ABSTRACT
This book offers the reader a set of tools for analyzing television. Wehope anyone-even a casual viewer-might use them to better under - stand the medium. But perhaps you’d like to take your under standing of television beyond that of a casual viewer. Perhaps you’d like to study the medium in a more rigorous fashion. If this is your interest, then you’ll need to understand some of the methods that have evolved in the study of television from a critical studies perspective-rooted in analytical methods applied to literature, art, history, economics, political science, the cinema, and the theater. These methods tend to be clustered together in a discipline known as television studies, which blossomed as the twentieth century ended, as can be seen from this flurry of book releases:
1998: The Television Studies Book
1999: Critical Ideas in Television Studies
2002: Television Studies: The Key Concepts
2002: Television Studies
2004: The Television Studies Reader
2004: An Introduction to Television Studies
2009: Television Studies After TV
2010: Television Studies: The Basics1
What interests us most are the “critical methods and applications” (as suggested by this book’s subtitle) influenced by the different strains of television studies that first developed during the 1980s and 1990s and continue to this day. This part of the book will outline the most significant of those strains. We have divided them into approaches that focus mostly on TV programs “themselves,” without theorizing extensively about the
3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7111 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 35 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
TV-industry workers. Chapter 12 addresses the former, examining author - ship, stylistics, genre study, and semiotics. Chapter 13 summarizes the latter, considering ideological analysis, political economy, feminism, queer theory, and race and ethnic studies. As you’ll see, our division quickly crumbles as textual analysis inevitably makes assumptions about the viewer/industry and viewer/industry research has little relevance if it doesn’t also talk about programs. Nonetheless, clustering these approaches into different chapters allows us to see certain common areas of interest in them.
