ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the experience of watching television-an experience that, as I suggested in the introduction, is a pervasive and almost universal feature of modern life. And yet, precisely because it is so much a part of the fabric of everyday life, it is not very well understood. All of the essays in this book address the general question: How do we make sense of and derive pleasure from watching television? This chapter zeros in on the meeting place between television’s discourses and television viewers. We will approach this intersection between the world inside the set and the viewer in front of it from three directions. First, I assess the general strand of contemporary literary theory called readeroriented criticism to see what light it might shed on how we understand television narratives. Sarah Kozloff’s chapter on television narratives has examined the relationship between the tellers of “tele-tales” and the tales them-selves. In part, this chapter takes up the relationship between television’s tales and the viewers of those tales. If every story presumes a teller, it also presumes someone to whom the story is told.
