Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television

John Thornton Caldwell

Rutgers University Press, 1995 - Performing Arts - 437 pages

“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.

Contents

• Unwanted Houseguests and Altered States: 32
• Modes of Production The Televisual Apparatus: 73
• Boutique Designer TelevisionAuteurist Spin Doctoring: 105
• Franchiser Digital PackagingIndustrialStrength Semiotics: 134
• Loss Leader Event Status ProgrammingExhibitionist History: 160
• Trash TV ThriftShop VideoMore Is More: 193
• Tabloid TV Styled LiveOntological Stripmall: 223
• Televisual Audience Interactive Pizza: 249
• Televisual Economy Recessionary Aesthetics: 284
• Televisual Politics Negotiating Race in the L A Rebellion: 302
• Notes: 359
• Bibliography: 407
• Index: 423

Bibliographic information

• Title: Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television; ACLS Humanities E-Book; 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
• Contributor: American Council of Learned Societies
• 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