week one  8/25  The Semiotic Method

 week two  9/1  Double Deception and Open
                                          Signification in TV Advertising

 week three  9/8  Repetition and Variation

 week four  9/15  Crafty Comfy Cuteness

 week five  9/22  The Reality Conundrum

 week six  9 /29  Canonical TV Narratives

 week seven  10/6  G4 and the Culture of Irony

 week eight  10/13  Watching People
                                          Talking About Cooking

 week nine  10/20   Ideology and Exnomination

 week ten  10/27  Temporality and the Soaps

 week eleven  11/3  Talk TV: The Insistence of
                                          the Signifying Chain

 week twelve  11/10  Double Deception

 week thirteen  11/17  Video Aesthetics in Film

 week fourteen  11/24  Postfeminism

 week fifteen  12/29  Textual Detournement

If you ask the people around you why they watch television, they’re liable to tell you any number of things: they watch TV because it makes them laugh or because it moves them emotionally; they watch because certain shows cater to their personal interests; they watch in order to stay informed about what’s going on in the world; or perhaps they don’t really “watch” at all, but just find a certain comfort in having the set turned on. Despite the fact that TV has many billions of viewers worldwide, it is curious that very few ever take the time to study television—breaking it down, picking it apart, asking what it means, how it works, and what it wants of us.

As Robert C. Allen suggests in his introduction to Channels of Discourse, there are two reasons why we don’t often subject television to critical scrutiny. First, TV is considered by many to be “mere entertainment,” the lightest of pop-cultural diversions, and is thus either ignored as harmless background noise, or dismissed as commercial trash, hardly meriting any deep scholarly analysis. Second, TV is simply too much a part of our daily lives for us to analyze its discourse objectively and without prejudice, let alone understand our own complicity in television’s project.

This course is designed to actively confront both of the problems Allen identifies. Over the next fourteen weeks we will deliberately work to break down divisions between light entertainment and serious art; we will indict the apparently harmless and learn to appreciate the crass. We will look very closely at programs that many would insist do not merit such scrutiny. We will read what demands to be seen and see what demands to be read. Above all, however, we will seek to make strange the many televisual forms and conventions that we have, over years of viewing, come to accept as natural, normal and given.

As a member of this class, you will learn to view and discuss television in ways that will unnerve your friends, upset your relatives, and that will bring casual conversations to a screeching halt. As we will see, however, there is nothing casual about TV’s hunger for viewership, nor is there anything accidental about its efforts to position viewers. By actively refusing the impulse to take TV for granted, this course works to uncover TV’s own insatiable desire for viewers’ desire—demystifying the ever-evolving strategies by which TV keeps us hooked, always wanting more.

Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and
     Contemporary Criticism
Robert C. Allen, ed.
Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1992

Making Sense of Media: Key Texts in Media and Cultural Studies
by Arthur Asa Berger
Blackwell Publishers, 2004