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This site features two main forms of the textual analysis of popular
culture artifacts: interpretive and content analysis.
Interpretive textual analyses include: semiotics, rhetorical
analysis, ideological analysis, and psychoanalytic approaches, among
many others. These types of analysis seek to get beneath the surface
(denotative) meanings and examine more implicit (connotative) social
meanings. These textual analysis approaches often view culture as
a narrative or story-telling process in which particular "texts" or
“cultural artifacts” (i.e., a pop song or a TV program)
consciously or unconsciously link themselves to larger stories at
play in the society. A key here is how texts create subject
positions (identities) for those who use them.
Content analysis is a more quantitative approach that broadly
surveys things like how many instances of violence occur on a typical
evening of prime time TV viewing, or how many Asian American women
appear in a day’s worth of TV commercials. This information,
especially when linked to more qualitative kinds of analysis, can
be very valuable in moving beyond the analyst’s always somewhat
subjective observations.
INTERPRETIVE TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
- Textual
Analysis. Daniel Chandler’s excellent mass media site
contains very useful introductions to a variety of types of interpretive
textual analysis. It also includes a nice primer on how to analyze
advertisements that can be a good introduction to actually doing
textual analysis. Unfortunately, his site does not allow direct
links, so to get to these pieces you must go to his general site
and follow the file-folder markers to the relevant material.
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CONTENT ANALYSIS
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
[Few topics
on popular culture can be adequately researched on the web alone.
These reading suggestions are designed as beginning points for further
offline study.]
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Allen, Robert C. Speaking of Soap Operas. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1985. |
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Excellent study of the production and consumption of daytime
soap operas. |
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Allen, Robert C., ed. Channels of Discourse Reassembled:
Television and Contemporary Criticism.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. |
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Introduces a variety of critical approaches to popular culture
(semiotics, genre analysis, ideological analysis, etc.) through
essays focusing on American television. |
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Barthes, Roland. The Fashion System. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983. |
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Classic, complicated study of how the world of high fashion
industry uses “fabric texts” and words to create an
abstract world of fashionableness that must at once always change
and always stay the same. |
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Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary
America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. |
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The best book yet written on the role of pop “celebrities”
in US culture, using production, textual and gender analysis.
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Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television,
Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen, 1987. |
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Sophisticated analysis of the relations among MTV videos, consumer
culture, and the psychodynamics of identity formation in youth.
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Kellner, Douglas. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity
and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern. London; New York: Routledge, 1995. |
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Broad study that offers both a fully developed theoretical model
and case studies ranging from Rambo to Madonna to Gulf War news
coverage. |
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Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy
and Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991. |
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One of the most often cited “classics” in American Studies
literature, this analysis combines production analysis, textual
analysis and ethnographic audience analysis of the “romance
novel” genre. |
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Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and
Meaning in Advertising. London: Boyars, 1978. |
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The classic text on how advertisements address and create their
audiences. |
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