What follows is a very incomplete list of recommended books from the CMS faculty. For books specifically by CMS faculty, please check their individual websites or see our Articles and Books page.

A

Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp.

Adams, Henry, "The Virgin and the Dynamo".

Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem.

Altick, Richard D. The Shows of London.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities.

B

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida.

Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies.

Becker, Howard. Art Worlds.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller," in Illuminations.

Benjamin, Walter, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations.

Berger, John and Jean Mohr. Ways of Seeing.

Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation.

Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe.

C

Carey, James. Communication as Culture.

Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film.

Coles, Robert. Doing Documentary Work.

Coombe, Rosemary. The Cultural Life of Copyright.

D

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle.

Douglas, Susan. Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922.

F

Forster, E.M. "The Machine Stops". (short story)

G

Gibson, William. Neuromancer.

Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time and Architecture.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. (as a theory of transatlantic cultural matrices)

Ginsburg, Faye D., Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin. Media Worlds.

Ginzburg, Carlo. Myths, Emblems, Clues.

Gitelman and Pingree. New Media 1740-1915.

H

Hall, Stuart. Introduction to Cultural Studies Reader.

Haraway, Donna. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs."

Hartley, John. Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: the Key Concepts.

Hobsbawm & Ranger. The Invention of Tradition.

J

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making.

K

Katz, Elihu & Daniel Dayan. Media Events.

Kern, Stephan. The Culture of Time and Space.

Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament.

M

Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media.

Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine.

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization.

Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck.

P

Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air.

Pool, Ithiel de Sola. Technologies of Freedom.

Proff, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. (postmodern paranoia)

S

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey.

Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News.

Snow, C.P. "The Idea of the Two Cultures."

Sontag, Susan. On Photography.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others.

T

Thorburn/Jenkins. Rethinking Media Change.

Jenkins/Thorburn. Democracy and new Media.

Turkle, Sherry. Life On the Screen.

U

Uricchio, William & Roberta Pearson, Re-Framing Culture.

V

Venturi, Robert. Learning From Las Vegas.

W

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah and Pat Harrigan, eds. First Person. (game studies as a no-holds-barred turf war)