東華大學圖書館 |

The Media Concept: A Genealogy.

紀錄類型:	書目-電子資源 : Monograph/item
正題名/作者:	The Media Concept: A Genealogy./
作者:	Shechtman, Anna.
出版者:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2020,
面頁冊數:	215 p.
附註:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-12, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International82-12A.
標題:	Film studies. -
電子資源:	https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=27743845
ISBN:	9798516931468

The Media Concept: A Genealogy.
Shechtman, Anna.

The Media Concept: A Genealogy. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2020 - 215 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-12, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2020.

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

What does Media Studies study? Recent contributions to the field have made the compelling case that everything that communicates meaning-texts, bodies, networks, environments, the world itself-is media, declaring the field's status as the discipline of all disciplines. But media is also something historically and linguistically specific: the concept didn't even enter common usage until the late 1950s. This dissertation examines the specificity of media's semantic forms-mass media, the media, mediums, and mainstream media-each of which serves as the inspiration for one of its chapters. But I am no less invested in the word's vagaries and (sometimes obscurantist) capacity: what forms of political critique and ideological mystification does "media" afford? Just as each chapter is defined by an iteration of the media concept, so too is it focused on a specific social formation-the intelligencia, the market, the art world, the industry-that has appropriated the media concept to reinforce its own boundaries and influence.Chapter One recovers the already dense meaning of "mass media" from a 1959 conference, hosted by the Tamiment Institute, titled "Mass Media and Mass Culture," featuring Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, and the President of CBS Frank Stanton, among other intellectuals and industry titans. For the conference's illustrious speakers, "mass media" was variously a boon to civic participation, a scourge inviting corporate monoculture or totalitarian social control, and a clever euphemism for commercialism. Zooming out from the high-level circumlocution of the Tamiment conference, I trace the term's multiplying meanings (and related terms) in the New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Vogue, Ebony, Jet, ArtNews, and the Partisan Review between 1950 and 2000-a corpus of magazines that I built and analyzed using word-embedding models, with support from Yale's Digital Humanities Lab. The results of this data collection and processing lead me to the questions that motivate each of the dissertation's subsequent chapters.In Chapter Two, I question the historical significance of personifying media (i.e. the media) for midcentury black intellectuals-even as communication theorists like Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton were dispelling the notion of a singular, centralized media as a myth perpetuated by Cold War paranoiacs. Beginning with Harold Cruse's call to Black intellectuals to "revolutionize the cultural apparatus" and "neutralize CBS, NBC, and ABC," I use archival and textual analysis to reexamine the complex relationship between Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison-often seen as ideological and stylistic opponents-in terms of their different political and rhetorical strategies for confronting, revolutionizing, and neutralizing "the media," singular and hegemonically white.Chapter Three moves from the Black press and publishing to art criticism and museums. I demonstrate that in the very decades that the "media concept" entered the vernacular, the "medium concept" began to shape art criticism, art history, and museum studies. It became standard practice, for example, for wall labels and catalog captions to display the medium, or material, of the work of art; and art historians and connoisseurs began to use the un-Latinate plural "mediums" to rhetorically elevate and distinguish the category of art from the imperial spread of mass "media." This was no coincidence: mediums emerged as a category for the organization and appreciation of art as the dialectical counterpart to media, and in response to the cultural imperialism of its mass-produced forms. I analyze the cultural criticism of Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss, alongside the exhibition archives of the Museum of Modern Art. I then turn to the earliest theorists and purveyors of "camp" culture-Parker Tyler, Charles Henri Ford, Gore Vidal-to demonstrate that the camp sensibility worked through the mediums/media dialectic toward a self-critique of both high and low art forms.Chapter Four turns to the institutional history of American electricity companies, film studios, and broadcast networks, which in the 1970s and '80s stopped being called agents of "mass media" and were rechristened as tributaries of the media's "mainstream." In this age of conglomeration, these industries pivoted from competing for "mass audiences" to functioning as collaborators or subsidiaries, and presented the "media personality" as their friendly face. A study of eponymous TV shows of this era (from the Nat King Cole Show to the Mary Tyler Moore Show), reveals that, unlike "mass media," agents of "mainstream media" could absorb alternative media into their flow of programming and capital. Mobilizing the logic of the "personality," they even made racial and gender difference the face of their increasingly consolidated production.In each of these chapters, "media" bolsters a secondary concept that it also threatens to obsolesce: culture, democracy, art, diversity. So, too, with the humanities-as Media Studies offers itself anew as a macro-disciplinary means of understanding our world.

ISBN: 9798516931468Subjects--Topical Terms:

2122736
Film studies.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Mass culture

The Media Concept: A Genealogy.
LDR:06267nmm a2200361 4500 001 2281818
005 20210927083402.5
008 220723s2020 ||||||||||||||||| ||eng d
020 $a 9798516931468
035 $a (MiAaPQ)AAI27743845
035 $a AAI27743845
040 $a MiAaPQ $c MiAaPQ
100 1 $a Shechtman, Anna. $3 3560532
245 1 4 $a The Media Concept: A Genealogy.
260 1 $a Ann Arbor : $b ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, $c 2020
300 $a 215 p.
500 $a Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-12, Section: A.
500 $a Advisor: Hungerford, Amy;Peters, John Durham.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2020.
506 $a This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.
506 $a This item must not be added to any third party search indexes.
520 $a What does Media Studies study? Recent contributions to the field have made the compelling case that everything that communicates meaning-texts, bodies, networks, environments, the world itself-is media, declaring the field's status as the discipline of all disciplines. But media is also something historically and linguistically specific: the concept didn't even enter common usage until the late 1950s. This dissertation examines the specificity of media's semantic forms-mass media, the media, mediums, and mainstream media-each of which serves as the inspiration for one of its chapters. But I am no less invested in the word's vagaries and (sometimes obscurantist) capacity: what forms of political critique and ideological mystification does "media" afford? Just as each chapter is defined by an iteration of the media concept, so too is it focused on a specific social formation-the intelligencia, the market, the art world, the industry-that has appropriated the media concept to reinforce its own boundaries and influence.Chapter One recovers the already dense meaning of "mass media" from a 1959 conference, hosted by the Tamiment Institute, titled "Mass Media and Mass Culture," featuring Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, and the President of CBS Frank Stanton, among other intellectuals and industry titans. For the conference's illustrious speakers, "mass media" was variously a boon to civic participation, a scourge inviting corporate monoculture or totalitarian social control, and a clever euphemism for commercialism. Zooming out from the high-level circumlocution of the Tamiment conference, I trace the term's multiplying meanings (and related terms) in the New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Vogue, Ebony, Jet, ArtNews, and the Partisan Review between 1950 and 2000-a corpus of magazines that I built and analyzed using word-embedding models, with support from Yale's Digital Humanities Lab. The results of this data collection and processing lead me to the questions that motivate each of the dissertation's subsequent chapters.In Chapter Two, I question the historical significance of personifying media (i.e. the media) for midcentury black intellectuals-even as communication theorists like Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton were dispelling the notion of a singular, centralized media as a myth perpetuated by Cold War paranoiacs. Beginning with Harold Cruse's call to Black intellectuals to "revolutionize the cultural apparatus" and "neutralize CBS, NBC, and ABC," I use archival and textual analysis to reexamine the complex relationship between Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison-often seen as ideological and stylistic opponents-in terms of their different political and rhetorical strategies for confronting, revolutionizing, and neutralizing "the media," singular and hegemonically white.Chapter Three moves from the Black press and publishing to art criticism and museums. I demonstrate that in the very decades that the "media concept" entered the vernacular, the "medium concept" began to shape art criticism, art history, and museum studies. It became standard practice, for example, for wall labels and catalog captions to display the medium, or material, of the work of art; and art historians and connoisseurs began to use the un-Latinate plural "mediums" to rhetorically elevate and distinguish the category of art from the imperial spread of mass "media." This was no coincidence: mediums emerged as a category for the organization and appreciation of art as the dialectical counterpart to media, and in response to the cultural imperialism of its mass-produced forms. I analyze the cultural criticism of Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss, alongside the exhibition archives of the Museum of Modern Art. I then turn to the earliest theorists and purveyors of "camp" culture-Parker Tyler, Charles Henri Ford, Gore Vidal-to demonstrate that the camp sensibility worked through the mediums/media dialectic toward a self-critique of both high and low art forms.Chapter Four turns to the institutional history of American electricity companies, film studios, and broadcast networks, which in the 1970s and '80s stopped being called agents of "mass media" and were rechristened as tributaries of the media's "mainstream." In this age of conglomeration, these industries pivoted from competing for "mass audiences" to functioning as collaborators or subsidiaries, and presented the "media personality" as their friendly face. A study of eponymous TV shows of this era (from the Nat King Cole Show to the Mary Tyler Moore Show), reveals that, unlike "mass media," agents of "mainstream media" could absorb alternative media into their flow of programming and capital. Mobilizing the logic of the "personality," they even made racial and gender difference the face of their increasingly consolidated production.In each of these chapters, "media" bolsters a secondary concept that it also threatens to obsolesce: culture, democracy, art, diversity. So, too, with the humanities-as Media Studies offers itself anew as a macro-disciplinary means of understanding our world.
590 $a School code: 0265.
650 4 $a Film studies. $3 2122736
650 4 $a Communication. $3 524709
650 4 $a American literature. $3 523234
653 $a Mass culture
653 $a Media concept
653 $a Media studies
690 $a 0900
690 $a 0459
690 $a 0591
710 2 $a Yale University. $b English Language and Literature / Film Studies. $3 3560533
773 0 $t Dissertations Abstracts International $g 82-12A.
790 $a 0265
791 $a Ph.D.
792 $a 2020
793 $a English
856 4 0 $u https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=27743845