Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How About These?

Introduction: Shoulders to Stand On.

Section I: The Columbia School.

Introduction.

Critical Research at Columbia: Lazarsfeld and Merton's “Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action” Peter Simonson and Gabriel Weimann.

Herzog’s “On Borrowed Experience:” Its Place in the Debate Over the Active Audience Tamar Liebes.

Section II: The Frankfurt School.

Introduction.

The Subtlety of Horkheimer and Adorno: Reading “The Culture Industry” John Durham Peters.

Benjamin Contextualized: On “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Paddy Scannell.

Redeeming Consumption: On Lowenthal’s “The Triumph of the Mass Idols” Eva Illouz.

Section III: The Chicago School.

Introduction.

Community and Pluralism in Wirth’s “Consensus and Mass Communication” Eric Rothenbuhler.

The Audience Is a Crowd, the Crowd Is a Public: Latter-Day Thoughts on Lang and Lang’s “MacArthur Day in Chicago” Elihu Katz and Daniel Dayan.

Towards the Virtual Encounter: Horton and Wohl’s “Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction” Don Handelman.

Section IV: The Toronto School.

Introduction.

Harold Adams Innis and his Bias of Communication Menahem Blondheim.

Canonic Anti-text: Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media Joshua Meyrowitz.

Section V: British Cultural Studies.

Introduction.

Retroactive Enrichment: Raymond Williams's Culture and Society John Durham Peters.

Canonization Achieved? Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” Michael Gurevitch and Paddy Scannell.

Afterthoughts on Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure” in the Age of Cultural Studies Yosefa Loshitzky.

Index