The craft of criticism

THE CRAFT OF CRITICISM

With contributions from thirty leading media scholars, this collection provides a comprehensive overview of the

main methodologies of critical media studies. Chapters address various methods of textual analysis, as well as

reception studies, policy studies, production studies, and contextual, multi-method approaches, like intertextual￾ity and cultural geography. Film and television are at the heart of the collection, which also addresses emergent

technologies and new research tools in such areas as software studies, gaming, and digital humanities. Each

chapter includes an intellectual history of a particular method or approach, a discussion of why and how it was

used to study a particular medium or media, relevant examples of influential work in the area, and an in-depth

review of a case study drawn from the author’s own research. Together, the chapters in this collection give

media critics a complete toolbox of essential critical media studies methodologies.

Contributors: Cynthia Baron, Ron Becker, Mary Beltrán, Patrick Burkart, Jeremy G. Butler, Cynthia Chris,

Norma Coates, Eric Freedman, Rosalind Gill, Jonathan Gray, Mary L. Gray, Timothy Havens, Matt Hills,

Michele Hilmes, Nina B. Huntemann, Victoria E. Johnson, Michael Kackman, Mary Celeste Kearney, Bill

Kirkpatrick, Amanda Ann Klein, Shanti Kumar, Suzanne Leonard, Jessa Lingel, Madhavi Mallapragada, Daniel

Marcus, Todd McGowan, Jason Mittell, Ted Nannicelli, Diane Negra, Matthew Thomas Payne, Miriam Posner,

Jacob Smith

Michael Kackman is Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the

University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA, where he teaches courses in the history and criticism of U.S. television,

Cold War cultural history, nationhood and political culture, and history and memory practices in everyday life.

He is the author of Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2005),

and co-editor of Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence (Routledge, 2010).

Mary Celeste Kearney is Director of Gender Studies and Associate Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre

at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA. She is author of Girls Make Media (Routledge, 2006) and Gender

and Rock (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is editor of The Gender and Media Reader (Routledge, 2011) and

Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls’ Media Culture (Peter Lang, 2011), as well as co-editor (with Morgan

Blue) of Mediated Girlhoods’ second volume (Peter Lang, 2018). She is academic editor of the book series

Routledge Research in Gender, Sexuality, and Media, and serves on the boards of several academic journals.

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THE CRAFT

OF CRITICISM

C R I T I C A L M E D I A

STUDIES IN PRACTICE

EDITED BY

MICHAEL KACKMAN AND MARY CELESTE KEARNEY

First published 2018

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

 2018 Taylor & Francis

The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial

material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been

asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs

and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,

now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,

or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks

or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and

explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-415-71629-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-71630-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-87997-0 (ebk)

Typeset in Amasis

by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

List of Figures viii

List of Tables x

Acknowledgments xi

Foreword by Michele Hilmes xii

Introduction, or How to Cook an Artichoke 1

Mary Celeste Kearney

PART I

PRIMARY METHODS 9

1. Ideology 11

Ron Becker

2. Discourse 23

Rosalind Gill

3. Narrative 35

Jason Mittell

4. Non-Fiction Media 47

Daniel Marcus

5. Visual Style 59

Jeremy G. Butler

6. Sound 72

Jacob Smith

7. Acting and Performance 84

Cynthia Baron

8. Representation 97

Mary Beltrán

vi Contents

9. Authorship and Auteurism 109

Cynthia Chris

10. Political Economy 122

Patrick Burkart

11. Media Policy 134

Bill Kirkpatrick

12. Psychoanalytic Criticism 146

Todd McGowan

13. Cognitivism 157

Ted Nannicelli

14. Ethnography 169

Jessa Lingel and Mary L. Gray

PART II

SYNTHETIC/MULTIPERSPECTIVAL APPROACHES 181

15. Audiences 183

Matt Hills

16. Genre 195

Amanda Ann Klein

17. Intertexts and Paratexts 207

Jonathan Gray

18. Stardom and Celebrity 219

Suzanne Leonard and Diane Negra

19. Cultural Geography 231

Victoria E. Johnson

20. National/Transnational/Global 242

Shanti Kumar

21. History and Historiography 254

Michael Kackman

22. Production 268

Timothy Havens

PART III

EMERGENT AND CHALLENGING OBJECTS 279

23. Popular Music 281

Norma Coates

24. New Media 293

Madhavi Mallapragada

Contents vii

25. Games and Gaming 305

Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina B. Huntemann

26. Software 318

Eric Freedman

27. Digital Humanities 331

Miriam Posner

Contributors’ Biographies 347

Index 352

FIGURES

1.1 Chart of ideological assumptions 16

1.2 Chart of an ideological formation 17

3.1 Veronica Mars 44

3.2 Veronica Mars 44

5.1 Boardwalk Empire 61

5.2 Moonrise Kingdom 62

5.3 Mad Men 63

5.4 The Office 64

5.5 Out of the Past 65

5.6 The Best Years of Our Lives 67

7.1 The Killer 93

7.2 The Killer 93

8.1 Get Out 99

8.2 The Big Bang Theory 101

8.3 Out of Sight 105

9.1 Inextinguishable Fire 114

9.2 What Farocki Taught 114

9.3 “Whale” from Green Porno 117

13.1 Curb Your Enthusiasm 165

13.2 Arrested Development 166

16.1 Oklahoma! 200

16.2 The Philadelphia Inquirer 203

17.1 Six Degrees 215

17.2 Six Degrees 216

21.1 Hopalong Cassidy 262

21.2 Hopalong Cassidy 263

25.1 Spec Ops 310

25.2 Spec Ops 313

25.3 Spec Ops 314

26.1 Apple Developer 320

26.2 NASA’s Eyes on the Earth 327

List of Figures ix

27.1 Network diagram of Micheaux films 338

27.2 Network diagram of Micheaux films based on actor participation 340

27.3 Network diagram of actors in Micheaux films 341

27.4 Network diagram of Evelyn Preer and A.B. De Comathiere in Micheaux films 342

27.5 Network diagram of actors appearing in at least four Micheaux films 342

27.6 Network diagram of two sets of actors appearing in Micheaux films 343

TABLES

27.1 Actors and films, prepared for a network diagram 338

27.2 A two-mode network table 338

27.3 A truncated one-mode network table for actors 339

27.4 A truncated one-mode network table for films 339

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, our sincere thanks to each of our contributors. It is absolutely no exaggeration to say that

you would not be holding this book in your hands if not for their deep commitment to this collection and their

diligent work in crafting chapters that will serve as accessible and efficient tools for many current and future

scholars of media culture.

We are beyond grateful also to Dr. Morgan Blue for her expert editorial assistance. She not only lent her

keen eye to every missing em dash and serial comma, she also paid close attention to each chapter’s critical

arguments, providing us and our contributors with insightful guidance for improvement. Thank you, Morgan,

a gazillion times over.

Thanks also to the many students we have taught—and learned from—over the years in our critical

media studies courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Southern California, DePaul

University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Notre Dame. You’ve helped us to become

better teachers of the craft of media criticism and to ask better questions in our own research.

We would not be the teachers and critics we are today without the expert guidance we received in gradu￾ate school by some of the finest critical media scholars. Julie D’Acci, John Fiske, Michele Hilmes, David James,

Caren Kaplan, Marsha Kinder, and Lynn Spigel welcomed us into the conversation, modeled rigorous critique,

and showed us the value of a well-placed “So what?” or “Say more about that!” Thank you all.

We extend our gratitude as well to Erica Wetter, our Routledge editor, whose enthusiasm, support, and

patience during our work on this project were generously offered, especially when we needed them most. We

cannot think of a better shepherd for this book and for us as its editors.

Last but not least, we gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Notre Dame. Our colleagues

in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre have created a climate of wit, rigor, and deep collegial￾ity, and we’re fortunate to teach and learn among you. Notre Dame’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal

Arts not only lent financial support during the editing process, but also hosted a conference that brought our

contributors together to develop their chapters in an intimate and productive workshop environment. This col￾lection would not be the same without their generous support.

FOREWORD

Michele Hilmes

Critical media studies is a big tent. This fine new collection of essays, populated by some of the best-known

names in contemporary media studies, is a work focused not on setting boundaries but on laying out the con￾tours of a very lively and inclusive field. And how rapidly it has grown!

In the early 1980s, a field that we might recognize as “media studies” began to emerge. Out of a tangle of

communications, film, literature, journalism, cultural history, technology studies, sociology, political science,

and a number of other disciplines, a central core of concerns began to cohere, pulling threads that eventually

knit together into a complex but mutually invigorating structure of theories, methods, programs, and publica￾tions. The earliest direct reference I’ve been able to find to “media studies” in the context of scholarly publication

is Christine Gledhill’s compilation of papers from a 1979 conference entitled “Film and Media Studies in Higher

Education” organized by the British Film Institute and London University School of Communication. As of late

2017, if we are to believe a website for students seeking majors called BachelorsPortal.com, there are currently

631 undergraduate degree programs in Media Studies and Mass Media in the United States. Without a doubt,

it is film and television that have provoked the greatest growth in media studies over the last fifty years, with

digital media gradually becoming inextricably intermixed, and with sound studies—always a vital part of media

but long overlooked by scholars and critics—developing rapidly as the digital audio age emerges.

But what does it mean to add “critical” to the term? First of all, critical media studies centers on the critical

analysis of texts—not texts in isolation, but as they are produced by industries and institutions, and received

by audiences and societies. Media studies pioneered what we now call an “integrated approach” to critical

study very early on, in the 1940s, linked to critical analysis of the “culture industries” made by Theodor Adorno

and Max Horkheimer. More than a half century later, it is still the way in which media texts and objects are

constructed and perceived—what methods are used to create meaning, how identities are represented and

reinforced, what discourses are circulated, how texts intersect with legal and economic institutions, how audi￾ences interpret and interact with texts, and how their lives are shaped by media—that remains the ongoing

project at the heart of critical media studies.

Second, critical media studies focuses on power. It is no coincidence that the emergence of media stud￾ies as a field coincides with the growth of cultural theory in the 1980s. Drawing on the critical analysis of

working-class British scholars like Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart that began to appear in the 1950s,

enhanced by the cultural theory of Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at

the University of Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as by European post-structuralist theory, a new

field began to emerge. Supported by the rise of feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer studies, the

role of media in both supporting and subverting existing structures of power and authority became the domi￾nant focus of critical media scholarship and media studies education. Issues of ideology, representation, and

Foreword xiii

patterns of discourse, all fundamentally concerned with the way that power plays out in the production and

reception of media texts, continue to inform the field and give it continuing relevance as new media technolo￾gies are introduced and work to affect society in the deep ways that their predecessors have.

Finally, critical media studies inherently resists disciplinarity. Rather than seek to draw lines around what

counts as appropriate objects or approaches, the emphasis is on inclusion. The present volume is an admirable

expression of that openness, reflecting theories and methods drawn from across a multitude of scholarly disci￾plines, and offering analyses that cut across existing categories and objects to reach out to new ones. It marks

how far the field has come and gives indications of the many directions it may take in the future.

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