History of Communication Research

Communication 294Robert Horwitz
rhorwitz@ucsd.edu
x42843

Fall 2001This seminar is designed to introduce beginning graduate students to the intellectual history of communication research. This is a complex task in a department that seeks not to recapitulate mainstream American communication research but to extend it and criticize it. This department draws intellectual sustenance from some of the figures and traditions within conventional communication research but from others outside it, as well. The seminar will try to provide a history of the “field” of communication as it is conventionally understood while weaving into it the alternative tradition that this department is trying to invent.

These aims make reading assignments somewhat complicated. Some of the readings explore arguments and theories in themselves; other readings serve as a history of ideas; still others serve as historical background and context. Part of the task is to understand how to read each week’s assignments, and to see how the readings enter into intellectual conversation. We will tend to use many readings from many sources rather than read books in their entirety. This strategy has its pros and cons, of course. We cover a lot of territory, but we do less close exigesis than I would like. The strategy also makes ordering books a bit problematic. I have ordered several books (available for purchase at Groundwork Books) in the expectation you might want to build your libraries. Finally, I do not necessarily expect that you read the books listed under “recommended.” Think of this course and syllabus as a way to enter the discipline; the required and recommended readings are part of the broad intellectual field of communication. If you don’t examine some books now, you may wish to visit them later, as you move through your graduate education.

Required texts
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso, revised edition, 1991).
Roland Barthes, Image – Music – Text (Hill & Wang, 1977).
John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Swallow Press, 1954).
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 1961).
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (Norton, 1949).
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Free Press, 1922/1965).
Chandra Mukerji & Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture (California, 1991).
Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978).
Herbert Schiller, Mass Communications and American Empire (Westview, 2nd ed. 1992).
Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, (Norton, 1978).General recommended texts
Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
Edward Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory (Kentucky, 1995).
Everett M. Rogers, A History of Communication Study: A Biographical Approach (Free Press, 1994).

CALENDAR

Week 1. The mass and the public: The “problem” of communication and democracy
C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” in The Sociological Imagination (Oxford, 1959), pp. 195-226.
Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (Basic Books, 1978), pp. 122-144.
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Free Press, 1922), pp. 3-32, 398-410.
John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Swallow, 1954), chapters 4-6.
Jurgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,” in Mukerji & Schudson, eds.,
Rethinking Popular Culture, pp. 398-404.
Recommended
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (MIT Press, 1989).
Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (MIT, 1992).
Slavko Splichal, Public Opinion: Developments and Controversies in the Twentieth Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
Robert Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (Sage, 1975).
Edward Bernays, Propaganda (Norton, 1928).
Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (Garland Publishing, 1927/1972).
Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth Century France (Yale, 1981).
Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Cornell, 1991).
Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (Norton, 1995).
John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State (Verso, 1988).

Week 2. Macro-theoretical roots of the study of communication: The Enlightenment and its legacy; modernity and its discontents
Frank Manuel, “Introduction,” in Manuel, ed., The Enlightenment (Prentice Hall, 1965), pp. 1-16. Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment” in Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Viking Press, 1980), pp. 1-24.
Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (Free Press), pp. xlii-liii, 1-13, 27-46.
Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto” in Tucker, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader.
Marshall Berman, "Unchained Melody," The Nation (May 11, 1998), pp. 11-16.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5) (Roxbury, 1998), pp. 13- 31, 180-183.
Georg Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Donald Levine, ed., Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago, 1971), pp. 324-339.
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (Norton, 1949).
Recommended
John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago, 1999).
Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton, 1961).
Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community (Oxford, 1953).
Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (Basic Books, 1980).

Week 3. Individual, society, and culture
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Free Press, 1915/1965), pp. 13-33, 235-265.
Edward Sapir, “Language,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1934).
George Herbert Mead, “Self,” in Mead, On Social Psychology, ed. Alselm Strauss (Chicago, 1934), pp. 199-209, 242-246.
George Stocking, Jr., “Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective,” in George Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution (Free Press, 1968), pp. 195-233.
A.R. Luria, Cognitive Development (Harvard, 1976), pp. 3-19, 135-143.
A.R. Luria, “Towards the Problem of the Historical Nature of Psychological Processes,”
International Journal of Psychology, 6/4 (1971), pp. 259-272.
Marshall Sahlins, “La Pensee Bourgeoise: Western Society as Culture,” in Mukerji & Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture, pp. 278-290.
Recommended
Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Cornell, 1993).
Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences 1870-1930 (Johns Hopkins, 1994).
Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, ed. Michael Cole (Harvard, 1978).
Michael Cole, Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline (Harvard, 1996).
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago, 1972).

Week 4. Macrohistorical tradition -- strong effects?
Paul Lazarsfeld, “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Research,” Studies in
Philosophy and Social Science IX (1941).
Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (Free Press, 1958), pp. 19-75.
Wilbur Schramm, Mass Media and National Development (Stanford, 1964), pp. 20-57.
Herbert Schiller, Mass Communications and the American Empire, 2d ed. (Westview, 1992), pp. 45-61, 95-169.
Frantz Fanon, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 1961/1968), pp. 148-205.
Recommended
Journal of Communication special issues on administrative vs. critical research.
Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Renewal (Sage, 1996).
Hanno Hardt, Critical Communication Studies: Communication, History, and Theory in America
(Routledge, 1992).

Week 5. Microsociological tradition -- weak effects?
Hadley Cantril, “The Invasion From Mars,” in Wilbur Schramm and Donald Roberts, eds., The Process and Effects of Mass Communication (Illinois, 1971), pp. 579-595.
Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” Public Opinion Qarterly 12 (1948), pp. 280-315.
Herta Herzog, “Motivations and Gratifications of Daily Serial Listeners,” in Schramm, ed. The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, pp. 50-55.
Robert K. Merton, Mass Persuasion: The Social Psychology of a War Bond Drive (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1946), pp. 1-19, 175-189.
Paul Lazarsfeld & Elihu Katz, Personal Influence (Free Press, 1955), pp. 15-42, 116-133, 137-143,
175-186, 309-334.
Paul Lazarsfeld & Robert Merton, “Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action,” in Lyman Bryson, ed., The Communication of Ideas (Cooper Square, 1964), pp. 95-118.
Recommended
Edward Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory, pp. 117-158.
Steven Chaffee & John Hochheimer, “The Beginning of Political Communication Research in the United States: Origins of the 'Limited Effects' Model,” in Everett Rogers and Francis Balle,
eds., The Media Revolution in America and Western Europe (Ablex, 1982), pp. 263-283.
Paul Lazarsfeld, “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir,” in Donald Fleming
& Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960 (Harvard, 1969), pp. 270-337.

Week 6. Strong effects II
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 42-107.
Michael Cole & Sylvia Scribner, The Psychology of Literacy (Harvard, 1981), pp. 234-260.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (McGraw-Hill, 1965), pp. 19-35.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso, revised edition, 1991), pp. 1-140.
Recommended
Jack Goody, The Domestication of Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977).
Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone, Essential McLuhan (Basic Books, 1996).
David Olson, The World on Paper (Cambridge, 1994).
Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (Basic Books, 1973).
James Carey, “Technology and Iedology: The Case of the Telegraph,” in Carey, Communication
As Culture (Routledge, 1989), pp. 201-230.

Week 7. Unmaking a science: critics of the traditional microsociological paradigm
Max Horkheimer & Theodore Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Seabury, 1969), pp. 120-167.
Theodore Adorno, “Stars Down to Earth,” Telos 19 (Spring, 1974), pp. 13-90.
Todd Gitlin, “Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm,” Theory and Society 6 (1978), pp. 205- 253.
Christopher Simpson, “US Mass Communication Research, Counterinsurgency, and Scientific 'Reality',” in William Solomon & Robert McChesney, eds., Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in US Communication History (Minnesota, 1993), pp. 313-348.
Recommended
Willard Rowland, Jr., The Politics of TV Violence Research (Sage, 1983).
Theordor Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” in Donald Fleming & Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960 (Harvard, 1969), pp. 338-370.
Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960 (Oxford, 1994).

Week 8. How do we mean? The linguistic/interpretive turn and semiotics
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minnesota, 1983), pp. 91-150.
Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Gerth & Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in
Sociology (Oxford, 1946), pp. 129-156.
Roland Barthes, Image – Music – Text (Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 8-68, 89-124.
Recommended
Max Weber, “’Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in Weber, The Methodology of
the Social Sciences, trans. Shils & Finch (Free Press, 1949), pp. 50-112.
Paul Rabinow & William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (UC Press, 1979).

Week 9. The concept of culture and its revisions
James Carey, “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” in Carey, Communication As Culture
(Routledge, 1989), pp. 13-36.
Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in Mukerji & Schudson, eds.,
Rethinking Popular Culture, pp. 239-277.
Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Mukerji & Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture, pp. 407-423.
Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Stuart Hall, ed., Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies (Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 128-138.
Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees,” in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1996), pp. 25-46.
John Fiske, “Television: Polysemy and Popularity,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (1986), pp. 391-408.
Recommended
Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Reading, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Columbia, 1977).
Dan Schiller, Theorizing Communication: A History (Oxford, 1996).

Week 10. Globalization, post-coloniality and post-modernity
Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978).
Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” (second lecture) in Nicholas Dirks, et al, eds. Culture/Power/History (Michigan, 1994), pp. 210-221.
David Morley, “Postmodernism: The Rough Guide,” in James Curran, David Morley, Valerie
Walkerdine, Cultural Studies and Communications (Arnold, 1996), pp. 50-65.
John Durham Peters, “Conclusion,” from Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago, 1999), pp. 263-273.
Recommended
Bernard Lewis, “The Revolt of Islam,” The New Yorker, November 19, 2001, pp. 50-63.
David Harvey, The Condition of Posmodernity (Blackwell, 1980).
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke, 1991).
Ulf Hannerz, “The World in Creolisation,” Africa 57 (1987), pp. 547-559.
Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago, 1990).
James Curran & Myung-Jin Park, eds., De-Westernizing Media Studies (Routledge, 2000).
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1989).