Television and the Self
Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation
Contributions by Tanja N. Aho, Andrée E. C. Betancourt, Amy C. Duvall, Jennifer G. Hall, Michael Johnson, Susan G. Kahlenberg, Amanda S. McClain, Brian McKernan, Cynthia J. Miller Institute for Liberal Arts, Emerson College, Marcelina Piotrowski, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Leah A. Rosenberg, David Staton, Ellen E. Stiffler, Lynne M. Webb, Robin Redmond Wright, Jingsi Christina Wu Edited by Kathleen M. Ryan, Deborah A. Macey
Publication date:
05 April 2013Length of book:
304 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
236x162mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780739179574
Sitting prominently at the hearth of our homes, television serves as a voice of our modern time. Given our media-saturated society and television’s prominent voice and place in the home, it is likely we learn about our society and selves through these stories. These narratives are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that shape and reflect the world and our role in it. Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation brings together a diverse group of scholars to investigate the role television plays in shaping our understanding of self and family. This edited collection’s rich and diverse research demonstrates how television plays an important role in negotiating self, and goes far beyond the treacly “very special” episodes found in family sit-coms in the 1980s. Instead, the authors show how television reflects our reality and helps us to sort out what it means to be a twenty-first-century man or woman.
The strength of Television and the Self is its effort to create conversation across and within areas of television studies, theoretically, thematically, and methodologically. Perhaps most noteworthy are the diverse methodological perspectives employed here—ranging from discourse and textual analysis to autoethnography, content analysis, and reflections on media history — which point to the breadth and plurality of the field. The autoethnographies (Marcelina Piotrowski’s essay on 'becoming Polish' through television viewership and Andree Betancourt’s reflection on motherhood as portrayed through characters on HBO’s Six Feet Under and The Sopranos) are especially powerful, merging academic critique with personal stories, narrated by authors who reflect—thoughtfully and, at times, emotionally—on the ways in which their relationship to TV has impacted their identities and lives. . . .Television and the Self speaks to multiple perspectives, inviting readers to consider the ways in which our own identities, values, and everyday lives have been shaped and molded, influenced and informed, by our engagement with televisual narratives.