Article Summaries

Article summaries in cultural studies

Here you will find an ever growing list of article summaries in cultural studies and other affiliated fields such as sociology, anthropology and media studies. Summaries here try to give a shortened version of the article in a manner that preserves main ideas and the structure of the article in a short and accessible text. Summaries of long articles are often divided into different part for the sake of convenience and links here take you to the first part of such article summaries. Article summaries here are additionally interconnected where relevant in order to allow for contextual learning. 

Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities
Claude Levi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth

De Saussure – The Nature of the Linguistic Sign

Karl Marx – The German Ideology
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto

Mary Douglas – Ritual Uncleanness

Maurice Halbwachs – "Historical Memory and Collective Memory"

Emile Durkheim – "The Genesis of the Notion of the Totemic Principle or Mana"
Emile Durkheim - "What is Social Fact?"
Emile Durkheim - Division of Labor in Society
Emile Durkheim - Elementary Forms of Religious Life 
Emile Durkheim - Moral Education
Emile Durkheim - The Rules of Sociological Method
Emile Durkheim - Suicide
Emile Durkheim - On Morality and Society

Neil Postman - The Disapperance of Childhood
Hegel - Fragments of a System
Hegel  - Phenomenology of Spirit

Abdul JanMuhamed / "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature"

Gayatri Spivak / "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
Jean Baudrillard / Simulacra and Simulation

Jean Baudrillard / "The Structural Law of value and the Order of Simulacra"

Roman Jakobson - On Linguistic Aspects of Translation

Theodor Adorno - culture industry reconsidered

Louis Althusser: On ideology: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

Roland Barthes / Rhetoric of the Image 

Mikhail Bakhtin: "Carnival and Carnivalesque"

Paul Willis – Learning to Labor 

Betty Friedan – "The Problem That Has No Name"

Susan Bordo – Reading the Male Body

Judith Butler / Gender Trouble
Judith Butler / Bodies that Matter
Judith Butler / Performative Acts and Gender Constitution
Judith Butler / Critically Queer 

Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space

Michel De Certeau - Walking in the City

Georg Simmel – The Metropolis and Mental Life
Georg Simmel - The Stranger
Georg Simmel / The Problem of Sociology
 "Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy" Arjun Appadurai

Guy Debord/ Society of the Spectacle

John Berger – "Ways of Seeing"

Peter Berger - Invitation to Sociology

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" - Laura Mulvey

Michel Foucault – Of Other Spaces (Heterotopia)
Michel Foucault  - "The Subject and Power"
Michel Foucault: Panopticism
Michel Foucault - Truth and Power
Michel Foucault -  The Discourse on Language
Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality

Michel Foucault / What is an Author     

Fredric Jameson – Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Martin Heidegger – Building Dwelling Thinking

Clifford Geertz: "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight

"Doing Gender" by Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman

Dick Hebdige: Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Roland Barthes - Myth Today
Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author

Norbert Elias – The Civilizing Process

Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Max Weber - "religious affiliation and social stratification 

Max Weber  - Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism

Clifford Geertz: Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture – Summary, Review and analysis 

Clifford Geertz –"From the Native's Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding"

Clifford Geertz - PersonTime and Conduct in Bali 

Pierre Bourdieu – The Historical Genesis of the Pure Aesthetic

Marc Prensky - "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants"

Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Walter Benjamin - the Author as Producer

Sigmund Freud – "The Uncanny"

Sigmund Freud - The Ego and the Id

Sigmund Freud - Mourning and Melancholia 

Sigmund Freud - The Future of an Illusion 

Sigmund Freud - Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Sigmund Freud - Civilization and Its Discontents

Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams

Sigmund Freud - Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Sigmund Freud - Totem and Taboo

Sigmund Freud - Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Sigmund Freud - Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
Alfred Schutz - The Stranger
Erving Goffman - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 

Erving Goffman On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction 

Erving Goffman - Stigma and Social Identity

Hardt and Negri - Empire

Horace Miner - Body Ritual Among the Nacirema 
David Rosenhan - Being Sane in Insane Places
Jihad vs. McWorld / Benjamin Barber
The Clash of Civilizations - Samuel Huntington
The End of History and the Last Man / Francis Fukuyama
Orientalsim / Edward Said
Stanley Fish -Is There a Text in This Class?
Jonathan Culler / Reading as a Woman
Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action / Lazarsfeld and Merton 
Living with Television: The Violence Profile / Gerbner and Gross
Prime Time Ideology / Gitlin
Introduction: Identity in the Age of the Internet / Turkle  
International Institutions: Two Approaches / Robert Keohane
The Demand for International Regimes / Robert Keohane
Can we think systematically about ethics and statecraft / Welch
The origins of war in Neorealist theory / Kenneth Waltz 
Hegemony, Gramsci and International relations / RW Cox
Anarchy is what states make of it / Alexander Wendt
The Laugh of the Medusa / Helene Cixous 
Sherry Ortner /  Female to Male as Nature to Culture?

Patricia Hill Collins / Black Feminist Thought

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