Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern

Media Culture develops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television, music and other artifacts to discern their nature and effects, argueing that media culture is the dominant form of culture which socializes us and provides materials for identity, 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 analyses 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 multi-dimensional approach to cultural studies that broadens the field and opens it to a variety of disiplines. He also provides approaches to the vexed question of the effects of culture and provides perspectives for cultural studies.