The Craft of Media Criticism provides students and scholars a definitive overview of the main methodologies that make up critical media studies. Written by leading scholars in media studies, chapters address methods including various forms of textual analysis, as well as reception studies, production studies, and contextual, multi-method approaches. Film and television are at the heart of these methodologies, although attention is also paid to issues of medium specificity and convergence. Each chapter includes an intellectual history of the particular method in question, a discussion of why and how it emerged around a particular medium or media, relevant examples of influential work in the area, and an in-depth review of a case study drawn from the author's own work. Together, the chapters in this comprehensive text provide would-be media critics with a tool box of must-know critical media studies methodologies.

Michael Kackman is Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches courses in the history and criticism of U.S. television, Cold War cultural history, nationhood and political culture, and history and memory practices in everyday life. He is the author of Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and co-editor of Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence (Routledge, 2010).

Mary Celeste Kearney is Director of Gender Studies and Associate Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. She is author of Girls Make Media (Routledge, 2006) and Gender and Rock (Oxford, 2017). She is editor of The Gender and Media Reader (Routledge, 2011) and Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls' Media Culture (Peter Lang, 2011), as well as co-editor (with Morgan Blue) of Mediated Girlhoods' second volume (Peter Lang, 2018). She is academic editor of the book series Routledge Research in Gender, Sexuality, and Media, and serves on the boards of several academic journals.

Foreword - Michele Hilmes

Introduction, or How to Cook an Artichoke -Mary Celeste Kearney

PART I PRIMARY METHODS

1 Ideology - Ron Becker

2 Discourse - Rosalind Gill

3 Narrative - Jason Mittell

4 Non-Fiction Media - Daniel Marcus

5 Visual Style - Jeremy Butler

6 Sound - Jacob Smith

7 Acting and Performance - Cynthia Baron

8 Representation - Mary Beltrán

9 Authorship and Auteurism - Cynthia Chris

10 Political Economy - Patrick Burkart

11 Media Policy - Bill Kirkpatrick

12 Psychoanalytic Criticism - Todd McGowan

13 Cognitivism - Ted Nannicelli

14 Ethnography - Jessa Lingel & Mary Gray

PART II Synthetic/Multiperspectival Approaches

15 Audiences - Matt Hills

16 Genre - Amanda Ann Klein

17 Intertexts and Paratexts - Jonathan Gray

18 Stardom and Celebrity - Suzanne Leonard & Diane Negra

19 Cultural Geography - Victoria E. Johnson

20 National/Transnational/Global - Shanti Kumar

21 History and Historiography - Michael Kackman

22 Production - Timothy Havens

PART III Emergent and Challenging Objects

23 Popular Music - Norma Coates

24 New Media - Madhavi Mallapragada

25 Games and Gaming - Matthew Thomas Payne & Nina B. Huntemann

26 Software - Eric Freedman

27 Digital Humanities - Miriam Posner

Contributors' Biographies