Jonathan Gray and Daphne Gershon, "Reading Media: How to Do Textual Analysis" (NYU Press, 2026)

About this episode

The episode discusses the book 'Reading Media: How to Do Textual Analysis', which revitalizes textual analysis methods for contemporary media.

Reading Media: How to do Textual Analysis reinvigorates one of media and cultural studies’ most foundational methods at a moment when it is most needed, showing its continuing vitality by adapting it to new media environments, cultural objects, and scholarly questions.The volume insists that the close study of meaning, form, and representation remains central to understanding media’s power. With contributions from leading and emerging scholars, the book offers a diverse toolkit: from narratological and semiotic analysis of film and TV, to historical poetic accounts of TikTok, multimodal analysis of Afrobeats music videos, and postcolonial criticism of games. Essays extend the scope of textual analysis to unexpected objects—such as plastic waste, memes, and refugee-authored media—while others demonstrate how texts operate across platforms, genres, and transmedia franchises. Beyond offering new and improved approaches to textual analysis, each chapter illustrates its approach using a specific case study, functioning both as a step-by-step how-to guide and as an example of textual analysis in action.Reading Media advances a vision of textual analysis that is rigorous yet flexible…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guests: Jonathan Gray, Daphne Gershon

Topics covered

• textual analysis
• media studies
• cultural studies
• new media
• case studies

Keywords

• textual analysis
• media
• cultural studies
• case studies
• new media

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: NYU Press

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