Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television“Holling is tormented by Koyaanisqatsi dreams until he goes out and does the wild thing with a young stag . . . . ”––Synopsis from production company “Bible,” Northern Exposure, March 30, 1992
The collision of auteurism and rap––couched by primetime producers in the Northern Exposure script––was actually rather commonplace by the early 1990s. Series, and even news broadcasts, regularly engineered their narratives around highly coded aesthetic and cultural fragments, with a kind of ensemble iconography. Televisuality interrogates the nature of such performances as an historical phenomenon, an aesthetic and industrial practice, and as a socially symbolic act. This book suggests that postmodernism does not fully explain television's stylistic exhibitionism and that a reexamination of “high theory” is in order. Caldwell's unique approach successfully integrates production practice with theory in a way that will enlighten both critical theory and cultural studies.
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Contents
Unwanted Houseguests and Altered States | 32 |
Modes of Production The Televisual Apparatus | 73 |
Boutique Designer TelevisionAuteurist Spin Doctoring | 105 |
Franchiser Digital PackaginglndustrialStrength Semiotics | 134 |
Loss Leader Event Status ProgrammingExhibitionist History | 160 |
Trash TV ThriftShop VideoMore Is More | 193 |
Tabloid TV Styled LiveOnto logical Stripmall | 223 |
Televisual Audience Interactive Pizza | 249 |
Televisual Economy Recessionary Aesthetics | 284 |
Televisual Politics Negotiating Race in the L A Rebellion | 302 |
Notes | 359 |
| 407 | |
| 423 | |
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Bibliographic information
| Title | Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television Communications, media, and culture Rutgers series in communications, media, and culture Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, John Thornton Caldwell |
| Author | John Thornton Caldwell |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Rutgers University Press, 1995 |
| ISBN | 0813521645, 9780813521640 |
| Length | 437 pages |
| Subjects | › › Performing Arts / Television / History & Criticism Social Science / General Social Science / Popular Culture |
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