Media in Cultural Context: Popular Readerships
This MIT OpenCourseWare course traces the history of popular reading in the Western world, from the rise of mass print culture to today's reading communities. It looks at how access to print shaped divides between highbrow and lowbrow taste and between male and female readerships, then turns to contemporary reading practices: fan fiction, Oprah's book club, comics, hypertext fiction, mass-market romance novels, and mega-chain bookstores. Reader response theory anchors the analytical side, giving students tools to examine why certain texts and reading habits get labeled serious or trivial. Course materials include a syllabus, readings, and assignments developed by MIT faculty, free to access online with no certificate offered. The course treats gender as one lens among several for understanding reading culture rather than as its sole subject, sitting alongside taste, class, and media format as organizing questions.