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Reading List: What it is, what’s on it

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If you’re coming across this blog in your search for reading lists to help you make your own, chances are you won’t need this explanation of what they are, so feel free to skip right down to the meat of this post. For friends and family members who read this without knowing the ins and outs of getting a PhD in the humanities/English/film/cultural studies, here’s a quick breakdown of what a reading list is and why it is important:

A reading list is, in large part, what it sounds like. You make a list of a whole bunch of books, movies, and tv shows that should combine to give you a solid grounding in the area of focus you’ve decided on (more on that in a different post). This means you’re likely picking the so-called canonical works, the big important things that people have heard of. But you’re also trying to balance what has been considered “important” by previous scholars with what you find important for your future in addition to trying to fill in the gaps of what has largely been left out of your field in the past. For much of the humanities, this means you’re giving some extra attention to aspects of race, gender, and sexuality that have been pushed to the side by the scholars who have come before you. After all, blindly following the mistakes of the past is, you know, bad. To that end, you also need to think about time. I leaned towards newer scholarship when compiling my reading list because my area of interest is something that is still ongoing and it is important to read what people are saying about it right now. That might not be as important to other scholars, so you have to think about your project and what it is important to know.

via GIPHY

Of course, even though it is called a reading list, that doesn’t mean that there’s only books on it. In English PhD programs or other fields where primary sources (works that you’re studying (fiction, films, tv shows), rather than the secondary sources which are usually books about those primary sources, AKA dry academic texts) include filmed media, you’ll want to think about if it is important to include some film or television on your reading list. In my case, where my primary and secondary fields of study are both concentrated on film and television, I don’t have any textual fiction on my “reading” list, it is instead full of fiction (and one documentary!) films and shows. In standard English areas of study where you’d read primarily fiction texts for your primary sources, you’d also have a much higher proportion of those kinds of texts than I do. In the pop culture subfields like mine, there’s still apparently some skepticism about whether we’re as rigorous as the other fields and so we must prove our mettle by reading much more secondary sources than other fields need to. It’s bullshit, basically, but that’s why my reading list is about 50/50 primary and secondary texts.

My primary field is about as narrow as you’re allowed to get, at least here at OSU, so I was able to curate the kinds of movies that ended up on my list a bit more than normal. Often, absurdly, one is required to declare all of film or television studies as their primary field, and are therefore obliged to cram the entire history of filmed media onto a list that, at most, can be about 40 texts long. That’s silly. Looking over others’ example lists in this field shows that there’s a heavy preference towards the older end of film history, with things petering out pretty strongly by the time you get to the 90s and 2000s. Since my area of interest (legacyquels) don’t really appear as such until ~2008, this kind of list would be… detrimental. As such, my list only goes from 1970 to the present and leans towards the large blockbuster productions that the legacyquels have been part of. You’ll notice a fun trick I did where I put the first film of a series that had a legacyquel in my primary field reading list and then the legacyquel in my more specialized secondary field list. 1 for the price of 2! The problem is that there aren’t many films in my area of study that aren’t created by straight cis white guys, so I had to get my share of diverse creators (probably not enough, in fact) around the edges of my reading list. More on that in my next post about my major and minor fields.

I think that’s enough rambling. I’ll also use this post as an index and link every post I do for an individual entry on this list to the corresponding text here. So if you’re interested in what I have to say about one of these texts, just click on the link to it. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to comment on this post and I’ll answer when I can. You can also find me on twitter @beneclasedu, and you can ask me there if you find this list years after the fact and I no longer have access to the OSU login that I’m using to host this site. Without further ado, here’s the list(s):

Major Field: Post-70 Film and Television

Primary Sources (Film)

  1. John Cassavetes, A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
  2. Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975)
  3. Steven Spielberg, Jaws (1975)
  4. John G. Avildsen, Rocky (1976)
  5. Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver (1976)
  6. George Lucas, Star Wars (1977)
  7. John Carpenter, Halloween (1978)
  8. Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now (1979)
  9. George Miller, Mad Max (1979)
  10. Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
  11. Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (1982)
  12. David Cronenberg, Videodrome (1983)
  13. James Cameron, The Terminator (1984)
  14. Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (1989)
  15. Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991)
  16. Jonathan Demme, The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
  17. John Singleton, Boyz n the Hood (1991)
  18. Edward James Olmos, American Me (1992)
  19. Richard Linklater, Before Sunrise (1995)
  20. Wes Craven, Scream (1996)
  21. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, The Matrix (1999)
  22. Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
  23. Jane Campion, In the Cut (2002)
  24. Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away (2002)
  25. Brad Bird, The Incredibles (2004)
  26. Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
  27. Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood (2007)
  28. Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2009)
  29. Joss Whedon, The Avengers (2012)
  30. Luca Guadagnino, Call Me by Your Name (2017)
  31. Jordan Peele, Get Out (2017)

Primary Sources (Television)

  1. Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander (1983, 5 episodes)
  2. David Lynch and Mark Frost, Twin Peaks (1990-91, 30 episodes)
  3. David Milch, Deadwood (2004-06, 30 episodes)
  4. Rob Thomas, Veronica Mars (2004-06, 64 episodes)
  5. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, Lost (2004-10, 121 episodes)
  6. Dave Filoni, Star Wars: Clone Wars (2009-2014, 121 episodes)
  7. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag (2018-19)

Secondary Sources

  1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935)
  2. Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” (1962)
  3. Stuart Hall & Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (2018)
  4. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message (1968)
  5. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (1969)
  6. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies 3rd Edition (2016)
  7. Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance” (1975)
  8. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)
  9. David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” (1979)
  10. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1979)
  11. Seymour Chatman, “What Novels Can Do that Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)” (1980)
  12. Noël Carroll, “The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (And Beyond)” (1982)
  13. Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television 2nd Edition (1990)
  14. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992)
  15. Lisa A. Lewis, The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (1992)
  16. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (1993)
  17. Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (1997)
  18. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999)
  19. Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (2000)
  20. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (2001)
  21. Charles Ramírez Berg, Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance (2002)
  22. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Its Cultural Forms (2003)
  23. Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema Vol. 1 (2004)
  24. Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (2004)
  25. Peter Kramer, “Big Pictures: Studying Contemporary Hollywood Cinema through Its Greatest Hits (2005)
  26. Janet McCabe, Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema (2005)
  27. Cornel Sandvoss, Fans, the Mirror of Consumption (2005)
  28. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006)
  29. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (2007)
  30. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008)
  31. Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art (2009)
  32. Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture (2009)
  33. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (2010)
  34. Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (2010)
  35. Barry Langford, Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology Since 1945 (2010)
  36. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (2011)
  37. Amy Holdsworth, Television, Memory, and Nostalgia (2011)
  38. Victoria O’Donnell, Television Criticism (2012)
  39. Caetlin Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (2013)
  40. Ruby Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (2013)
  41. Gerald Sim, The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (2014)
  42. D. Connor, The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (2015)
  43. Matt Yockey, Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe (2017)
  44. Gilberto Perez, The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film (2019)
  45. Sean Guynes, Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics (2020)
  46. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell, How to Watch Television (2020)

 

Secondary Field: Narratology (focus on serialization)

Primary Sources (Film)

  1. David Lynch, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
  2. Steve Miner, Halloween H20 (1998)
  3. Richard Linklater, Before Sunset (2004)
  4. Wes Craven, Scream 4 (2011)
  5. Richard Linklater, Before Midnight (2013)
  6. Richard Linklater, Boyhood (2014)
  7. George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
  8. Ryan Coogler, Creed (2015)
  9. J. Abrams, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
  10. Barry Jenkins, Moonlight (2016)
  11. Dennis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
  12. David Gordon Green, Halloween (2018)
  13. Anthony and Joe Russo, Avengers: Endgame (2019)
  14. Tim Miller, Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Primary Sources (Television)

  1. The Up Series (1964-2019, 9 episodes/films)
  2. David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017, 18 episodes)
  3. David Milch, Deadwood (2019, 1 movie)
  4. Rob Thomas, Veronica Mars (2019, 8 episodes)
  5. Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler, and Leslye Headland, Russian Doll (2019, 8 episodes)
  6. Dave Filoni, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2020, 12 episodes)

Secondary Sources

  1. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983) !
  2. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (1990)
  3. Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (2000)
  4. Kristen Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (2003)
  5. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It (2006)
  6. Michael Z. Newman, “From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative” (2006)
  7. Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009)
  8. Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis, Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (2010)
  9. Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (2010)
  10. Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas, New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age (2011)
  11. David Herman, James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012)
  12. Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes, Adaptations, and Fan Productions: Remake/Remodel (2012)
  13. Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Film Sequels (2012)
  14. Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (2015)
  15. Lee Goldberg, Television Fast Forward: Sequels & Remakes of Cancelled Series (2015)
  16. Robin Warhol, “Binge Watching: How Netflix Original Programs are Changing Serial Form” (2016)
  17. Scott Higgins, Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial (2016)
  18. James Phelan, Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (2017)
  19. Frank Kelleter, Media of Serial Narrative (2017)
  20. Brian Richardson, A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives (2019)
  21. Jan Alber and Brian Richardson, Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges (2020)

PhD Exam Reading Questions

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I’m hoping that by titling these posts with what I searched as I looked for these kinds of things I can help future students who are also in search of these kinds of things.

These came to me via a friend who got them from another friend who got them from Cindy Selfe and Laura Allen, both of whom work in the R(hetoric)C(omposition)L(iteracy) department here at OSU. I’ve not met either of them in person, at least not more than in passing, but I am grateful to them for their wonderful questions that translate pretty well to other disciplines. I also won’t commit to answering all of these questions in every post or for every reading, but I will try to answer the ones that seem important for whatever reading I’ll be writing about. I’ll use these questions as an outline to format each reading-specific post.

With that, here’s the list of questions

Reading Questions (with thanks to Cindy Selfe, Laura Allen)

  1. Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?
  2. Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?
  3. Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?
  4. Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?
  5. Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?
  6. Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?
  7. Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

via GIPHY

Exams: A New Hope

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Hi, I’m a Ph.D. student at THE Ohio State University studying legacyquels (more on that later, I’m sure) in film and television. I’m starting this blog as a way of tracking and holding myself accountable to the reading I’ll need to do in the time before the (tentatively scheduled) December 2020 exam date. There’s a lot of reading and writing to be done in that time, so I’ll be doing at least the latter part here so that I can hold myself accountable to doing the reading and synthesizing what I’ve read/watched.

In the near future, look for a post with my reading list, as well as a description of my major and minor fields. Those will hopefully be useful to those who come looking here for a film and tv studies reading list for their PhD programs in the future. I looked at a few of these kinds of sites myself as I developed these lists, so I hope I can repay that to whomever may come after me.

The majority of post on this page will be me trying to make sense of what I’ve read recently. I’ll aim, for now, at posting 3x a week, roughly every other day. That’s a lot of posting, but it should be relatively short posts that synthesize what I’ve read in that book and begin to connect them to other readings or texts. If you’re a family member looking to support me in this endeavor, I’d appreciate any clarification questions you might have about what you read here. The way you learn best is by teaching others, so I’d welcome the opportunity to explain what I’ve written differently. If you’re a friend or colleague looking in on what I’m reading and something you’ve read jumps out to you as a cool or interesting connection, please let me know about that as well! We’re all in this together, as I’ve heard some young people sing inside a high school gym. Here goes nothing.

via GIPHY