This dissertation investigates the development of mass communication research in the United States in the years between 1940 and 1972. Central to that investigation is the career of Dr. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist whose interventions into debates about the effects of mass communication in the 1950s have remained largely overlooked in received histories of the discipline. By focussing on Wertham's contribution to the development of communications research a number of submerged tendencies are illuminated. A context for the development of the media effects research paradigm is suggested in the first three chapters, each of which highlights a different element which structured postwar communication research. The importance of elitist critiques of mass culture which dominated aesthetic discussions throughout the first half of the twentieth-century are assessed as a foundational factor in the development of communication research paradigms. Postwar concerns about the role of group-mindedness and collectivization are seen to contribute to a conservative political climate which shaped the development of the discipline. Differences between psychoanalysis and behavioral psychology are examined in order to demonstrate the ways in which communication research was consolidated around quantitative and scientistic methodologies. The remaining chapters present two specific case studies of media effects research. Wertham's 1954 anti-comics book, Seduction of the Innocent, is examined in detail in order to illustrate an approach to the study of the mass media that was not pursued by communications researchers. The development of a conservative and individualistic media effects paradigm stemming from research on the impact of television on children is presented as the culmination of postwar tendencies in communication studies. This dissertation argues that because the study of mass communication has been largely defined in the United States through reference to research into me
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.35978 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Beaty, Bart H. |
| Contributors | Straw, Will (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Graduate Communications Program.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001686480, proquestno: NQ55299, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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