press, 1957)
Edward Shils, "Mass Society and Its Culture," Daedalus (89) (1960): 288-314
Jean Baudrillard, "Requiem for the Media," in his For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Telos Press, 1981).
Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," in Signatures of the Visible (Routledge, 1992)
Formulation of society, media, communication & culture from a
critical perspective; European &
What are the ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions associated with "critical" traditions in explaining the relationships between media and society, and media and culture? How do these authors conceive of communication, media, culture, and the role of the press? To what extent have they been influenced by Enlightenment thought? by classical social theorists? How do they conceptualize processes of socio-historical change and continuity and the relationship of individual agency and social structure? How do these authors conceive of the effects of media, and how does their perspective compare to that of "effects research"?
Goran Therborn, "Critical
Theory and the Legacy of Twentieth.Century Marxism,"
Martin Jay, "The Genesis of Critical Theory," The Dialectical Imagination (Little, Brown & Co., 1973).
David McLellan, "The
Max Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory," from his Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1992/1968).
Paul Lazarsfeld, "Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research," Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (9)(1941): 2-16
Max Horkheimer, "Means and Ends," from his Eclipse of Reason (NY: Continuum, 1974/1947).
Benjamin, W. (1968) ‘The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, pp. 217-251 in H. Arendt (ed), Illuminations.
Theodor Adorno, "On the
Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," in Arato &
Gebhardt, eds. The
Morrison, David E. (1978). Kultur and Culture: The Case of Theodor W. Adorno and Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Social Research 45(2), 331-355.
Peter U. Hohendahl, "The displaced intellectual? Adorno's American years revisited," New German Critique, Spring-Summer 1992.
Herbert Marcuse, “The Closing of the Universe of Discourse,” pp. 84-120 in One-Dimensional Man (Beacon Press, 1964).
Jurgen Habermas, "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article," New German Critique, Fall 1974.
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, "The proletarian public sphere," in Communication and Class Struggle, vol. 2, eds. Armand Mattelart & Seth Sieglaub (NY: International General, 1983).
Joan Landes, "The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration," in Feminists Read Habermas (Routledge, 1995).
John B. Thompson, "The theory of the public sphere," Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 10, 1993.
Jurgen Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (MIT Press, 1992).
Antonio Gramsci, "Journalism," Selections from Cultural Writings (Harvard UP, 1985), pp.386-425.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (International Publishers, 1971):
"The Intellectuals," pp. 3-23.
"On Education," pp. 24-43.
Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980):
"Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," pp. 31-49.
"Means of Communication as Means of Production," pp. 50-63.
Raymond Williams, "'You're a Marxist, Aren't You?'" in his Resources of Hope (Verso, 1989).
What is semiotics and how does its conception of communication compare to other approaches covered thus far? What is a "sign" and how does it come to have meaning? What is "myth"?
What is structuralism and how does it conceive of communication and the process of signification? What does it mean to say that structuralism is associated with "the death of the subject"? What are the ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions of semiotics and structuralism? How do they conceptualize the processes of socio-historical continuity and change, and the relationship of structure and agency? How is this approach related to Enlightenment thought? to the liberal tradition? to the mass communication research tradition? to the critical tradition? To what extent is this approach relevant to the contemporary study of media, communication and culture?
Ferdinand de Saussure, “The nature of the linguistic sign” and “The
immutability and mutability of the sign,” in his Course in General
Linguistics (McGraw-Hill, 1959).
Jonathan Culler, “Saussure’s Theory of Language,” in Ferdinand de Saussure (Penguin, 1976).
Terry Eagleton, “Structuralism,” in Literary Theory (University of
Minnesota, 1996)
Kaja Silverman, “From Sign to Subject,” in The Subject of Semiotics
(
Perry Anderson, “Structure and Subject,” in In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (University of Chicago, 1984)
Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies (Hill & Wang, 1957)
Roland Barthes, “Signifier and signified,” in his Elements of semiology (Hill and Wang, 1967).
Fredric Jameson, ""The Linguistic Model," in The Prison-House of Language (Princeton UP, 1972)
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (U Chicago P, 1966)
Umberto Eco, “Towards a Semioligical Guerilla Warfare (1967),” in his Travels in Hyperreality (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986).
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy (Monthly Review P, 1971)
John Fiske & John Hartley, Reading Television (Metheun, 1978)
What are the foundations of media research and theory known as "the political economy of communication"? What characterizes a political-economic approach to media studies (e.g., intellectual roots, relationship to research traditions, objects and methods of inquiry, key positions and arguments)? How does its approach to culture compare to the approach found in cultural studies (both British and American variants)? How does this tradition aid in our understanding of debates and outcomes in communication policy in general, and in how we conceive of the role(s) of citizens in modern society?
E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, no. 50 (1971), 76-136.
Excerpts on “commodification” from
G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of
Welfare Capitalism.
Vincent Mosco, “Commodification,” in The Political Economy of Communication (Sage, 1996).
Andrew Calabrese, “Toward a Political Economy of Culture,” in Andrew Calabrese and Colin Sparks, ed., Toward a Political Economy of Culture.
David Harvey, “The political-economic transformation of late twentieth century capitalism,” Part Two of The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1989), pp. 121-197.
Excerpt on Hayek & Keynes from
Yergin & Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The
Smythe, Dallas. “On the audience
commodity and its work,” in
Elaine Meehan, “Conceptualizing Culture as Commodity: The Problem of Television,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (1986): 448-457
Nicholas Garnham, “The Media as
Cultural Industries,” in Emancipation, the Media and Modernity (
Dan Schiller, “How to Think About Information,” in Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, ed., The Political Economy of Information (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
Armand Mattelart, “Against Global Inevitability,” Media Development 46(2), (1999), 3-6.
Jan Aart Scholte, “The Sources of Neoliberal Globalization,” United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. [on web – URL to be provided]
Anup Shah, “Free Trade and Globalization: A Primer on Neoliberalism,” from globalissues.org [URL to be provided].