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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.
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
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS ANTH Grading Mode: Student Option
Prerequisites: NONE
Last Updated on MAR-24-2000
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459