Dreams in American Television Narratives: From Dallas to Buffy

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Dreams in Television Narratives is the first comprehensive analysis of one of American television's most frequently utilized tropes, the dream. From its beginning, television has been a storytelling medium. Whether delivered to a live audience or played out on a sound stage, narratives and those who write them have always been the crux of the television program. While film can claim a long history of scholarly inquiry into the connection between film and dreams, no comprehensive research exists on the subject of television dreams. Locating its primary function as narrative, the author uses examples from American sitcoms and dramatic programs, analyzing the narrative functions of dreams using, as its frame, Carl Jung's narrative stages of the dream: exposition, development, culmination, and conclusion. While television dreams are analyzed throughout, case studies of the television programs The Sopranos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are included to show in detail how dreams function throughout a television series. Includes a compendium of over 1000 television episodes that include dreams, a valuable tool for any television scholar or enthusiast.

Reviews

In this deftly written, cogent, comprehensive, and pioneering study, a must read for every fully conscious TV scholar, Cynthia Burkhead not only wakes up television studies to the neglected oneirics of its intricate narratology but provides some dreamy interpretations of the most engaging and essential televisual reveries. -- David Lavery, author of Joss Whedon: A Creative Portrait from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Marvels The Avengers
Dreams in American Television Narratives: From Dallas to Buffy is a pioneering study of a cutting-edge topic. This book offers an engaging examination of television dreaming in American-produced TV drama, showing how dreams function not only to deepen and extend TV drama stories, but also as vehicles for the psychological probing of televisions most intriguing characters. Focusing on TV dramas of the last three decades from the 1990s quality era to the most audacious examples of complexity from recent years this study demonstrates that the increased prevalence and significance of dreams in American TV drama owe much to the multi-layered, serialised modes of storytelling that increasingly define this once formulaic and episodic programme category. -- Trisha Dunleavy, Associate Professor of Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and author of Television Drama: Form, Agency, Innovation

Author Bio

Cynthia Burkhead, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Alabama, US. She is the author of the Student Companion to John Steinbeck and the coeditor of Joss Whedon: Conversations and Grace Under Pressure: Grey's Anatomy Uncovered.