Televisuality : style, crisis, and authority in American television

Author(s)

• Caldwell, John Thornton

Bibliographic Information

Televisuality : style, crisis, and authority in American television

John T. Caldwell

（Rutgers University Press classics）

Rutgers University Press, 2020, c1995

• : pbk

Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 599-621) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Although the "decline" of network television in the face of cable programming was an institutional crisis of television history, John Caldwell's classic volume Televisuality reveals that this decline spawned a flurry of new production initiatives to reassert network authority. Television in the 1980s hyped an extensive array of exhibitionist practices to raise the prime-time marquee above the multi-channel flow. Televisuality demonstrates the cultural logic of stylistic exhibitionism in everything from prestige series (Northern Exposure) and "loss-leader" event-status programming (War and Remembrance) to lower "trash" and "tabloid" forms (Pee-Wee's Playhouse and reality TV). Caldwell shows how "import-auteurs" like Oliver Stone and David Lynch were stylized for prime time as videographics packaged and tamed crisis news coverage. By drawing on production experience and critical and cultural analysis, and by tying technologies to aesthetics and ideology, Televisuality is a powerful call for desegregation of theory and practice in media scholarship and an end to the willful blindness of "high theory."

Table of Contents

Contents Preface Part I The Problem of the Image 1 Excessive Style: The Crisis of Network Television 2 Unwanted Houseguests and Altered States: A Short History of Aesthetic Posturing 3 Modes of Production: The Televisual Apparatus Part II The Aesthetic Economy of Televisuality 4 Boutique: Designer Television/Auteurist Spin Doctoring 5 Franchiser: Digital Packaging/Industrial-Strength Semiotics 6 Loss Leader: Event Status Programming/Exhibitionist History 7 Trash TV: Thrift-Shop Video/More Is More 8 Tabloid TV: Styled Live/Ontological Stripmall Part III Cultural Aspects of Televisuality 9 Televisual Audience: Interactive Pizza 10 Televisual Economy: Recessionary Aesthetics 11 Televisual Politics: Negotiating Race in the L.A. Rebellion Postscript: Intellectual Culture, Image, and Iconoclasm Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

by "Nielsen BookData"

Details

• NCID: BC06058635
• ISBN:
  • 9781978816039
• Country Code: us
• Title Language Code: eng
• Text Language Code: eng
• Place of Publication: New Brunswick, N.J.
• Pages/Volumes: xvi, 647 p.
• Size: 21 cm
• Classification:
  • LCC : PN1992.6
  • DC20 : 302.23/45
• Subject Headings:
  • LCSH : Television broadcasting -- Social aspects -- United States
  • LCSH : Television broadcasting -- United States -- History
  • LCSH : Television programs -- United States -- History and criticism
  • LCSH : Visual communication
• Parent Bibliography ID:
  • BB27695152