Not available to order
Publication date:
22 September 2006Length of book:
226 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9780742535657
This up-to-date and lively text focuses on a wide range of issues, such as politics as theater, the economic forces shaping contemporary political media, the rhetoric of the "War on Terrorism," and the growth of new media. Separate chapters explore a range of contexts, including the presidency, Congress and the courts, foreign news reporting, and political art. The text concludes with ways to open up additional pathways for imagining our national life, ranging from Internet-supported activism to innovative uses of documentary film.
Center Stage: Media and the Performance of American Politics examines political and mediated communication as forms of representational theater. Taking the dramatic orientation to politics seriously, Woodward explores how American civic culture is variously enriched and diminished by the ways practitioners and journalists organize narratives, or stories, about our civic life.
Center Stage: Media and the Performance of American Politics examines political and mediated communication as forms of representational theater. Taking the dramatic orientation to politics seriously, Woodward explores how American civic culture is variously enriched and diminished by the ways practitioners and journalists organize narratives, or stories, about our civic life.
The role of ritual, pageantry, and drama in politics predates the media age by centuries. In Center Stage Gary Woodward examines how the staging of modern mediated political events, the professionalization of politics, and a relatively passive citizenry come together to provide an opportunity for us 'to rekindle the nation's impaired capacity for political imagination.' This is a highly readable text that conveys the drama of modern political stagecraft through exquisite narrative while simultaneously supporting arguments and analysis with a wide range of research studies and rhetorical and political theory.