Media Reception Studies

Staiger Janet

ISBN 10: 0814781357 / ISBN 13: 9780814781357

Published by New York University Press, 2005

About this Item

pp. 262.

Seller Inventory # 7933134

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Media Reception Studies
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814781357
• ISBN 13: 9780814781357
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

A broad survey on how audiences make meaning out of mass media

Media Reception Studies broadly surveys the past century of scholarship on the ways in which audiences make meaning out of mass media. It synthesizes in plain language social scientific, linguistic, and cultural studies approaches to film and television as communication media.

Janet Staiger traverses a broad terrain, covering the Chicago School, early psychological approaches, Soviet theory, the Frankfurt School, mass communication research and critical theory, linguistics and semiotic theory, social-psychoanalytical research, cognitive psychology, and cultural studies. She offers these theories as a set of tools for understanding the complex relationships between films and their audiences, TV shows and their viewers. She explains such questions as the behavior of fans; the implications of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity with regard to the media; the effect of violence, horror, and sexually explicit images on viewers; and the place of memory in spectatorship.

Providing an organized and lucid introduction to a staggering amount of work, Media Reception Studies is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in understanding the effects of mass media.

About the Author

Janet Staiger teaches cultural, gender, sexuality, and media studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her recent books are Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception and Blockbuster TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era (both available from NYU Press).