Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Post-modern

by Kellner; Douglas

• ISBN13: 9780415105705
• ISBN10: 0415105706
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1995-01-24
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Media Culturedevelops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television, music and other artifacts to discern their nature and effects, argueing that media culture is the dominant form of culture which socializes us and provides materials for identity, social reproduction and change. Through studies of Reagan and Rambo, horror films and youth films, rap music and African American culture, Madonna, fashion, television news and entertainment, MTV,Beavis and Butt-Head, the Gulf-War as cultural text, cyberpunk fiction and postmodern theory, Kellner provides a series of lively studies that both illuminate contemporary culture and provide methods of analysis and critique. Many people today talk about cultural studies, but Kellner actually does it, carrying through a unique mixture of theoretical analyses and concrete discussions of some of the most popular and influential forms of contemporary media culture. Criticizing social context, political struggle, and the system ofcultural production, Kellner develops a multi-dimensional approach to cultural studies that broadens the field and opens it to a variety of disiplines. He also provides approaches to the vexed question of the effects of culture and provides perspectives for cultural studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Theory/Context/Methods	p. 13
Theory Wars and Cultural Studies	p. 15
Media Culture, Politics, and Ideology from Reagan to Rambo	p. 55
Notes	p. 89
For a Cultural Studies That is Critical, Multicultural, and Multiperspectival	p. 93
Notes	p. 122
Diagnostic Critique and Cultural Studies	p. 123
Social Anxiety, Class, and Disaffected Youth	p. 125
Black Voices from Spike Lee to Rap	p. 157
Reading the Gulf War	p. 198
Media Culture/Identities/Politics	p. 229
Television, Advertising, and the Construction of Postmodern Identities	p. 231
Madonna, Fashion, and Image	p. 263
Mapping the Present from the Future from Baudrillard to Cyberpunk	p. 297
Conclusion	p. 331
References	p. 342
Index	p. 352
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