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Understanding Television: Industrial System, Cultural Form, and Everyday Life
CHUM306 SP

Crosslistings: AMST306,ANTH306,FILM306

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 an d 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 investiga te how viewers' responses to television may be conditioned by their social positions and interpretive resources.

MAJOR READINGS

James L. Baughman, THE REPUBLIC OF MASS CULTURE;
Nicholas Abercrombie, TELEVISION AND SOCIETY;
John Thornton Caldwell, TELEVISUALITY: STYLE, CRISIS, and AUTHORITY IN MODERN TELEVISION;
Horace Newcomb, ed., TELEVISION: THE CRITICAL VIEW (Fifth edition);
Joshua Gamson, FREAKS TALK BACK: TABLOID TALKSHOWS AND SEXUAL NONCONFORMITY;
Robert Thompson, TELEVISION'S SECOND GOLDEN AGE

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

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

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.

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-10:00PM;     Location: CFH106
Reserved Seats:    (Total Limit: 24)
SR. major:    Jr. major:
SR. non-major:    Jr. non-major:    SO:    FR: X

Special Attributes:
Curricular Renewal:    Reading Non-Verbal Texts, Focused Inquiry Course
Permission:    Permission of Instructor Required

Last Updated on MAR-24-2000


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