Television Studies

How to Watch Television edited by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell

by

Greg Daniels and Michael Schur’s Parks and Recreation

This is the first anthology I have to deal with on this list, and I’m not going to go into the kind of intense detail I usually go into for these kinds of things. Mostly, I’ll give a brief overview of what the purpose of the anthology is (and whether it seems effective based on what of it I read) and then look at the essays I selected in brief, just covering the thesis and methodology of said essays.

Thompson, Ethan, and Jason Mittell, eds. 2020. How to Watch Television. 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press.

Collection Overview

In their introduction, Thompson and Mittell work to position this book as an “owner’s manual,” accessible to both lay readers and students who might be using the book as a first step in research. As such, the essays have been kept short, and are focused on a particular series with one area of investigation (as can be seen in the essay titles). This can also be seen in the introduction’s focus on explaining what critical inquiry is, separating it from the “thumbs up, thumbs down” world of evaluation. This is all very introductory stuff, but they lay it out well and it could even be used as a way of introducing the concept of media criticism in a classroom.

Funnily, I’ve only seen two of the shows that I read essays about as of the time of this writing, and I kind of want to leave that as a guessing game for you. Leave a comment with your guesses!

“Better Call Saul: The Prestige Spinoff” by Jason Mittell

Mittell is a talented writer and television academic, and so it is no wonder that his essay here is really great at being both succinct and clear-eyed about its premise: that the concept of “prestige TV” is somewhat antithetical to the way TV has operated throughout most of its history as an imitative form, and that a spinoff of a prestige TV show is doubly antithetical and required a deft handling from its showrunners to mark it as both indebted to the original show and as something worthy of attention in its own right. Mittell nicely lays out what the term “prestige TV” has come to mean in its focus on a more masculine style and deliberate moral grayness that at one time felt new but now has settled into a concrete style. Through a close reading of the show’s first episode, Mittell shows how some of the very things that read as callbacks to those who were coming from Breaking Bad could also be read as pretty basic genre signifiers of prestige TV, thus bridging the gap between the two seemingly opposed impulses.

Concepts like “prestige” or “formulaic” are not inherent markers of quality; rather, they fit into larger constructions of taste and value embedded within broader cultural hierarchies such as gender, class, and education. Early television was viewed as a “lowbrow” medium compared to literature, theater, and film, largely because the domestic mass medium was seen as less elite and more the domain of women and children. As the category of prestige television rose in the twenty-first century, much of its cultural legitimacy was earned by distancing itself from traditional feminized genres such as melodramatic soap operas and embracing the cinematic and literary cache of serious drama while employing established film writers, directors, and actors. […] Even though a prestige drama can be great TV, we must not assume that only prestige series are high quality, nor that the sophisticated style of prestige is a guarantee of aesthetic success. Instead, we must remember that labels like “prestige,” “quality,” and “lowbrow” are all cultural constructions, used to reinforce hierarchies steeped in social power and identity. (15-6)

“One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling” by Abigail De Kosnik

De Kosnik here argues that soap operas have a unique potential to tell stories over decades, which allow for some unprecedented storytelling opportunities. She argues that the soap opera form encourages three elements in its storytelling. The first is the ability to plant character traits much further in advance than can happen in typical tv or other stories. Even things that weren’t intended as seed for a later payoff can be utilized in this way, she claims. Secondly, there is a mirroring ability to have events ripple throughout a much longer timespan than can normally happen. Finally, the rough approximation of real-time allows for a tighter sense of relevance and identification on the parts of audience members. Each of these, De Kosnik claims, makes the soap opera into a more-realistic-than-normally-considered medium for storytelling, a claim she backs up by demonstrating how one character (Vicki) on OLtL has been a source for storytelling surrounding the concept of child abuse that has had semi-realistic long-lasting repercussions.

A deep seed and long reveal need not have any “authorial” intent behind it, but the reveal must accord with viewers’ recollection of characters’ histories in order to ring true. (73)

No matter how long these male-oriented narratives [of James Bond and comic book films] remain a part of the popular cultural landscape, they rarely allow their core characters to substantially age, or to undergo the significant psychological and emotional crises that accompany different stages of life – by their emphasis on repetition rather than character growth, they lack the kind of narrative journey that One Life to Live writers were able to give viewers who followed Vicki’s advancement from youth into middle age. (73)

“Buckwild: Performing Whiteness” by Amanda Ann Klein

In this essay, Klein does a bit industrial reading of what she calls the MTV identity shows, those programs like Jersey Shore and Teen Mom which focused on a specific subsection of society to appeal to those audiences as well as a broader audience. She claims that shows like Buckwild, which was the “redneck hillbilly” version, encouraged people to sell themselves as being the heightened version of their identity, a melding of real-world and “reality” that makes people into the pawns of capitalism at best and can have deadly consequences, as happened for the star of Buckwild, at worst. This falls in line somewhat with Racquel Gates’ arguments about the “negative” depictions of black women on reality shows, though Gates sees in this melding a place for agency while Klein’s view is more ominous and insidious.

In the midst of this so-called crisis of whiteness, Buckwild likewise offers a model of whiteness emblematic of resilience and resourcefulness in the face of economic hardship. The Buckwild cast works menial jobs (or in some cases, no jobs at all) but embraces and celebrates the freedom this unfettered lifestyle provides. They engage in a kind of rural bricolage, turning old pickup trucks into swimming pools and “skiing” on old garbage can lids tied to the back of RTVs; such resourcefulness suggests that being poor and white isn’t all that bad as long as you can still have fun. Furthermore, the series effectively rebrands whiteness as freedom, ingenuity, and bravery, thus reclaiming it from negative signifiers like poverty, racism, and lack of education. (119)

Indeed, Buckwild‘s tragic ending highlights how on-screen identities and material bodies are bound tightly together in MTV’s identity cycle. When your job is to play yourself, you are never not working. And when being yourself means endangering your body, then both work and being yourself is a never-ending state of precarity. (124)

“Parks and Recreation: The Cultural Forum” by Heather Hendershot

Hendershot argues that the age of niche TV has made it almost impossible for a tv show to be “controversial” in the way that they were back during the era of the Big Three stations when everybody was watching roughly the same things. There is no longer a “cultural forum” (borrowing from Newcomb and Hirsch) where ideas can battle it out in the span of a single show or episode, instead each show seems more ideologically one-sided. Hendershot then argues that Parks and Rec is a show that at least gives voice to both sides of a debate, even if its framing and handling indicate a left-leaning bias. She interestingly notes that the characters of Leslie and Ron are opposites but ones that aren’t ideologically pure themselves. Each one leans obviously in one direction or the other, but has championed tendencies towards their opposing ideology. It is this balance that resurrects the cultural forum within the show.

Can programs hope to address – or even confront, challenge, or offend – a “mass” rather than a “niche” audience, or does our narrowcasting environment ensure that politically ambitious programs preach to the choir? If the old cultural forum idea truly fizzled out with the decline of the dominance of the Big Three networks, would any series dare to speak to a heterogeneous audience? There is at least one program that strives to do exactly this: NBC’s Parks and Recreation. Celebrating the virtues of local government and staking a claim for the value of civic engagement and the possibility of collaboration – or at least peaceful coexistence – between different political camps, Parks and Recreation offers a liberal pluralist response to the fragmented post-cultural forum environment. (232)

“Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life: TV Revivals” by Myles McNutt

McNutt’s essay is the one most clearly relevant to my area of study, as he is talking directly about the kind of show I am interested in studying. Here, he talks most about the balancing act such shows have to pull off as they try to walk the line between industrial and fan pressures, each of which is vital to the revival’s very existence. He notes that an environment in which a cancelled show retains some sense of cultural cache, from streaming availability to even podcasts like Gilmore Guys, is crucial for setting the grounds for such a revival as it gives the industry an indication of the show’s ongoing popularity while its continuing relevance ensures a welcoming audience. He notes also, however, that these are not guarantors of a well-received revival once it actually happens. Fans are a fickle friend, and especially when the show in question was seemingly cancelled before its time, the pressure can create an environment that is difficult to navigate.

The logic supporting the trend of television revivals depends on three key factors. The first, and simplest, is that television development remains driven by existing media properties: movies, past television series, books, video games, and even podcasts are developed into new series based on the idea that an existing fan base and cultural awareness will create a built-in audience for that series. […] Revivals, however, are dependent on more than brand recognition. The second key factor to a revival is ongoing success in aftermarkets: The trend is built on shows that have had a significant afterlife beyond their initial broadcast, whether through traditional syndication, DVD sales, or – increasingly – through streaming platforms like Netflix. A series’ presence in these aftermarkets provides continued visibility, such that new viewers can become invested in the series and existing viewers can have their interest in the series refreshed. In a contemporary marketplace, a show’s fanbase is not just those who watched a show when it aired but also those who have been exposed to it through the increasingly large number of spaces where that television series lives. […] Third, and most intangibly, there needs to be evidence that people are taking advantage of this opportunity, and that viewers are still invested in these characters. (252)

Revivals are made because both industrial logic and fan narratives support their existence as a way to leverage continued interest in the series while also providing characters with the conclusion or continuation they deserved: If the series were to continue, however, the fan narratives shift dramatically, and “Another Year in the Life” risks reading as a cynical iteration of an existing franchise rather than a necessary revival of a story fans are invested in. Revivals sit at the complicated crossroads of industrial logic and creative imperative, and Gilmore Girls is neither the first nor the last program to explore the challenges of bringing a series back to life in an age where revisiting your favorite show is as easy as looting up Netflix or Hulu. (258-9)

“The Walking Dead: Adapting Comics” by Henry Jenkins

Jenkins writes about a different set of audience-creator tensions. While he notes that comics like The Walking Dead seem like they’re perfectly suited for adaptation, especially as the industry continues in its trend towards mining previously existing IP for whatever its worth, he also points out that they can come with their own set of audience expectations and pressures in the form of fidelity towards the source material. He writes about how one big scene from early in the comics got pushed back by about a season in order to foil fan expectations, and how other relationships were given greater depth on the show than was allowed within the relatively short confines of a comic book. He also writes about the fan tensions around the CDC subplot that ends the first season, and how the show’s creators didn’t want to deviate too much from the comic creator’s desire to leave the zombies’ origins unexplained. Jenkins looks for the letters published at the end of the comics for evidence of fan investment and creator response surrounding these topics.

As this Walking Dead example suggests, there is no easy path for adapting comics for the small screen. There are strong connections between the ways seriality works and comics and television, but also significant differences that make a one-to-one mapping less desirable than it might seem. Television producers want to leave their own marks on the material by exploring new paths and occasionally surprising their loyal fans. The challenge is how to make these adjustments consistent not with the details of the original stories, but with their “ground rules,” their underlying logic, and one good place to watch this informal “contract” between reader and creators take shape is through the letter columns published in the back of the comics. It is through this process that the producers can help figure out what they owe to the comics and to their readers. (390)

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

by

Marshall McLuhan himself

McLuhan, Marshall. 2003 (1974). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Edited by W. Terrence Gordon. Critical Edition. Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Marshall McLuhan has two big concepts that, tellingly, make up the first two chapters of this massive text. The first is his pithy “the medium is the message,” a statement he returns to throughout to explain exactly what he means and some of the intricacies of the implications thereof. The point is that it isn’t the content of a medium which matters but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate. He uses bodily metaphors of amputation and prosthesis to explain how we have ceded much of our sensory organs to these media, which then structure how we interact with the world and the other people in it. This idea is augmented by his other important idea, that of the temperatures of media, where a hot medium is “high definition” and requires little human interaction in order to achieve a sense of “closure” with the medium while a cold medium is “low definition” and therefore requires more human work in order to achieve that closure. For McLuhan, closure is a rebalancing that must occur whenever a new medium is introduced to human life, which inevitably creates a numbness in the corresponding bodily sense, a phenomenon he borrows from the medical field called “autoamputation.”

McLuhan suggests that these hot and cold media have different effects depending on whether the society it enters is prepared to handle its intrusion or not. He supposes, for example, that print exploded a previously tribalistic society in Europe into a land of individuals while the introduction of radio tended to cause an implosion of nationalism. These things, again, happen no matter what the content of the medium is, it is the technological form of the medium that dictates what will happen when it becomes integrated with the culture it comes from, or comes in contact with.

Which brings us to McLuhan’s ickier side. He writes a lot, like, a lot a lot, about how various peoples are unprepared to deal with the mediums that those in the West might be able to integrate more smoothly. He writes with large, sweeping assumptions, for example, about the continent of Africa and its peoples, and how such “primitive” societies might respond poorly to different media. It’s a bunch of hooey as far as I’m concerned, and it makes one question everything else he says about “understanding media.”

Where most other theorists have linked the movies to prior media like photography or theater, McLuhan links it instead with print, and specifically the book, given its visual presentation of a high density of information and its linear progression. I think there are fundamental flaws to this idea, especially when one starts to consider the content of the media (which, to say the least, is an area where McLuhan and I have some differences of opinion). He does, however, productively link it to an industrialized society where people come together to make one thing, which, he says, is similar to the symphony orchestra of the 19th century. He also, like Eisenstein, links film to stream-of-consciousness writing in the works of James Joyce and others.

McLuhan writes that TV is a medium well-suited to looser personalities (like JFK instead of Nixon, famously) and process instead of product. McLuhan also believes that, because TV (in 1964, at least) is a cool medium in which the audience must participate in order to experience closure, TV then leans towards the documentary and makes us into people who require a depth of knowledge on a subject presented to us via its poorly resolved images. I tried to foresee what McLuhan would have made of TV in is current form, which is higher definition and therefore hotter. I couldn’t really do it. McLuhan doesn’t provide a whole ton of great roadmaps for a project like that, and thinking of a medium without its content seems antithetical to me anyways (and, frankly, impractical, given McLuhan’s own ultimate failure to do so).

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

McLuhan is in conversation with scholars and writers of his time who, he claims, think about media in a wrong way. McLuhan’s arguments are indeed more expansive than many, though I think they are bound up in some really bad assumptions that taint them pretty thoroughly. More importantly, McLuhan has been a source for debates in several of the books I’ve read so far, and likely more as I keep reading. The strongest pushback to him I’ve found so far is Raymond Williams’ in Television: Technology and Cultural Form, where he argues that McLuhan’s is a theory of technological determinism which ignores the culture’s role in a given medium’s invention, production, and reception. There is still some merit to be found in McLuhan’s big ideas, but they need to be separated out from the unuseful stuff and properly accounted for to be of any real value

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

McLuhan’s strategy here seems to be largely scattershot. The first section of his book develops the big theoretical ideas before the second part, the longer part, dives into a bunch of media on an individual basis where he discusses that particular medium’s peculiarities in the context of his larger ideas. Within these chapters, however, thoughts seem to bubble up out of aphorisms and telling anecdotes. This can lead to a confusing and difficult to follow flow of ideas.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

McLuhan seems to be going for a kind of gestalt-based theory. He’ll throw dozens of vaguely connected ideas at you in a given chapter, from a variety of angles, and hope that something sticks. It often does, but it also leads to a sense of time wasted, unfortunately.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

As a work of theory I think this is valuable but heavily flawed. I remain unconvinced of his content-less understanding of the media, while his imperialist tendencies make it difficult to read his arguments in good faith. I’m sure I’ll return to him, but more likely as a person to argue against than with.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

medium, message, closure, autoamputation, prosthesis, high definition, low definition, hot medium, cool medium, literacy,

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. (19)

What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (20)

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as content. The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The content of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech. (31)

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.” High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, “high definition.” A cartoon is “low definition,” simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone. (39)

Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as an entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be “forgotten,” “censored,” and reduced to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or assimilated. […] For many people, this cooling system brings on a life-long state of psychic rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology. (40)

Nevertheless, it makes all the difference whether a hot medium is used in a hot or a cool culture. The hot radio medium used in cool or non-literate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. A cool or low literacy culture cannot accept hot media like movies or radio as entertainment. They are, at least, as radically upsetting for them as the cool TV medium has proved to be for our high literacy world. (48)

The present book, in seeking to understand many media, the conflicts from which they spring, and the even greater conflicts to which they give rise, holds out the promise of reducing these conflicts by an increase of human autonomy. (76)

By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls – all such extensions of our bodies, including cities – will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. With the new media, however, it is also possible to store and to translate everything; and, as for speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier. (86)

If the movie merges the mechanical and organic in a world of undulating forms, it also links with the technology of print. The reader in projecting words, as it were, has to follow the black and white sequences of stills that is typography, providing his own sound track. He tries to follow the contours of the author’s mind, at varying speeds and with various illusions of understanding. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bond between print and movie in terms of their power to generate fantasy and the viewer or reader. (383)

Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio and TV, and the comics are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action. Prior to the movies, the most obvious example of such corporate artistic action had occurred early in the industrialized world, with the large new symphony orchestras of the nineteenth century. (392)

As much as the infinitesimal calculus that pretends to deal with motion and change by minute fragmentation, the film does so by making motion and change into a series of static shots. Print does likewise while pretending to deal with the whole mind in action. Yet film and the stream of consciousness alike seem to provide a deeply desired release from the mechanical world of increasing standardization and uniformity. Nobody ever felt oppressed by the monotony or uniformity of the chaplain ballet or by the monotonous, uniform musings of his literary twin, Leopold Bloom. (395)

The TV image requires each instant that we “close” the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object. (419)

With TV came the end of bloc voting in politics, a form of specialism and fragmentation that won’t work since TV. instead of the voting block, we have the icon, the inclusive image. Instead of a political viewpoint or platform, the inclusive political posture or stance. Instead of the product, the process. (427-8)

Now that we have considered the subliminal force of the TV image and a redundant scattering of samples, the question would seem to arise: “What possible immunity can there be from the subliminal operation of a new medium like television?” People have long supposed that bulldog opacity, backed by firm disapproval, is adequate enough protection against any new experience. It is the theme of this book that not even the most lucid understanding of the peculiar force of a medium can head off the ordinary closure of the senses that causes us to conform to the pattern of experience presented. The utmost purity of mind is no defense against bacteria, though the confreres of Louis Pasteur tossed him out of the medical profession for his base allegations about the invisible operation of bacteria. To resist TV, therefore, one must acquire the antidote of related media like print. (436)

If we ask what is the relation of TV to the learning process, the answer is surely that the TV image, by its stress on participation, dialogue, and depth, has brought to America new demand for crash-programming in education. Weather there ever will be TV in every classroom is a small matter. The revolution has already taken place at home. TV has changed our sense-lives and our mental processes. It has created a taste for all experience in depth that affects language teaching as much as car styles. Since TV, nobody is happy with a mere book knowledge of French or English poetry. The unanimous cry now is, “Let’s talk French,” and “Let the bard be heard.” And oddly enough, with the demand for depth, goes the demand for crash-programming. Not only deeper, but further, into all knowledge has become the normal popular demand since TV. […] the right approach is to ask, “What can TV do that the classroom cannot do for French, or for physics?” The answer is: “TV can illustrate the interplay of process and the growth of forms of all kinds as nothing else can.” (439-40)

The young people who have experienced a decade of TV have naturally imbibed an urge toward involvement in depth that makes all the remote visualized goals of usual culture seem not only unreal but irrelevant, and not only irrelevant but anemic. It is the total involvement in all-inclusive nowness that occurs in young lives via TV’s mosaic image. This change of attitude has nothing to do with programming in any way, and would be the same if the programs consisted entirely of the highest cultural content. The change in attitude by means of relating themselves to the mosaic TV image would occur in any event. It is, of course, our job not only to understand this change but to exploit it for its pedagogical richness. The TV child expects involvement and doesn’t want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society. (443)

Television: Technology and Cultural Form by Raymond Williams

by

Matt Groening’s The Simpsons

Williams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Second Edition (1990). New York: Routledge.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Raymond Williams dedicates much of this book to explaining what television is as a technology (that is, an extension of the more fundamental technology that is broadcasting, which first came to prominence via audio and the radio), what kinds of cultural requirements called it into existence (the increasingly atomized social world of a post-Industrial Revolution society), and the effects it has (to be listed later). It seems he writes largely to counter Marshall McLuhan’s conception of technological determinism, in which the technology just kind of pops into existence and has certain effects that are largely disconnected from the culture in which the technology exists. Williams, on the other hand, says that we need to return intention, history, and context to the discussion of television and its effects.

Williams tracks the history of the development of the technology that would lead, eventually, to television and then traces the way that other technologies were results of social needs (tele-phony/graphy as a way of communicating brief information across long distances quickly as a result of a growing desire to organize military and capitalist maneuvers) as a way of setting up how television, which is centrally produced but distributed broadly to individual homes, allows for a similar social requirement to be met. That social requirement is the need for distribution of information (and, less importantly but still crucially, entertainment) to a people who are increasingly separated from a sense of community that had once held society together. As societies get bigger and more spread out thanks to industrial practices and pressures, television (and radio before it) became a way to redeploy the kinds of things that might have been accomplished via town meetings or even public gatherings.

Williams then turns to examining who controls the production and dissemination of television programming, which, he notes, was always secondary to the fact that the signal existed in the first place. It was not that there were tv shows sitting around waiting for a technology to allow them to be broadcast into people’s homes, but that once that signal existed there was then a need for something to send over it. By looking at several British and American tv stations, he looks at what it means to have publicly owned stations and privately owned stations, both what that means for the kinds of shows that are being produced and shown on the channels and what it means for the way that the channels are being run financially. Williams later notes that as technologies of dissemination continue to develop, these signals will soon be able to reach around the world, which will have various additional effects of cultural imperialism and further consolidation of power.

Williams then investigates the way television works on a programming level. Here is his most famous concept from this book, that of flow as the dominant mode of televisual communication. He outlines how tv shows flow into one another, how within those shows there is a flow from scene to scene (or from show to commercial and back) and how within those smaller units there is still a continual flow of visual and aural information. This, he claims, is what makes it hard to turn the tv off, and what makes television seem insidious to those who would classify it as a means of society’s degradation. Even though we might switch between channels to find alternate programming, there is still an experience of flow from one channel to the next. It’s everywhere!

Williams then investigates the effects of television. Here is where he makes his strongest case against McLuhan, who he claims is treating the television as an ideology rather than a technology that has been made and used by a society. Television isn’t pushing the things on tv, society is via the television. Looked at this way, Williams claims, we can see how television was developed to help facilitation communication between those in power and those who have power over them, but also how others can co-opt that system for their own ends. Here lies the realm of pirate radio and tv stations, which exist fully within the boundaries of what is made possible with the technology even if they are not an intended effect of that technology. This kind of thing seems crucial to understanding the rest of William’s project, which projects the current (for 1974) situation of television into the future and in which Williams largely predicts the internet, in concept if not explicit detail.

Williams lays out how the continual development of technology related to broadcasting will soon create an international network of competing and conflicting distribution methods, aka the internet. Williams sees two ways of this working out. On the one hand, if arguments can be made that there should remain some level of local control over what is sent across these new means of broadcasting, there might be a real democratization of information and communication. On the other hand, if corporations are able to influence the development of these technologies enough, they might be able to manipulate the course of events towards a situation where the corporations are able to control what is seen as acceptable and possible within their neigh-unescapable grasp. It seems clear to me that Williams, in creating this binary of possible outcomes, hit exactly on what has happened, in that the internet has allowed for a greater ability for people to communicate with each other and learn about the world, but that corporations still largely control the ways in which those people use that information and lay out patterns of thought that those people still largely follow. There are cracks in the system because both of these outcomes happened at once and the corporate control is not nearly as all-encompassing as it would have needed to be to create that full dystopia and is indeed largely in control of the ways people communicate, but still those pirate messages are possible and even likely within this system. Perhaps it is utopian after all.

Williams’ concept of television and broadcasting is largely limited to Britain and the US, which does tend to limit his analysis somewhat. I would be curious to read a history of television during this time in other countries to see if the English language examples are as universal as Williams seems to claim they are.

Sarah Palmer watches TV on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Williams really only explicitly debates with McLuhan, who he pretty well takes to task for his technological determinism. Other than that, the biggest bit of context is the period in which Williams is writing. About 20 years after television’s popularity began, and with an ensuing 40+ years of development that has followed had made some of his arguments a little outdated. For instance, he writes about the technological inferiority of television as a visual medium when compared to the cinema. While that still remains true, at least on a level of scale, television is no longer so technologically inferior that it limits what can be shown on it the way it did in Williams’ time. Indeed, televisions can now have more color information than a digital projector at a theater can. This means that tv as a way of transmitting old (or new) movies is no longer a matter of dealing with poorer picture quality for the convenience of home viewing. Still, Williams’ analysis allows room for this change to happen, and even briefly predicts it.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Williams takes the socio-political view of the development of technologies as his main way of understanding how technologies come to be based on desires that needed to be fulfilled. He also examines not just the intended effects of a technology such as television but also their unintended and yet still possible effects. By looking at intentions and then effects, he is able to see why television came to be and what it is doing, and what it could be doing.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Williams methodological choice is largely his rhetoric. Here he argues that technological determinism is a flawed way of understanding the ways technology interacts with societies, and he aptly argues for a fuller understanding of its role as a social tool.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

As the start of my television-theory readings, this works really well to ground me in a way of thinking about tv as a medium. Even though it contains little in the way of theories of television as a medium of drama, where most of my readings will be focused, it still will likely remain foundational to my understanding of what is going on at a societal level with tv.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

television, technological determinism, cause and effect, cause, effect, social, society, broadcasting, flow, commercial, public, technology, medium, programming

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

If the technology is a cause, we can at best modify or seek to control its effects. Or if the technology, as used, is an effect, to what other kinds of cause, and other kinds of action, should we refer and relate our experience of its uses? (2)

[I]n the particular case of television it may be possible to outline a different kind of interpretation, which would allow us to see not only its history but also its uses in a more radical way. Such an interpretation would differ from technological determinism in that it would restore intention to the process of research and development. The technology would be seen, that is to say, as being looked for and developed with certain purposes and practices already in mind. At the same time the interpretation would differ from symptomatic technology and that these purposes and practices would be seen as direct: as known social needs, purposes and practices to which the technology is not marginal but central. (6-7)

The cheap radio receiver is then a significant index of a general condition and response. It was especially welcomed by all those who had least social opportunities of other kinds; who lacked independent mobility or access to the previously diverse places of entertainment and information. Broadcasting could also come to serve, or seem to serve, as a form of unified social intake, at the most general levels. What had been intensively promoted by the radio manufacturing companies thus interlocked with this kind of social need, itself defined within general limits and pressures. (21)

The ‘commercial’ character of television has then to be seen at several levels: as the making of programs for a profit in a known market; as a channel for advertising; and as a cultural and political form directly shaped by and dependent on the norms of a capitalist society, selling both consumer goods and a way of life based on them, in an ethos that is at once locally generated, by domestic capitalist interests and authorities, and internationally organized, as a political project, by the dominant capitalist power. (36-7)

But there has never been a time, until the last fifty years, when a majority of any population had regular and constant access to drama, and used this access. Even within the last half-century, at the peak of popularity of the cinema, figures for Britain indicate an average of less than one attendance a week per head of the adult population. It is difficult to get any precise comparative figures for television. But it seems probable that in societies like Britain and the United States more drama is watched in a week or weekend, by the majority of viewers, then would have been watched in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period. […] Whatever the social and cultural reasons may finally be, it is clear that watching dramatic simulation of a wide range of experiences is now an essential part of our modern cultural pattern. Or, to put it categorically, most people spend more time watching various kinds of drama than in preparing and eating food. (56)

But the cultural importance of the serial, as an essentially new form, ought not to be limited to this kind of traditional ratification. Few forms on television have the potential importance of the original serial. If the form has been overlaid, understandably, by the ‘classic’ emphasis, and more generally by the stock formulas of crime and illness, that is a particular cultural mediation, which it is necessary to understand and look for ways beyond. (58)

What is being offered is not, in older terms, a program of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of program items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real ‘broadcasting’. (91)

The flow offered can also, and perhaps more fundamentally, be related to the television experience itself. Two common observations bear on this. As has already been noted, most of us say, in describing the experience, that we have been ‘watching television’, rather than that we have watched ‘the news’ or ‘a play’ or ‘the football’ ‘on television’. Certainly we sometimes say both, but the fact that we say the former at all is already significant. Then again it is a widely if often ruefully admitted experience that many of us find television very difficult to switch off; that again and again, even when we have switched on for a particular ‘program’, we find ourselves watching the one after it and the one after that. The way in which the flow is now organized, without definite intervals, in any case encourages this. (94)

Especially in advanced industrial societies the near universality and general social visibility of television have attracted simple cause-and-effect identifications of its agency in social and cultural change. […] What is really significant is the direction of attention to certain selected issues – on the one hand ‘sex’ and ‘violence’, on the other hand ‘political manipulation’ and ‘cultural degradation’ – which are of so general a kind that it ought to be obvious that they cannot be specialized to an isolated medium but, in so far as television bears on them, have to be seen in a whole social and cultural process. Some part of the study of television’s effects has then to be seen as an ideology: a way of interpreting general change through a displaced and abstracted cause. (121-2)

[McLuhan’s conception of the media] is an apparently sophisticated technological determinism which has the significant effect of indicating a social and cultural determinism: a determinism, that is to say, which ratifies the society and culture we now have, and especially its most powerful internal directions. For if the medium – weather print or television – is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects. Similarly, what are elsewhere seen as effects, and as such subject to social, cultural, psychological and moral questioning, are excluded as irrelevant by comparison with the direct physiological and therefore ‘psychic’ effects of the media as such. The initial formulation – ‘the medium is the message’ – was a simple formalism. The subsequent formulation – ‘the medium is the massage’ – is a direct and functioning ideology. (130)

All technologies have been developed and improved to help with known human practices or with foreseen and desired practices. […] There will be in many cases unforeseen uses and unforeseen effects which are again a real qualification of the original intention. […] While we have to reject technological determinism, in all its forms, we must be careful not to substitute for it the notion of a determined technology. […] We have to think of determination not as a single force, or a single abstraction of forces, but as a process in which real determining factors – the distribution of power or of capital, social and physical inheritance, relations of scale and size between groups – set limits and exert pressures, but neither wholly control nor wholly predict the outcome of complex activity within or at these limits, and under or against these pressures. (132-3)

The unique factor of broadcasting – first in sound, then even more clearly in television – has been that its communication is accessible to normal social development; it requires no specific training which brings people within the orbit of public authority. If we can watch and listen to people in our immediate circle, we can watch and listen to television. (135)

All this will take time and prolonged effort. The struggle will reach into every corner of society. But that is precisely what is at stake: a new universal accessibility. Over a wide range from general television through commercial advertising to centralized information and data-processing systems, the technology that is now or is becoming available can be used to affect, to alter, and in some cases to control our whole social process. And it is ironic that the uses offer such extreme social choices. We could have inexpensive, locally based yet internationally extended television systems, making possible communication and information sharing on a scale that not long ago would have seemed utopian. These are the contemporary tools of the long revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy, and of the recovery of effective communication in complex urban and industrial societies. But they are also the tools of what would be, in context, a short and successful counter-revolution, in which, under the cover of talk about choice and competition, a few para-national corporations, with their attendant states and agencies, could reach farther into our lives, at every level from news to psychodrama, until individual and collective response to many different kinds of experience and problem became almost limited to choice between their programmed possibilities. (156-7)

Major and Minor Fields

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As I wrote about a little in the reading list post, your reading list will depend upon what your major and minor fields are. Here at OSU’s English department, you’re required to have one major field and at least one minor field. You can have two minor fields, though it feels like a lot more work for very little additional payoff, so I avoided that. Here at OSU, you’re also required to justify/explain your major and minor fields and what interests you about them, so for the sake of transparency and helping people who might be in the same position, I’m going to put my justifications here as well. Hope they’re useful for you.

Major Field Description: Post-70 U.S. Film and Television

My major field of study is Post-70 Film and Television, with a strong emphasis on blockbuster films and big budget series. These films and shows are not only the primary tentpoles for the industry during this period, but also the types of films and shows that become touchstones within and instigators of broader cultural conversations. They are also examples of storytelling pitched to the largest possible audience through what Hollywood largely considered as the default character and audience identity of the straight white cis-gendered male. Blockbusters highlighted technological filmmaking advancements (surround sound, digital editing, CGI, etc), the combination of which is fascinating in its implications for both how the films are made and why they are received the way they are by audiences. Of course alongside the rise of the blockbuster spectacular, there’s a strong independent tradition that thrives in the 1970s and continues somewhat diminished into the present (and from which some blockbusters like Halloween and The Terminator emerge); these films on my list provide important examples of alternate storytelling and scale-of-production possibilities. Though my focus is primarily on Hollywood film and television, I have included some examples from outside its boundaries in order to capture a range of other filmmaking (and television-making) techniques that often are eventually subsumed into Hollywood’s blockbuster style, like Spike Lee’s expansive scope in Do the Right Thing that gives the supporting cast space to be fuller characters than were previously allowed in Hollywood’s pragmatist cinematic form, not to mention its attention to characters and audiences that Hollywood had largely ignored in its general myopic concentration on whiteness. Although Hollywood is and has been dominated by white male voices, I also tried to be inclusive of films that had strong input by women and people of color where possible. Broadening beyond the auteurist understanding of single authorship of a film or tv show allows movies like Star Wars (with Maria Lucas’ editing) and shows like Veronica Mars (with Kristen Bell’s central performance) to be strong representatives of female voices in filmmaking alongside more traditional examples like Julie Dash’s direction of Daughters of the Dust and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s showrunning for Fleabag.

My list of secondary sources is populated with a mix of canonical film theory books and essays as well as representative writings on areas of particular interest to my focus on big budget, highly-leveraged film and television in the post-studio era. I consider myself to be, at least partially, a formalist, so Eisenstein, McLuhan, Bordwell, and Bazin (among others) are foundational texts for me. I am also, however, deeply interested in audience studies and spectator theory, an area that Jenkins, Lewis, and Staiger help illuminate. The history of film and film theory is significant to my major field, since I am bracketing a half century defined by the collapse of the classical studio system and the rise of radically new economic structures and film technologies in production, distribution, and exhibition; Carroll, Barnouw, Rodowick, Langford, and Connor will help me better contextualize the way that the current moment has come to be via industrial and technological changes over recent history. Following Richard Dyer, I am also interested in how Hollywood has constructed an overbearing whiteness as the often-understudied default position from which it tells its stories. So many of the movies and shows on my list are about whiteness without acknowledging that fact, and that phenomenon is one I am keen to study more.

via GIPHY

Minor Field Description: Narrative Theory and Seriality Studies

My minor field is in narratology with an emphasis on serialization in film and television. To get as broad an understanding as the field as is possible, I’ve selected some general overviews as well as some standout texts within important subfields (rhetorical narratology, natural and unnatural narratology). With that background, I then focused on serialization in film and television, an until recently underrepresented subfield within narratology. Here I have quite a few studies of television serialization, but, with a few exceptions, little on modern film serialization because not much has yet been written on that subject except for by writers like Locke and Verevis. Writers like Higgins have, however, investigated the world of early film serials. I hope to eventually combine the knowledge from this tv-heavy serialization theory with the more generalized film theory from my major field to create a deeper understanding of how film and tv narratives can operate serially. This will be a crucial part of my dissertation research, as I aim to write primarily about film sequels that were made long after the original films were in theaters. Seriality studies often looks to the way a show balances the serialized/episodic tendencies in relation to the show as a whole, while film studies—when it has analyzed seriality in its medium—usually looks at it primarily as an opportunity to continue a story/world that has been successful (commercially or critically) in the past. I think each of these foci have something to bring to each other, and I think the extreme length of time between films in the movies I’m interested in can call attention to the function gaps play in the aforementioned aspects of serialized filmic/televisual storytelling. To that end, I have populated my primary sources with various kinds of serialized storytelling in film and television. Many of the examples take an original film from my major field list and match it with that franchise’s latest entry, while others have a self-contained serial form, like Moonlight and Boyhood or Russian Doll.

Reading List: What it is, what’s on it

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If you’re coming across this blog in your search for reading lists to help you make your own, chances are you won’t need this explanation of what they are, so feel free to skip right down to the meat of this post. For friends and family members who read this without knowing the ins and outs of getting a PhD in the humanities/English/film/cultural studies, here’s a quick breakdown of what a reading list is and why it is important:

A reading list is, in large part, what it sounds like. You make a list of a whole bunch of books, movies, and tv shows that should combine to give you a solid grounding in the area of focus you’ve decided on (more on that in a different post). This means you’re likely picking the so-called canonical works, the big important things that people have heard of. But you’re also trying to balance what has been considered “important” by previous scholars with what you find important for your future in addition to trying to fill in the gaps of what has largely been left out of your field in the past. For much of the humanities, this means you’re giving some extra attention to aspects of race, gender, and sexuality that have been pushed to the side by the scholars who have come before you. After all, blindly following the mistakes of the past is, you know, bad. To that end, you also need to think about time. I leaned towards newer scholarship when compiling my reading list because my area of interest is something that is still ongoing and it is important to read what people are saying about it right now. That might not be as important to other scholars, so you have to think about your project and what it is important to know.

via GIPHY

Of course, even though it is called a reading list, that doesn’t mean that there’s only books on it. In English PhD programs or other fields where primary sources (works that you’re studying (fiction, films, tv shows), rather than the secondary sources which are usually books about those primary sources, AKA dry academic texts) include filmed media, you’ll want to think about if it is important to include some film or television on your reading list. In my case, where my primary and secondary fields of study are both concentrated on film and television, I don’t have any textual fiction on my “reading” list, it is instead full of fiction (and one documentary!) films and shows. In standard English areas of study where you’d read primarily fiction texts for your primary sources, you’d also have a much higher proportion of those kinds of texts than I do. In the pop culture subfields like mine, there’s still apparently some skepticism about whether we’re as rigorous as the other fields and so we must prove our mettle by reading much more secondary sources than other fields need to. It’s bullshit, basically, but that’s why my reading list is about 50/50 primary and secondary texts.

My primary field is about as narrow as you’re allowed to get, at least here at OSU, so I was able to curate the kinds of movies that ended up on my list a bit more than normal. Often, absurdly, one is required to declare all of film or television studies as their primary field, and are therefore obliged to cram the entire history of filmed media onto a list that, at most, can be about 40 texts long. That’s silly. Looking over others’ example lists in this field shows that there’s a heavy preference towards the older end of film history, with things petering out pretty strongly by the time you get to the 90s and 2000s. Since my area of interest (legacyquels) don’t really appear as such until ~2008, this kind of list would be… detrimental. As such, my list only goes from 1970 to the present and leans towards the large blockbuster productions that the legacyquels have been part of. You’ll notice a fun trick I did where I put the first film of a series that had a legacyquel in my primary field reading list and then the legacyquel in my more specialized secondary field list. 1 for the price of 2! The problem is that there aren’t many films in my area of study that aren’t created by straight cis white guys, so I had to get my share of diverse creators (probably not enough, in fact) around the edges of my reading list. More on that in my next post about my major and minor fields.

I think that’s enough rambling. I’ll also use this post as an index and link every post I do for an individual entry on this list to the corresponding text here. So if you’re interested in what I have to say about one of these texts, just click on the link to it. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to comment on this post and I’ll answer when I can. You can also find me on twitter @beneclasedu, and you can ask me there if you find this list years after the fact and I no longer have access to the OSU login that I’m using to host this site. Without further ado, here’s the list(s):

Major Field: Post-70 Film and Television

Primary Sources (Film)

  1. John Cassavetes, A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
  2. Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975)
  3. Steven Spielberg, Jaws (1975)
  4. John G. Avildsen, Rocky (1976)
  5. Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver (1976)
  6. George Lucas, Star Wars (1977)
  7. John Carpenter, Halloween (1978)
  8. Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now (1979)
  9. George Miller, Mad Max (1979)
  10. Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
  11. Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (1982)
  12. David Cronenberg, Videodrome (1983)
  13. James Cameron, The Terminator (1984)
  14. Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (1989)
  15. Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991)
  16. Jonathan Demme, The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
  17. John Singleton, Boyz n the Hood (1991)
  18. Edward James Olmos, American Me (1992)
  19. Richard Linklater, Before Sunrise (1995)
  20. Wes Craven, Scream (1996)
  21. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, The Matrix (1999)
  22. Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
  23. Jane Campion, In the Cut (2002)
  24. Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away (2002)
  25. Brad Bird, The Incredibles (2004)
  26. Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
  27. Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood (2007)
  28. Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2009)
  29. Joss Whedon, The Avengers (2012)
  30. Luca Guadagnino, Call Me by Your Name (2017)
  31. Jordan Peele, Get Out (2017)

Primary Sources (Television)

  1. Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander (1983, 5 episodes)
  2. David Lynch and Mark Frost, Twin Peaks (1990-91, 30 episodes)
  3. David Milch, Deadwood (2004-06, 30 episodes)
  4. Rob Thomas, Veronica Mars (2004-06, 64 episodes)
  5. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, Lost (2004-10, 121 episodes)
  6. Dave Filoni, Star Wars: Clone Wars (2009-2014, 121 episodes)
  7. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag (2018-19)

Secondary Sources

  1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935)
  2. Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” (1962)
  3. Stuart Hall & Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (2018)
  4. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message (1968)
  5. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (1969)
  6. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies 3rd Edition (2016)
  7. Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance” (1975)
  8. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)
  9. David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” (1979)
  10. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1979)
  11. Seymour Chatman, “What Novels Can Do that Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)” (1980)
  12. Noël Carroll, “The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (And Beyond)” (1982)
  13. Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television 2nd Edition (1990)
  14. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992)
  15. Lisa A. Lewis, The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (1992)
  16. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (1993)
  17. Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (1997)
  18. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999)
  19. Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (2000)
  20. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (2001)
  21. Charles Ramírez Berg, Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance (2002)
  22. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Its Cultural Forms (2003)
  23. Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema Vol. 1 (2004)
  24. Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (2004)
  25. Peter Kramer, “Big Pictures: Studying Contemporary Hollywood Cinema through Its Greatest Hits (2005)
  26. Janet McCabe, Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema (2005)
  27. Cornel Sandvoss, Fans, the Mirror of Consumption (2005)
  28. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006)
  29. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (2007)
  30. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008)
  31. Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art (2009)
  32. Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture (2009)
  33. Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (2010)
  34. Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (2010)
  35. Barry Langford, Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology Since 1945 (2010)
  36. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (2011)
  37. Amy Holdsworth, Television, Memory, and Nostalgia (2011)
  38. Victoria O’Donnell, Television Criticism (2012)
  39. Caetlin Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (2013)
  40. Ruby Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (2013)
  41. Gerald Sim, The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (2014)
  42. D. Connor, The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (2015)
  43. Matt Yockey, Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe (2017)
  44. Gilberto Perez, The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film (2019)
  45. Sean Guynes, Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics (2020)
  46. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell, How to Watch Television (2020)

 

Secondary Field: Narratology (focus on serialization)

Primary Sources (Film)

  1. David Lynch, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
  2. Steve Miner, Halloween H20 (1998)
  3. Richard Linklater, Before Sunset (2004)
  4. Wes Craven, Scream 4 (2011)
  5. Richard Linklater, Before Midnight (2013)
  6. Richard Linklater, Boyhood (2014)
  7. George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
  8. Ryan Coogler, Creed (2015)
  9. J. Abrams, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
  10. Barry Jenkins, Moonlight (2016)
  11. Dennis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
  12. David Gordon Green, Halloween (2018)
  13. Anthony and Joe Russo, Avengers: Endgame (2019)
  14. Tim Miller, Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Primary Sources (Television)

  1. The Up Series (1964-2019, 9 episodes/films)
  2. David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017, 18 episodes)
  3. David Milch, Deadwood (2019, 1 movie)
  4. Rob Thomas, Veronica Mars (2019, 8 episodes)
  5. Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler, and Leslye Headland, Russian Doll (2019, 8 episodes)
  6. Dave Filoni, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2020, 12 episodes)

Secondary Sources

  1. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983) !
  2. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (1990)
  3. Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (2000)
  4. Kristen Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (2003)
  5. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It (2006)
  6. Michael Z. Newman, “From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative” (2006)
  7. Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009)
  8. Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis, Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (2010)
  9. Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (2010)
  10. Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas, New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age (2011)
  11. David Herman, James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012)
  12. Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes, Adaptations, and Fan Productions: Remake/Remodel (2012)
  13. Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Film Sequels (2012)
  14. Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (2015)
  15. Lee Goldberg, Television Fast Forward: Sequels & Remakes of Cancelled Series (2015)
  16. Robin Warhol, “Binge Watching: How Netflix Original Programs are Changing Serial Form” (2016)
  17. Scott Higgins, Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial (2016)
  18. James Phelan, Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (2017)
  19. Frank Kelleter, Media of Serial Narrative (2017)
  20. Brian Richardson, A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives (2019)
  21. Jan Alber and Brian Richardson, Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges (2020)