Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

No Marketing Blurb

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Banality in Cultural Studies
• Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics
• Television: Aesthetics and Audiences
• Television in the Family Circle: The Popular Reception of a New Medium
• The Seven Dwarfs and the Money Grubbers: The Public Relations Crisis of US Television in the Late 1950s
• Why We Don't Count: The Commodity Audience
• Techno-Ethics and Tele-Ethics: Three Lives in the Day of Max Headroom
• Critical and Textual Hypermasculinity
• Superman and the Protective Strength of the Trademark
• An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television
• Information, Crisis, Catastrophe
• TV Time and Catastrophe, or Beyond the Pleasure Principle of Television
• Representing Television
• Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Logics of Television is a volume of papers that developed out of The International Television Conference held at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in 1988. Within the collection, both the institution of television and individual programs are subjected to a wide range of analyses used in cultural studies and semiotics. The collection begins with the premise that television, unlike a book or film, cannot be analyzed as a discrete and delimited object, for it is inextricably bound up with audiences and the industry. Although the approaches included here are wide-ranging, the collection makes important contributions to a central debate in television studies: whether audiences are "duped" by this powerful medium, or whether they can exercise a critical or subversive reading of programming and hence distance themselves from its ideological effects. Contributors include top American scholars, such as Mary Ann Doane, as well as academics from outside of the US, such as Stephen Heath and Michelle Matterlart. These latter contributions lend a valuable perspective about the question of national and local "televisions" and their relationship to the US model. Given the scarcity of volumes addressing television studies, this volume should provide a welcome addition to the field; and although the essays vary in quality, most are well written and well argued. A. Goldson Brown University