Media Culture
       Media Culture develops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television,
       music, and other artifacts to discern their nature and effects. The book argues that
       media culture is now the dominant form of culture which socializes us and provides
       materials for identity in terms of both social reproduction and change. Through
       studies of Reagan and Rambo, horror films and youth films, rap music and African-
       American culture, Madonna, fashion, television news and entertainment, MTV,
       Beavis and Butt-Head, the Gulf War as cultural text, cyberpunk fiction and
       postmodern theory, Kellner provides a series of lively studies that both illuminate
       contemporary culture and provide methods of analysis and critique.
         Many people today talk about cultural studies, but Kellner actually does it,
       carrying through a unique mixture of theoretical analysis and concrete discussions
       of some of the most popular and influential forms of contemporary media culture.
       Criticizing social context, political struggle, and the system of cultural production,
       Kellner develops a multidimensional approach to cultural studies that broadens
       the field and opens it to a variety of disciplines. He also provides new approaches
       to the vexed question of the effects of culture and offers new perspectives for
       cultural studies.
         Anyone interested in the nature and effects of contemporary society and culture
       should read this book. Kellner argues that we are in a state of transition between
       the modern era and a new postmodern era and that media culture offers a privileged
       field of study and one that is vital if we are to grasp the full import of the changes
       currently shaking us.
       Douglas Kellner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin
       and author (with Michael Ryan) of Camera Politica: The politics and ideology of
       Hollywood films and (with Steven Best) of Postmodern Theory: Critical
       Interrogations. Kellner has also published Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of
       Marxism; Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity; Jean Baudrillard: From
       Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond; Television and the Crisis of Democracy;
       The Persian Gulf TV War. He has edited Jameson/Marxism/Critique and Baudrillard:
       A Critical Reader and co-edited (with Stephen Bronner) Critical Theory and
       Society: A Reader.
       Media Culture
       Cultural studies, identity and politics
       between the modern and the
       postmodern
       Douglas Kellner
        
        
        
        
        
       London and New York