Course Description

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MIT 4039F/G   Special Topics in MIT: Mass Culture Critique, Revisited

Course Description
Attacks on "fake news" and distrust of "the Media" aren't new.  This seminar historicizes such criticisms by revisiting the notorious midcentury critique of mass culture, its ancestors and descendants. While Adorno, Greenberg, MacDonald and others made it central to the new discipline of communication/media studies in the 1950s and 60s, the critique drew on much older polemics against "yellow journalism," "canned music," and "movie-made children." It then influenced commonsense views of television as "a vast wasteland" and rock music's countercultural investments in authenticity. The seminar thus traces out a genealogy of mass media critique from the 1890s into the 1960s and beyond.

This course is no longer active. Please contact FIMS Undergraduate Student Services, fims@uwo.ca, for more information.



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