Comparative History of Communications and Culture

Course Information

Where to find the readings: = Library. = Packet = World Wide Web (hyperlink).
= Micawber

November 6. Introduction
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT, 1991), 14-73, 159-175.
Michael Schudson, "Political Communication," in Erik Barnouw et al., International Encyclopedia of Communications (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 304-313.
James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 13-36.

November 13. Literacy and reading
Jack Goody and Ian P. Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy," Comparative Studies in History and Society 5 (1963), 304-45.
Roger Chartier, "The Practical Impact of Writing," in Roger Chartier ed., A History of Private Life, v. 3: Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 111-159.
Carl F. Kaestle, "Studying the History of Literacy" and "The History of Readers," in Carl F. Kaestle et al., Literacy in the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 3-72.
Dana Nelson Salvino, "The Word in Black and White: Ideologies of Race and Literacy in Antebellem America," in Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America: Literature and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 140-156.

November 13. Print, politics, and culture
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3-91.
Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 167-208 ("Reading, Writing and Publishing").
Carla Hesse, “Economic Upheavals in Publishing,” in Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche, eds., Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775-1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) 69-97.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed (London: Verso, 1991), 67-82.

November 27. Comparative development of journalism
Jeremy Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 1-10, 34-60, 68-98.
Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 3-120.
Jean K. Chalaby, “Journalism as an Anglo-American Invention: A Comparison of the Development of French and Anglo-American Journalism, 1830s-1920s,” European Journal of Communications (1996), 11: 303-326.
Alexander Stille, "The Italian Press," Correspondence (Spring/Summer 2000), 18-19.

December 4. Comparative sociology of postal and telecommunications networks
Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Harvard University Press, 1995), Chs 1-2.
Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (University of California Press, 1992), 33-85, 255-272.
S. Frederick Starr, "New Communications Technologies and Civil Society," in Loren Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 19-50.
Raymond M. Duch, Privatizing the Economy: Telecommunications Policy in Comparative Perspective (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), Chs. 3-4, 7.

December 11. Comparative Politics of the Electronic Media
Eli Noam, Television in Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), Chs. 1-3.
Gladys D. Ganley, "Power to the People via Personal Electronic Media," Washington Quarterly (Spring 1991), pp. 5-14.
Geoffrey Nunnberg, "Will the Internet Always Speak English?" The American Prospect (March 27-April 10, 2000)
Erran Carmel, "American Hegemony in Packaged Software Trade and the 'Culture of Software,'" The Information Society 13: 1 (January-March, 1997), 125-142.