Communication 797T - ST-Analyzing Media Textuality

The premise of this course is that textual analysis benefits from an understanding of textuality. Close analysis of texts is a foundational method within Communication Departments and an especially central approach to both film and media studies, producing exemplary case studies as well as the basis for more expansive inquiries. This course will offer an exploration of the intellectual foundations of textual studies and a careful consideration of theories of textuality. It will seek to revisit and reconsider the media text amid twenty-first century practices of seriality and transmedia franchise building, global interconnectivity, digital production and distribution, and intersubjective consumption, in which the boundaries of textuality are forever changing and porous. It will consider the text as discourse, the text as social practice, the text as data, the text as cognition, and the text as site of evolving technogenesis. Participants in the course will develop skills in the analysis and interpretation of media texts through approaches to form, structure, narrative, and genre; the ability to identify and understand medium specificity; experience with both "close reading" and "distant reading" practices; and a recognition of and familiarity with the critical frameworks from which these are all explicitly or implicitly drawn.

Open to Doctoral & Masters students only.