Media studies Books

Book SynopsisThis text explores a broad range of media-related topics as they pertain to China. The chapters provide detailed analyses of such issues as the increasing influence of advertisers; the efforts of the Communist party to direct editorial content; and the impact of Hong Kong television on Guanggzhou.

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Book SynopsisOffers a history of environmental journalism which looks at how the practice defines issues and sets the public agenda. This book includes the works of authors such as Pliny the Elder, John Muir, and Rachel Carson.

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Book SynopsisLooking at how journalism has changed over time, this book explores how the long-standing and untrustworthy conventions developed. It examines why reliable standards of objectivity and accuracy are critical not just to a free press but to the democratic society it informs and serves. It offers an account of how journalism and truth work.

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Book SynopsisExplores a pivotal time for South American literature of the 1930s and '40s. Moving among the authors from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and among the genres of fiction, the essay, popular journalism, and experimental little magazines, Sarah Ann Wells shows how writers on the periphery of global modernity were fashioning alternative approaches to media.

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Book SynopsisProvides a new framework in which to interpret the films of Michael Haneke, including Funny Games, Caché, and others, and to show how the concept of intermediality can be used to expand the possibilities of film and media studies, tying the two more closely together.

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Book SynopsisWhat does it mean to describe cinematic effects as “movie magic,” to compare filmmakers to magicians, or to say that the cinema is all a “trick”? The heyday of stage illusionism was over a century ago, so why do such performances still serve as a key reference point for understanding filmmaking, especially now that so much of the cinema rests on the use of computers? To answer these questions, Colin Williamson situates film within a long tradition of magical practices that combine art and science, involve deception and discovery, and evoke two forms of wonder—both awe at the illusion displayed and curiosity about how it was performed. He thus considers how, even as they mystify audiences, cinematic illusions also inspire them to learn more about the technologies and techniques behind moving images. Tracing the overlaps between the worlds of magic and filmmaking, Hidden in Plain Sight examines how professional illusionists and Trade Review"Fresh and intriguing, Hidden in Plain Sight offers a wealth of fascinating historical information on the myriad ways and contexts in which moving images have evoked experiences of wonder from audiences. Williamson’s interest in the material is infectious." -- Stephen Prince * author of Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality *"In answering questions that date back at least a century in movie-making, Williamson looks at how movie magic has inspired people to learn more about the techniques and technology behind the images. " * Flicksided *"Williamson’s superb book is a broadly conceived and thought-provoking reconsideration of the consanguinity of magic and moving images that obliges us to contemplate the special sense of wonder magic induces." -- Matthew Solomon * author of Disappearing Tricks and The Gold Rush *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Watching Closely 1 (De)Mystifying Tricks: The Wonder Response and the Emergence of the Cinema 2 Quicker than the Eye: Science, Cinema, and the Question of Vision 3 Second Sight: Time Lapse and the Cinema as Seer 4 The Enchanted Screen: Performing the Cinema’s Illusion of Life 5 Digital Prestidigitation: The Eclipse of the Cinema’s Mechanical Magic 6 Through Digital Eyes: Reanimating Early Cinema Conclusion: Other Obscurities and Illuminations Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThe Walt Disney Company has grown into a diversified global media giant, but is it still possible to identify a coherent Disney ethos? Examining everything from theme parks to merchandising to animation to live-action films, Disney Culture proposes that they all follow a core corporate philosophy dating back to the 1920s.Trade Review"Wills makes a strong contribution to both the fields of media studies as well as Disney scholarship with this concise, well written and thoroughly engaging overview of how the cultural, artistic, and economic factors surrounding the Disney corporation intersect." -- Blair Davis * author of Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page *"Disney Culture is a notable addition to the growing critical work on Disney and its cultural significance. Wills skillfully dissects the Disney ethos and even challenges the multimedia giant to 'mean something beyond merchandise' in the twenty-first century." -- Janet Wasko * author of Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy *"Wills's little gem of a book assesses the art, business, ideology, and audience of the Disney organization from its beginning to today. Disney Culture is an essential text for students in media studies, animation, and American culture." * Journal of American Culture *"An elegantly written and well-researched book...Wells makes a strong case for the powerful influence Disney has exerted on American life over the past century, how it has spread worldwide, and what it means for civilization." * Cercles *Disney Culture review in Musicals * Musicals *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: Making Disney Magic Chapter Two: The World According to Disney Chapter Three: Disney Dollars Chapter Four: Disney Values Further Reading Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisFrom the queasy zooms in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to the avant-garde mystery of Michael Snow’s Wavelength, from the excitement of televised baseball to the drama of the political convention, the zoom shot is instantly recognizable and highly controversial. Nick Hall traces the century-spanning history of the zoom lens in American film and television. Trade Review"Outstanding and engaging, Zoom makes a significant contribution to the scholarship of cinematography, allowing scholars to see zoom technology afresh." -- Patrick Keating * editor of Cinematography *"New Scholarly Books: Weekly Book List, June 8," by Nina C. Ayoub * Chronicle of Higher Education *Table of Contents1 Introduction 2 Drama at the Touch of a Lever 3 Take Me Out To the Ball Game 4 Unlimited Horizons 5 Creepers and Neck-Snappers 6 The Zoom Boom 7 Contemporary Zooms Acknowledgments Selected Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe Walt Disney Company has grown into a diversified global media giant, but is it still possible to identify a coherent Disney ethos? Examining everything from theme parks to merchandising to animation to live-action films, Disney Culture proposes that they all follow a core corporate philosophy dating back to the 1920s.Trade Review"Wills makes a strong contribution to both the fields of media studies as well as Disney scholarship with this concise, well written and thoroughly engaging overview of how the cultural, artistic, and economic factors surrounding the Disney corporation intersect." -- Blair Davis * author of Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page *"Disney Culture is a notable addition to the growing critical work on Disney and its cultural significance. Wills skillfully dissects the Disney ethos and even challenges the multimedia giant to 'mean something beyond merchandise' in the twenty-first century." -- Janet Wasko * author of Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy *"Wills's little gem of a book assesses the art, business, ideology, and audience of the Disney organization from its beginning to today. Disney Culture is an essential text for students in media studies, animation, and American culture." * Journal of American Culture *"An elegantly written and well-researched book...Wells makes a strong case for the powerful influence Disney has exerted on American life over the past century, how it has spread worldwide, and what it means for civilization." * Cercles *Disney Culture review in Musicals * Musicals *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: Making Disney Magic Chapter Two: The World According to Disney Chapter Three: Disney Dollars Chapter Four: Disney Values Further Reading Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisCovering everything from Bull Durham (1988) to The Bad News Bears (1976) this book examines how baseball-themed films and TV series depict the game, its players, fans, and place in American society. It considers works that nostalgically lionize white male heroes alongside films and television that dramatize the contributions of female and BIPOC players.Trade Review“Aaron Baker’s history of how film has represented baseball as a component of American society stands alone. Replete with exceptionally perceptive observations about dozens of baseball films, this book is a 'must' read for students of the game." -- Benjamin G. Rader * author of Baseball: A History of America's Game, 4th ed. *"An insightful and necessary analysis of baseball as a sport and a film subgenre through a sociopolitical lens examining race, gender, sexuality, globalization, and more." * The Brooklyn Rail *“Aaron Baker’s history of how film has represented baseball as a component of American society stands alone. Replete with exceptionally perceptive observations about dozens of baseball films, this book is a 'must' read for students of the game." -- Benjamin G. Rader * author of Baseball: A History of America's Game, 4th ed. *"An insightful and necessary analysis of baseball as a sport and a film subgenre through a sociopolitical lens examining race, gender, sexuality, globalization, and more." * The Brooklyn Rail *Table of ContentsContents Introduction: Baseball According to Satchel Paige: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” 1 Hollywood Baseball Films: Nostalgic White Masculinity or the National Pastime? 2 The Business of Baseball 3 Screening Who Gets to Play 4 The Glocalized Game 5 Fanball 6 Learning the Game Conclusion: The Show for the Thinking Fan and Going Online List of Baseball Films and Television Shows

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Book SynopsisTracing the transformation of storytelling in the digital age, this work examines electronic narrative forms. It reveals how digital media convey meaning and create stories. It stresses the difficulty of reconciling narrativity with interactivity and anticipates the time when media will provide fresh ways to experience stories.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Savage Preservation is an eye-opening account of the mutually entangled origins of ethnography and the meanings of modern media: recorded sound, color photography, documentary film. Not only does Brian Hochman enrich his readers’ sense of culture as a concept available to historical change, he demonstrates convincingly that North American media studies remains haunted at its core by the racial ‘science’ of earlier generations." —Lisa Gitelman, New York University "The book’s intersection of technological development and evolutionist cultural theory make a valuable contribution to media history."—Afterimage"Refreshing and original."—CHOICE"Hochman crafts a compelling account of the unexpected ways in which race and new media technologies intersected during this era."—MELUS"Hochman’s book is a clearly argued, broadly researched work with cogent case studies which should help to broaden our understanding of turn-of-the-century media and technology."—History of Anthropology NewsletterTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: The Passamaquoddy Experiment1. Media Evolution: Indians, Alphabets, and the Technological Measures of Man2. Representing Plains Indian Sign Language3. Originals and Aboriginals: Race and Writing in the Age of the Phonograph4. Race, Empire, and the Skin of the Ethnographic Image5. Local Colors: The Work of the Ethnographic AutochromePostscript: Fictions of PermanenceAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction to the Second Edition. Celebrity in the Digital Era: A New Public IntimacyCelebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary CulturePrefacePart I1. Tracing the Meaning of the Public Individuals2. Conceptualizing the Collective: The Mob, the Crowd, the Mass, and the Audience3. Tools for the Analysis of the Celebrity as a Form of Cultural PowerPart II4. The Cinematic Apparatus and the Construction of the Film Celebrity5. Television’s Construction of the Celebrity6. The Meanings of the Popular Music Celebrity: The Construction of Distinctive Authenticity7. The System of CelebrityPart IIIThe Embodiment of Affect in Political CultureConclusion: Forms of Power/Forms of Public SubjectivityCoda: George, Celebrities, and the Shift in Political/Popular CultureNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisIn a media ecology inundated by unauthorized materials, David S. Roh suggests that extralegal works such as fan fiction are critical to a system that spurs the evolution of culture. Illegal Literature argues that the proliferation of unsanctioned texts may actually benefit literary and cultural development.Trade Review"Illegal Literature is a clear headed look at the copyright protections surrounding authorship and the combined legal, material, and aesthetic construction of authorship over the modern period."—Joseph Tabbi, University of Illinois at Chicago"A stimulating contribution to a key contemporary debate that is certainly here to stay for many years."—Leonardo ReviewsTable of ContentsContentsPrologue: Between Analog and Digital CulturesIntroduction. Accretive Genius: The Case for Disrupting Culture1. Dead Authors, Copyright Law, and Parodic Fictions2. How Japanese Fan Fiction Beat the Lawyers3. The Open-Source Model: Versioning Literature and CultureEpilogue: On Being AccusedAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisFarm Worker Futurism reveals that the historical role of technology has had much to do with depicting the lives of farm laborers—Mexican migrants in particular—in the United States. This book explores the friction between agribusiness and farm workers through the lens of visual culture.Trade Review"In Farm Worker Futurism, one comes face-to-face with the techno-fascism that was routed around daily by the collective actions of laborers who hacked the future with anticipatory illuminations and critical disturbances. This not science-fiction, but it is futurity-as-history that drives science-fiction into the present for activist, artists, and critics. Curtis Marez has written a unique and highly accessible book that calls on us to perform the speculative seeding of the future as farm workers to make new worlds grow now."—Ricardo Dominguez, University of California, San Diego"Perhaps the greatest contribution of Farm Worker Futurism lies in its bold, creative, and apt attention to the intersections of labor and art as an inextricable dyad. Indeed, Marez’s attention to art associated with farmworker labor invites similar attention to art and discourse about a fuller range of labor-based cultural production."—American Literary History"Farm Worker Futurism provides additional, much-needed fodder for what critical food scholars claim as the agrarian imaginary and its capacity to thwart policy aimed at increasing social and ecological justice."—H-NetTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Farm Workers in the Machine1. “To the Disinherited Belongs the Future”: Farm Worker Futurism in the 1940s2. From Third Cinema to National Video: Visual Technologies and UFW World Building3. Farm Worker Futurisms in Speculative Culture: George Lucas and Ester HernandezAfterword: Farm Worker Futurism NowAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewMichael Wutz seeks to recuperate the literary novel in a post - print world by enhancing our sense of its place - the complexity as well as the security of its niche - within the digitally expanded 'media ecology.' He unfolds a fine-grained historical analysis into photographic, phonographic, cinematic, computational, and digital components. Dwelling on the relays by which these technologies have inscribed themselves on literary texts, Enduring Words makes a number of surprising and illuminating connections. - Bruce Clarke, author of Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems ""Enduring Words is an extraordinary assessment of print culture and its offspring, the modern novel. It navigates the history of technology, the history of the modern subject, biopolitics, the history of science, and the cognitive sciences. For Wutz, fictional narrative offers the 'best possible model' for what will emerge as a truly electronic art form. His is a much more sophisticated and optimistic take on literature's role in our electronic future, one that opens up new avenues for future research in both literary and media studies."" - Klaus Benesch, author of Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the American Renaissance ""For those skeptical, despairing, or merely curious about the novel's survival in the age of multimedia comes the welcome news of Enduring Words. With expert precision, Michael Wutz explains how the novel flourished and became even more insistently itself by assimilating techniques developed by revolutionary aural, visual, and digital technologies - the phonograph, the photograph, the silent, the talking, the color, and the animated film, the computer - without abandoning its own print culture. Enduring Words is a must read in every sense."" - Maria DiBattista, author of Imagining Virginia Woolf and Fast-Talking Dames

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Book SynopsisIn 1915, Kansas became one of only a handful of US states to establish its own film censorship board. The Kansas board controlled screen content in the state for more than fifty years, yet little is known about its activities. This first book-length study of state film censorship examines the unique political, social, and economic factors that led to its implementation in Kansas.Trade Review“I believe that Banned in Kansas will (and should) become a classic in the field of the social history of the motion picture in America. This book makes a very significant contribution and fills a very large void in our understanding of the forces behind the issue of social control of this important medium in the twentieth century.”—Garth Jowett, author of Film: The Democratic Art

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Book SynopsisExamines several narratives involving religion's historical influence on the news ethic of journalism: its decades-long opposition to the Sunday newspaper as a vehicle of modernity that challenged the tradition of the Sabbath; the parallel attempt to create an advertising-driven Christian daily newspaper; and the ways in which religion pressured the press to become a moral agent.Trade ReviewThis may be a book about history, but its concerns are remarkably contemporary. Its central concern is the struggle for journalism that is both trustworthy and important, a concern that resonates with today’s society that urgently needs credible news reporting but that distrusts media more than ever. It should become essential reading for those who want to understand media criticism in the United States."" - John Ferré, University of Louisville; co-author of Good News: Social Ethics and the Press""Mainstream press and mainstream church: two institutions often seen as being past their prime, losing audiences, scrambling to stay solvent, and trying to remain relevant. Ronald R. Rodgers examines how these two opinion leaders tangled as America entered the era of mass consumption of goods and ideas, setting the stage for our information-rich but wisdom-poor society.“Rodgers’s book is aptly named. More than a century ago, the debates about the role and soul of the press focused on whether it should give what people need or what they want—a question fascinatingly addressed in miniature when the a clergyman took control of the Topeka Capital for one week in 1900. This bread-vs.-circuses debate animates the discussion about what seems to be our soul-less public life in the twenty-first century, making Rodgers’s book a truly fascinating prologue to our present."" - Michael Sweeney, author of The Military and the Press: An Uneasy Truce""Ronald Rodgers brings a strong background to this book: more than twenty years as a newspaper reporter and editor, an intellectual curiosity about the past, and a proven track record as an astute historian. In studying journalism’s mission and conduct over a ninety-year period in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he closely examines criticism of how the press sustained itself and identified 'its role and responsibility.' Using both the regular press and the religious press, and focusing on the ethics of journalism, he argues convincingly that looking at the period under study can lead to a better understanding of journalism’s role in society today. This approach breaks significant new ground in a highly interesting book."" - Patrick S. Washburn, Professor Emeritus, Ohio University E.W. Scripps School of Journalism

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Book SynopsisQuestions the dominant notion that reporters entering the field in the late nineteenth century relied on an informal apprenticeship system to learn the rules of journalism. Drawing from the experiences of more than fifty reporters, Randall Sumpter argues that cub reporters could and did access multiple sources of instruction.Trade ReviewSumpter introduces the notion that the day's news work rules were spread through communities of practice, that is, informal interpersonal networks involving ‘knowledge brokers,' as well as through news fiction, newswriters' autobiographies, and trade and general interest publications. The author's early point about how studying this topic can offer insight into today's technology-driven upsetting of the boundaries of journalism underscores why this study is important."" - Patricia Dooley, Wichita State University; author of Taking Their Political Place: Journalists and the Making of an Occupation and The Technology of Journalism: Cultural Agents, Cultural Icons

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Book SynopsisAnalyses the expansion of narrative journalism in the American newspaper industry in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In doing so, the book offers the first institutionally situated history of narrative journalism's evolution from the New Journalism of the 1960s to long-form literary journalism in the 1990s.Trade Review“Offers a detailed, rich, and fascinating account of the narrative journalism movement from the Washington Post to the St. Petersburg Times to the Oregonian and beyond. No one else has done this and Thomas Schmidt has done it with deep research and strong writing himself.”—Michael Schudson, Columbia University, author of The Sociology of News and Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers "Thanks to Thomas Schmidt, scholars will now have a substantive, institutional sense of how, starting in the 1970s, newspaper editors, reporters, and trade leaders—and soon, in-house writing coaches—developed a community of practice around the turn to long-form storytelling. Grounded in fresh archival research, sifting through often-overlooked trade commentary, and incorporating over two dozen interviews with key players, Schmidt's deftly nuanced "cultural-institutional" approach complements and challenges stand-alone histories of the "New Journalism," as well as studies that either overlook the storytelling turn or would reduce it to economic factors. Rewriting the Newspaper is itself a book with a very important story to tell, and one that is still with us."—Christopher P. Wilson, Boston College, author of Reading Narrative Journalism: An Introduction for Students "In Rewriting the Newspaper, author Thomas Schmidt gets it right. This is the story of a generation of creative reporters, editors, and teachers, journalists who understood that while reports were central to their craft, they were incapable of fully communicating the truths behind the facts."—Roy Peter Clark, Poynter Institute for Media Studies, author of Writing Tools

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