This summer reading list was created by Nick Eppert, Class of 2017. Though not exhaustive, this list is a great place to get started, especially if you’re interested in feeling out different topics of research. For more information on what readings you can expect from your classes, head to MCC Course Descriptions page!
For the MCC Core Seminar:
-Plato’s Phaedrus
-Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” from Dialectic of Enlightenment
-Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
-Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (especially the section on “Panopticism”)
-Karl Marx’s Capital Volume 1 as much as possible from Part 1 but especially the section on “The Commodity”
-Jean Baudrillard’s “The Precession of Simulacra,” from Simulacra and Simulation
-Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings
-Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” from Manifestly Haraway
Anthropological Theory:
-Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Early Writings, Capital Volume 1
-Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, The Condition of The Working Class in England
-Marcel Mauss, The Gift
-Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, The Savage Mind
-Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, Group Analysis and the Psychology of the Ego, Moses and Monotheism
-Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Everyday Life
-Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Structures of Religious Life
-Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Issues in the Distinction between the Private and Public Domain
-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
-Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
-Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society
-Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience
-Bernard Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age
-Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture
The Anthropocene:
-Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene
-Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital
-Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life
–Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times
Network and Assemblage Theory/Material and Non-material Flows
-Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large
-Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, We Have Never Been Modern
-Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway
-Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
–John Durham Peters-The Marvelous Clouds
Classic Media Theory
-Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
-Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, The Gutenberg Galaxy
-Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, The Disappearance of Childhood, Technopoly, German Media Theory
-Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
-Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System
– Cornelia Vismann, Files
Biopolitics
-Michel Foucault-Society Must Be Defended, Abnormal, Psychiatric Power, Security Territory Population, History of Madness
-Jacques Derrida-The Animal that Therefore I am, The Beast and the Sovereign Volumes 1 and 2, Rogues
-Giorgio Agamben-Homo Sacer
-Roberto Esposito, Bios
-Judith Butler-Precarious Life
-Jasbir Puar-Terrorist Assemblages (also for Queer Theory and Assemblage Theory)
-Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”
Black Intellectual Theory/Negritude/Afro-Pessimism
-Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, The Wretched of the Earth, A Dying Colonialism
-Aimé Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism
-Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
-Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” “Blackness and Nothingness”
-Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection
Cybernetics and Systems Theory
-Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics
-Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication
-Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
-Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding
-Ludwig von Bertanffly, General Systems Theory
-Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems
Semiotics
-Ferdinand de Saussure-Course in General Linguistics
-Claude Levi-Strauss-Structural Anthropology
-Jacques Derrida-Of Grammatology
-Roman Jakobson-Language in Literature
–Roland Barthes-Mythologies, Elements of Semiology, Image-Music-Text
-Pierre Bourdieu-Language and Symbolic Power
-Julia Kristeva-Revolution in Poetic Language
Neoliberalism and Its Critiques
-David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
-Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics
-Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos
-Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism
-David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years
-Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
Media Archaeology
-Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer
-Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
-Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past
-Siegfried Zielinski, The Deep Time of Media
-Vilem Flusser, The Shape of Things
-Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves and Writings Machines