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The latest addition to the
Media and Society Series,
Meanings of the Medium takes a new approach to the study of the past, present, and future of television. Most of its authors are not media experts but literary critics, philosophers, rhetoricians, and historians. They use their unique skills to examine three interwoven themes: the origin and meaning of American attitudes toward television, the relationship between high art and television's popular art, and the relationship between particular kinds of programs and the audience's sensibilities. Stressing an aesthetic and historical approach, the volume directs itself to the reasons why people watch particular programs and what these patterns tell us about ourselves.
This volume is divided into three sections. First, Television and Society stresses the dynamic relationship between a particular genre and the sensibility of its audience. Television Programming as Art traces the subtle connections between High culture and examples of contemporary television programs. The development of American attitudes toward television is documented by media experts in the final section, Television and Its Critics.
List of contents
Introduction
Television and SocietyTelegenic Colloquies: Paradigms of Society in the TV Talk Show by Robert Cluett
Television Intimacy: Paradoxes of Trust and Romance by Judith Kegan Gardiner
Field and Screen: Baseball and Television by Michael Seidel
Not Such A Long Way, Baby: Women and Televised Myth by Harriet Blodgett
Television Programming as ArtAriosto and Bochco: Polyphonic Plotting in Orlando Furioso, Hill Street Blues, and L.A. Law by James V. Mirollo
The Good, the Bad and the Counterfeit: A Tolstoyan Theory of Television Narrative by Mary Sirridge
Richard Chamberlain's Hamlet Theoharis C. Theoharis
Television and Its CriticsTaking Television Too Seriously--and Not Seriously Enough by Barbara Lee
Mass Culture, Class Culture, Democracy, and Prime Time: Television Criticism and the Question of Quality, 1920-1988 by David Marc
From Mass Man to Postmodernism: Critical Analyses of Television for the Past Half Century by James. M. O'Brien
Bibliography
Index
About the author
KATHERINE USHER HENDERSON is Professor of English and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Dominican College of San Raphael. The author of
Joan Didion, she has published extensively on women's studies and contemporary writers.
JOSEPH ANTHONY MAZZEO is Avalon Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of eight books including
Varieties of Interpretation,
Renaissance and Revolution: The Remaking of European Thought,
The Design of Life: Major Themes in Biological Thought.
