Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation

(Paperback)

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Description

Sitting prominently at the hearth of our homes, television serves as a voice of our modern time. Given our media-saturated society and televisions 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 collections 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.

Reviews

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 hereranging 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 Piotrowskis essay on 'becoming Polish' through television viewership and Andree Betancourts reflection on motherhood as portrayed through characters on HBOs Six Feet Under and The Sopranos) are especially powerful, merging academic critique with personal stories, narrated by authors who reflectthoughtfully and, at times, emotionallyon 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. * Journal of American Culture *
[This is a] well-written and researched chapters of this edited volume. . . .The book is an excellent text and each chapter is well researched and the editors contribute much to the discipline. * Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly *
Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation is a fresh, lively approach to thinking about television in our everyday lives. The chapters in this edited volume highlight the importance of interrogating television programs as text. The reflexive collection makes an important contribution to our understanding of role of television in our lives, how TV contributes to identity formation, and above all how and why we enjoy it as much as we do. -- Debra Merskin, University of Oregon

Author Bio

Kathleen M. Ryan spent more than twenty years in network and local news production and she continues to work as an active multimedia director and producer. She holds a PhD in communication and society from University of Oregon, an MA in broadcast journalism from University of Southern California, and a BA in political science from University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado. Deborah A. Macey holds a PhD in communication and society from the University of Oregon, an MA in Communication and a BS in Business Administration from Saint Louis University. She is a visiting assistant professor at Saint Louis University, where she teaches courses in human communication and media studies.