Reading Media: How to Do Textual Analysis (Critical Cultural Communication)

Innovative methods in textual analysis to decode today’s ever-expanding media landscape

Reading Media: How to do Textual Analysis reinvigorates one of media and cultural studies’ most foundational methods at a moment when it is most needed, showing its continuing vitality by adapting it to new media environments, cultural objects, and scholarly questions.

The volume insists that the close study of meaning, form, and representation remains central to understanding media’s power. With contributions from leading and emerging scholars, the book offers a diverse toolkit: from narratological and semiotic analysis of film and TV, to historical poetic accounts of TikTok, multimodal analysis of Afrobeats music videos, and postcolonial criticism of games. Essays extend the scope of textual analysis to unexpected objects―such as plastic waste, memes, and refugee-authored media―while others demonstrate how texts operate across platforms, genres, and transmedia franchises. Beyond offering new and improved approaches to textual analysis, each chapter illustrates its approach using a specific case study, functioning both as a step-by-step how-to guide and as an example of textual analysis in action.

Reading Media advances a vision of textual analysis that is rigorous yet flexible, attuned to both aesthetics and politics, and responsive to today’s media environment. Essential for students and scholars in media, communication, and cultural studies, Reading Media both reaffirms and renews textual analysis as an indispensable way of engaging with the mediated worlds that shape contemporary life.

Jonathan Gray is Hamel Family Distinguished Chair in Communication Arts, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author and editor of numerous books, including Dislike-Minded, Show Sold Separately, Planet Digital (with Aswin Punathambekar and Adrienne Shaw), Reading Media (with Daphne Gershon), Fandom, Second Edition (with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington), and Satire TV (with Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson).

Daphne Gershon is Lecturer at Gonzaga University. She received her PhD from the Media and Cultural Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison