Television is perhaps the most ubiquitous and overlooked of all media. In its various forms--as commercial broadcast receiver, video playback unit, surveillance agent, art object, gaming and computer screen--it has come to shape our reality, yet few of us have stopped to examine the medium in any depth. Critics deride it as a "vast wasteland" responsible for the "dumbing down" of our culture, and we are encouraged to watch furtively, all the while disavowing our own enjoyment. These responses assume TV creates an automatic and pernicious effect on our behaviors, but this is clearly overly simplistic. Our goal in this course will be to examine television with a more careful eye, learning how to interpret it as a multifaceted social apparatus. To do this, we will take a materialist approach, emphasizing TV's status as a material object, a technology, an industry, and a cultural force that shapes, rather than merely reflects, contemporary society. We will be particularly interested in how television operates as a site for the negotiation of social norms and expectations, exhibiting the dialectical tug of war between forces of power and forces of resistance in US society.

Evaluation will be based on eight response papers (200-400 words), class participation, including responsibility for leading class discussion at least once, and a 20-25 page essay demonstrating original research related to the cultural study of television.

• Gigi Durham & Douglas Kellner, eds. Media and Cultural Studies
• Robert Allen, Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism. 2^nd Ed.
• Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited
• A selection of individual essays that will be posted in the COURSE MATERIALS folder the Blackboard site for this class (http://blackboard.okstate.edu)

Participation: Students are expected to attend every class and participate actively in class discussions. You will also be assigned to lead class discussion at least once during the semester, and your performance should demonstrate a grasp of the key issues of the day. You need not demonstrate complete mastery, but you should identify the central points of agreement or debate among the readings assigned for that day and lead a useful discussion of those topics. In many cases, the questions you have about the readings will be of more value to discussion than the statements you are prepared to affirm, so don't hesitate to indicate where you feel lost or confused. Handouts or clips are welcome but not essential. Participation will account for 10% of your grade.

Response Papers: You will be responsible for writing 8 brief (200-400 words) response papers over the course of the 15 week semester. Papers will be due on the day that we discuss the subject texts, and you may submit no more than one paper a week. I suggest you complete these assignments early in the semester so that you may have more time to devote to your seminar paper at the end. The papers should elaborate on key topics in the readings. Therefore, you should identify a key idea or set of ideas from the readings and attempt to apply the idea(s) to an analysis of the television medium, a TV text, or TV viewing habits. Application should ideally lead to evaluation: What are the limitations and possibilities of this idea or approach? What sort of thinking does it enable? What sort does it disable? Is it ultimately more useful than debilitating? These response papers will comprise 40% of your grade.

Research Essay: You will write a 20-25 page research essay demonstrating an original analysis of TV text(s), genres, or logics in relation to some material aspect of television history, production, distribution, or reception. I want to see you contextualize, not just offer a clever formal or psychoanalytic analysis. You will also present an abstract of your proposed topic to the class for comments and critiques. This will happen on a rolling basis beginning week 11. The final essay will be due by Monday of finals week. This will be worth 50% of your grade.

Assistance: You are strongly encouraged to discuss your essay topic and strategies with me early and often. I will happily comment on drafts of all papers, including the response papers, as long as I receive the drafts in a timely manner (i.e. not on the day before they are due). Finally, I am available to discuss the theoretical materials during office hours if you are having trouble or have performed poorly on the response papers. I urge you to take advantage of these opportunities.

Academic Honesty: Needless to say, all work you turn in for this class must be your own work. Plagiarism of any sort, incidental or intentional, will resort in failure for the course.

8/24

Introduction: The TV Apparatus

Read:

*John Ellis, "Broadcast TV as Cultural Form"
*Ellis, "Broadcast TV as Sound and Image"
*Raymond Williams, "Programming as Sequence & Flow"

8/31

Read:

"Introduction to Part I" MCS (33-38)
Marx, "The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas" MCS (39-42)
Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" MCS (152-165)
Gramsci, "Subaltern Classes, Concept of Ideology, and Cultural Themes: Ideological Material" MCS (43-47)
Adorno & Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry" MCS (71-101)
*Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media"

9/7

Read:

"Introduction to Part III" MCS  ( 219-224)
Garnham, "Contribution to the Pol. Ec. of Mass Communication" MCS (225-252)
Smythe, "On the Audience Commodity" MCS (253-279)
*Michael Curtin, "On Edge: Culture Industries in the Neo-Network Era."
*Eileen Meehan & Jackie Byars, "Telefeminism: How Lifetime Got It's Groove"

9/14

Political Economy II: TV as Public Sphere

Read:

Habermas, "The Public Sphere" MCS (102-108)
*David Morley, "Broadcasting and the Construction of the National Family"
Hermann & Chomsky "A Propaganda Model" MCS (280-318)
Gross, "Out of the Mainstream" MCS (405-423)

Watch:

9/21

Read:

*Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"
Seiter, "Semiotics, Structuralism, and Television" COD (31-66)
Feuer, "Genre Study and Television" COD  (138-160)
White, "Ideology and Ideological Analysis in TV" COD (161-202)

9/28

Read:

*Jane Feuer, "Liveness: Ontology as Ideology"
*David Morley, "Television & Gender"
*Todd Gitlin, "The Whole World is Watching"
*Lana Rakow & Kimberlie Kranich, "Woman as Sign in Television News"
*Stuart Hall, "Racist Ideologies and the Media"

10/5

Read:

McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message" MCS (129-138)
*Michel Foucault, from Discipline & Punish
*Lynn Spigel,  "The Suburban Home Companion: TV And The Neighborhood Ideal In Post-War America"
*Anna McCarthy, "Out of Home Networks in the 1990s"
*Tania Modleski, "Rhythms of Reception"

10/12

Cultural Studies: Theorizing Power & Resistance

Read:

Barthes, "Operation Margarine, Myth Today" MCS (121-128)
Hebdige, "From Culture to Hegemony & Subculture the Unnatural Break" MCS (198-216)
Hall, "Encoding/Decoding" MCS (166-176)
*John Storey, "Popular Culture as an Arena of Hegemony"
Fiske, "British Cultural Studies and Television" COD (284-326)
Gray, "The Politics of Representation in Network Television" MCS (439-461)

10/19

Class will not meet, but you will have the following reading:

Reception Studies I: Theorizing the Active Audience

Read:

*Herbert Gans, "The Critique of Mass Culture"
Allen, "Audience-Oriented Criticism and Television" COD (101-137)
*John Fiske, "Moments of Television"
*Ien Ang, "Dallas: Between Reality and Fiction"
*Seiter, et al. "Toward an Ethnography of Soap Opera Viewers"  

10/26

Reception Studies II: Fan Culture

Read:

*Michel DeCerteau, from The Practice of Everyday Life
*Henry Jenkins, "Star Trek Re-Run, Re-Read, Re-Written: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching"
*Matt Hills, "Defining Cult TV"
*Will Brooker, "Living on Dawson's Creek: Teen Viewers, Cultural Convergence, & TV Overflow"

11/2

"Introduction to Part IV" MCS (513-520)
*Susan Sontag, "On Culture and the New Sensibility"
Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" MCS (550-587)
Guy Debord, "The Commodity as Spectacle" MCS (139-143)
Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra" MCS (521-549)
Collins, "Postmodernism and Television" COD (327-353)
*Jane Feuer, "Art Discourse in 1980s Television: Modernism as Postmodernism"

11/9

Postmodern Television: Intertextuality & Camp

Read:

*John Fiske, "Intertextuality"
*John Caldwell, "The Televisual Audience: Interactive Pizza"
*Susan Sontag, "On Camp"
*Jane Feuer, "The Gay Sitcom"
*Andy Medhurst, "Batman, Deviance, and Camp"

11/16

Postmodern Subjectivity: Self-Construction on/through TV

Read:

*John Storey, ""Popular Culture as the 'Roots' and 'Routes' of Cultural Identities"
*Fiske, "Subjectivity and Address"
McRobbie, "Feminism, Postmodernism, and the 'Real Me'" MCS (598-610)
*Alexander Doty, "The Sissy Boy, the Fat Ladies, and the Dykes: Queerness and/as Gender in Pee-Wee's World"

11/23

11/30

Read:

Schiller, "Not Yet the Post-Imperial Era" MCS (318-333)
*Edward Hermann & Robert McChesney, "The Global Media in the Late 1990s"
*Sinclair et al., "New Patterns in Global TV"
*Ted Magder, "The End of TV 101"
*Daniel Miller, "The Young and the Restless in Trinidad"

12/7

Gitlin, Media Unlimited

12/12