Critical Textual Analysis

Course Description

The text is a foundational object in the study of media: it is what we consume as audiences, what our educations and professional routines are organized around producing, and the artifacts that carry the various meanings of culture that persist over time. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the various methodological approaches that take texts as their central point of inquiry, and to develop your skill and expertise in deploying these methods, with the goal of producing your own conference-ready piece of research by the end of the semester. Textual approaches to the analysis of media have developed in diverse fields such as anthropology, history, literature, rhetoric and philosophy; mass communication has been one place of their intellectual convergence. Therefore, readings in this class will span Modernist through Post-Modernist movements focusing, not on progress from one approach to another, but on the spiral interplay of those movements, intellectual frameworks, and their uptakes in various disciplines. There is a deep convergence of theory and method here, and as such, a robust interest theory is needed in order to guide the interpretation of media texts.

Code

MMC 9207

Credits

3

Subject

MMC