Media Studies Qualifying Exam List
(This list is meant to be a point of reference for students doing a qualifying exam in
Media Studies. The books on the list are not required but should be taken as a
starting point for developing your own list in consultation with your examining
faculty.)
Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. New York: Routledge,
1985.
Barnouw, Erik. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In
Illuminations. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin, 1990.
Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York:
Fawcett, 1994.
Bolter, Jay David, and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 2000.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1984.
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988.
de Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987.
Dow, Bonnie J. Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women's Movement Since
1970. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Fiske, John. Television Culture. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Gitlin, Todd. Inside Prime Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 1962.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural
Studies, 1972-79, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andre Lowe, and Paul
Willis. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge, 1981.
Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the
Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1976.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU
Press, 2006.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture
and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. (1964) Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press, 1994.
Mittell, Jason. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York:
Routledge, 2004.
Morley, David. Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge,
2002.
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 1982.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New
York: Penguin, 1985.
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.
Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1997.
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is
Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements. London: Marion Boyars, 1978.