The Soap Opera Paradigm

The Soap Opera Paradigm PDF Author: James H. Wittebols
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742520028
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
The Soap Opera Paradigm is an engaging look at the pervasive use of daytime soap opera storytelling techniques in most television program genres, from prime time soap operas and reality shows to the nightly news, coverage of political campaigns, and sports programming. Drawing from a wealth of research, James Wittebols shows how programming techniques have changed over time and what roles media concentration and commercial influences have played in these changes. Visit our website for sample chapters!

The Soap Opera Paradigm

The Soap Opera Paradigm PDF Author: James H. Wittebols
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742520028
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Soap Opera Paradigm is an engaging look at the pervasive use of daytime soap opera storytelling techniques in most television program genres, from prime time soap operas and reality shows to the nightly news, coverage of political campaigns, and sports programming. Drawing from a wealth of research, James Wittebols shows how programming techniques have changed over time and what roles media concentration and commercial influences have played in these changes. Visit our website for sample chapters!

The Survival of Soap Opera

The Survival of Soap Opera PDF Author: Sam Ford
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604737174
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The soap opera, one of U.S. television's longest-running and most influential formats, is on the brink. Declining ratings have been attributed to an increasing number of women working outside the home and to an intensifying competition for viewers' attention from cable and the Internet. Yet, soaps' influence has expanded, with serial narratives becoming commonplace on most prime time TV programs. The Survival of Soap Opera investigates the causes of their dwindling popularity, describes their impact on TV and new media culture, and gleans lessons from their complex history for twenty-first-century media industries. The book contains contributions from established soap scholars such as Robert C. Allen, Louise Spence, Nancy Baym, and Horace Newcomb, along with essays and interviews by emerging scholars, fans and Web site moderators, and soap opera producers, writers, and actors from ABC's General Hospital, CBS's The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful, and other shows. This diverse group of voices seeks to intervene in the discussion about the fate of soap operas at a critical juncture, and speaks to longtime soap viewers, television studies scholars, and media professionals alike.

The Dynasty Years

The Dynasty Years PDF Author: Jostein Gripsrud
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134884907
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The Dynasty Years documents and analyses in detail 'the Dynasty phenomenon', the hotly debated success of the Hollywood-made 'Rolls Royce of a primetime soap' which heralded a profound transformation of European television. From the operatic camp of Krystle and Alexis' fight in the lilypond or the Moldavian wedding massacre to the unprecedented gay sub-plot, Dynasty represented, in the words of co-producer Esther Shapiro, "the ultimate dollhouse fantasy for middle-aged women". Using evidence from audience survey results, newspaper and magazine clippings and letters to broadcasters and drawing on semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism and critical social theories, Jostein Gripsrud examines every aspect of Dynasty's production, reception and context. The result is a groundbreaking critical study. Jostein Gripsrud offers a theoretical but empirically grounded critique of many central positions in media studies, including notions of 'audience resistance' and the 'sovereign' audience and its freedom in meaning-making, arguing against what he perceives as the uncritical celebrations of the soap-opera genre in much contemporary media criticism.

The Fornes Frame

The Fornes Frame PDF Author: Anne García-Romero
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816531447
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A key way to view Latina plays today is through the foundational frame of playwright and teacher, Maria Irene Fornes, who has transformed American theatre. Considering Fornes's legacy, Anne García-Romero shows how five award-winning playwrights continue to contest and complicate Latina theatre.

The Language and Imagery of Coma and Brain Injury

The Language and Imagery of Coma and Brain Injury PDF Author: Matthew Colbeck
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350077801
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
What occurs within coma? What does the coma patient experience? How does the patient perceive the world outside of coma, if at all? The simple answer to these questions is that we don't know. Yet the sheer volume of literary and media texts would have us believe that we do. Examining representations of coma and brain injury across a variety of texts, this book investigates common tropes and linguistic devices used to portray the medical condition of coma, giving rise to universal mythologies and misconceptions in the public domain. Matthew Colbeck looks at how these texts represent, or fail to represent, long-term brain injury, drawing on narratives of coma survivors that have been produced and curated through writing groups he has run over the last 10 years. Discussing a diverse range of cultural works, including novels by Irvine Welsh, Stephen King, Tom McCarthy and Douglas Coupland, as well as film and media texts such as The Sopranos, Kill Bill, Coma and The Walking Dead, Colbeck provides an explanation for our fascination with coma. With a proliferation of misleading stories of survival in the media and in literature, this book explores the potential impact these have upon our own understanding of coma and its victims.

Gender and Sexual Dissidence on Catalan and Spanish Television Series

Gender and Sexual Dissidence on Catalan and Spanish Television Series PDF Author: Silvia Grassi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443812854
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Taking as a starting point an interpretation of the television medium as an Ideological State Apparatus, this book examines how gender roles and non-heteronormative sexualities are constructed in Spanish and Catalan television series. In the first part, which focuses on the construction of gender roles in Catalan soap operas, it applies the analytical paradigms founded by Anglo-Saxon feminist scholars for the content of soap operas to a corpus of material which has rarely been analysed through this perspective. In the second part, which focuses on the construction of non-heteronormative sexualities in Spanish and Catalan television series, the book challenges the rhetoric of “normalisation” and the “essentialist” paradigms which have so far dominated the examination of the construction of sexuality in television series. As such, this book addresses the role performed by television in the construction of meanings which surround gender issues and non-heteronormative sexualities. This is a timely exercise because gender studies and studies of sexual dissidence are fairly recent fields in Spanish and Catalan academia and television has been largely disregarded, especially as far as the analysis of characters and storylines is concerned. As a result, this book represents a major contribution to these fields in the Spanish and Catalan contexts.

Consuming Pleasures

Consuming Pleasures PDF Author: Jennifer Hayward
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813184479
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
"To be continued..." Whether these words fall at the end of The Empire Strikes Back or a TV commercial flirtation between coffee-loving neighbors, true fans find them impossible to resist. Ever since the 1830s, when Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers enticed a mass market for fiction, the serial has been a popular means of snaring avid audiences. In Consuming Pleasures jennifer Hayward establishes serial fiction as a distinct genre-one defined by the activities of its audience rather than by the formal qualities of the text. Ranging from installment novels, mysteries, and detective fiction of the 1800s to the television and movie series, comics, and advertisements of the twentieth century, serials are loosely linked by what may be called, after Wittgenstein, "family resemblances." These traits include intertwined subplots, diverse casts of characters, dramatic plot reversals, suspense, and such narrative devices as long-lost family members and evil twins. Hayward chooses four texts—Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Milton Caniff's comic strip Terry and the Pirates (1934-46), and the soap operas All My Children (1970-) and One Life to Live (1968-)—to represent the evolution of serial fiction as a genre, and to analyze the peculiar draw serials have upon their audiences. Although the serial has enjoyed great marketplace success, traditional literary and social critics have denounced its ties to mass culture, claiming it preys upon passive fans. But Hayward argues that active serial audiences have developed identifiable strategies of consumption, such as collaborative reading and attempts to shape the production process.

Radio Drama

Radio Drama PDF Author: Tim Crook
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134606931
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Radio Drama brings together the practical skills needed for radio drams, such as directing, writing and sound design, with media history and communication theory. Challenging the belief that sound drama is a 'blind medium', Radio Drama shows how experimentation in radio narrative has blurred the dividing line between fiction and reality in modern media. Using extracts from scripts and analysing radio broadcasts from America, Britain, Canada and Australia, the book explores the practicalities of producing drama for radio. Tim Crook illustrates how far radio drama has developed since the first 'audiophonic production' and evaluates the future of radio drama in the age of live phone-ins and immedate access to programmes on the Internet.

Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television

Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television PDF Author: Trisha Dunleavy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317402790
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book examines the creative strategies, narrative characteristics, industrial practices and stylistic tendencies of complex serial drama. Exemplified by shows like HBO’s The Sopranos, AMC’s Mad Men and Breaking Bad, Showtime’s Dexter, and Netflix’s Stranger Things, complex serials are distinguished by their conceptual originality, narrative complexity, transgressive lead characters and serial allure. As a drama form that continues to expand and diversify in today’s television, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones, Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale provide further examples. Dunleavy investigates the strategies that underpin the innovations, influence and success of complex serial drama, giving students and scholars a nuanced understanding of this contemporary TV form.

Media and Democracy

Media and Democracy PDF Author: James Curran
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 113437223X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Media and Democracy addresses key topics and themes in relation to democratic theory, media and technology, comparative media studies, media and history, and the evolution of media research. Professor Curran’s response to these questions provides both a clear introduction to media research, written for university undergraduates studying in different countries, and an innovative analysis written by one of the field’s leading scholars.