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Academic Year 2002/2003


Understanding Television: Industrial System, Cultural Form, and Everyday Life
ANTH 306 SP

Crosslistings:
AMST 306
FILM 306

Television designates an industry, its textual products, and a set of reading practices. Thus, understanding television requires a multidisciplinary approach. Focusing on the U.S. television industry, we will consider its history, economics, and organizational structures; its development, production, and distribution practices; and its interactions with other media industries. Television's product is an immense array of symbolic or cultural goods designed to attract large, heterogenous audiences and deliver their attention to sponsors. Televisual genres, programs, and individual episodes may be approached and understood as textual phenomena structured to offer possibilities of meaning and pleasure to audiences. The actual production of meaning and pleasure is completed in everyday, largely domestic contexts by viewers from diverse social backgrounds whose interests, competences, and intensity of involvement with television vary on multiple lines. From the viewpoint of reception, we will investigate how viewers' responses to television may be conditioned by their social positions and interpretive resources.

MAJOR READINGS

John Thorton Caldwell, TELEVISUALITY: STYLE, CRISIS, AND AUTHORITY IN MODERN TELEVISION
Horace Newcomb, ed., TELEVISION: THE CRITICAL VIEW (5th edition)
Josh Gamson, FREAKS TALK BACK
Bonnie Dow, PRIME TIME FEMINISM
Janet Staiger, BLOCKBUSTER TV

EXAMINATIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

Students are to keep a weekly research journal; there will be one or two short papers, a class presentation, and a final research paper.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS and/or COMMENTS

INTERVIEW REQUIRED. Students seeking admission must schedule an interview with the instructor to determine their eligibility. For each class there will be several hours of required television viewing of pretaped shows.

Unless preregistered students attend the first class meeting or communicate directly with the instructor prior to the first class, they will be dropped from the class list. NOTE: Students must still submit a completed Drop/Add form to the Registrar's Office.

The instructor of this course will not be using the on-line wait list. If you are interested in this course, please contact the instructor directly.

COURSE FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Level: UGRD    Credit: 1    Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS ANTH    Grading Mode: Student Option   

Prerequisites: NONE

SECTION 01

Instructor(s): Traube,Elizabeth G.   
Times: ...W... 07:00PM-09:50PM;     Location: ANTH6
Reserved Seats:    (Total Limit: 24)
SR. major:    Jr. major:
SR. non-major:    Jr. non-major:    SO:    FR:

Special Attributes:
Curricular Renewal:    Reading Non-Verbal Texts, Focused Inquiry Course
Permission:    Permission of Instructor Required
Links to Web Resources For This Course.

Last Updated on MAR-18-2003


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