Media Research and Psychoanalysis: A Suggestion

This short commentary outlines psychoanalysis as a theory and method and its potential value to media research. Following Dahlgren (2013), it is suggested that psychoanalysis may enrich the field because it may offer a complex theory of the human subject, as well as methodological means of doing justice to the richness, ambivalence and contradictions of human experience. The psychoanalytic technique of free association and how it has been adapted in social research (Hollway and Jefferson 2000) is suggested as a means to open up subjective modes of expression and thinking – in researchers and research participants alike – that lie beyond rationality and conscious agency

Reader and author gender and genre in Goodreads

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by SAGE Publishing in Journal of Librarianship & Information Science on 01/05/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000617709061 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.There are known gender differences in book preferences in terms of both genre and author gender but their extent and causes are not well understood. It is unclear whether reader preferences for author genders occur within any or all genres and whether readers evaluate books differently based on author genders within specific genres. This article exploits a major source of informal book reviews, the Goodreads.com website, to assess the influence of reader and author genders on book evaluations within genres. It uses a quantitative analysis of 201,560 books and their reviews, focusing on the top 50 user-specified genres. The results show strong gender differences in the ratings given by reviewers to books within genres, such as female reviewers rating contemporary romance more highly, with males preferring short stories. For most common book genres, reviewers give higher ratings to books authored by their own gender, confirming that gender bias is not confined to the literary elite. The main exception is the comic book, for which male reviewers prefer female authors, despite their scarcity. A word frequency analysis suggested that authors wrote, and reviewers valued, gendered aspects of books within a genre. For example, relationships and romance were disproportionately mentioned by women in mystery and fantasy novels. These results show that, perhaps for the first time, it is possible to get large scale evidence about the reception of books by typical readers, if they post reviews online

The Impossibility of Teaching Cultural Studies

"When I said that part of what the Centre was about was trying to produce organic intellectual work, I of course had the question of pedagogy essentially in mind." -- Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies" Those of us in the academy who call cultural studies "home" often claim that one of the main things we do is to teach cultural studies to other people. And, the vast majority of the time, that claim is simply wrong. As its title suggests, this essay is a polemic on the impossibility of teaching cultural studies. While recognizing that critical pedagogy is one of cultural studies' most important tasks, I argue that cultural studies itself is not something that people can be taught to do. Among other things, this essay examines: * the structural and institutional barriers that prevent us from teaching undergraduates what cultural studies is in any meaningful way, * the logistical and definitional problems that undercut our ability to teach graduate students how to do cultural studies themselves, and * the pedagogical and political issues that stand in the way of teaching anyone to become cultural studies practitioners. As a project that changes its shape dramatically across both space and time, cultural studies resists our efforts to squeeze it into traditional syllabi or lesson plans. As both an intellectual and a political project, cultural studies defies even the sharpest teacher's ability to train other people in its practice

Popular Book Clubs and the Marketing of African American Best-Sellers

International audienceTwice in American cultural history, have book clubs significantly contributed to the making of African American (unlikely) best-sellers and the unexpected commercial success of now famous and acclaimed authors. This chapter investigates the circumstances in which these works were selected and documents the consequences on reception and sales. Both examples offer insight in the making of African American best-sellers and classics and challenge the notion that racially committed texts and literary masterpieces (such as Black Boy and Winfrey’s later selection of Beloved by Morrison) belong to the margin of a conservative book market and of mainstream American culture