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A collection of essays, which provide a comprehensive picture of how and why the genre of reality television emerged, what it means, how it differs from earlier television programming, and how it engages societies, industries, and individuals.
From early first-wave programs such as Candid Camera, An American Family, and The Real World to the shows on our television screens and portable devices today, reality television consistently takes us to cities--such as New York, Los Angeles, and Boston--to imagine the place of urbanity in American culture and society. Jon Kraszewski offers the first extended account of this phenomenon, as he makes the politics of urban space the center of his history and theory of reality television. Kraszewski situates reality television in a larger economic transformation that started in the 1980s when America went from an industrial economy, when cities were home to all classes, to its post-industrial ec...
There is one sound that will always be loudest in sports. It isn’t the squeak of sneakers or the crunch of helmets; it isn’t the grunts or even the stadium music. It’s the deafening roar of sports fans. For those few among us on the outside, sports fandom—with its war paint and pennants, its pricey cable TV packages and esoteric stats reeled off like code—looks highly irrational, entertainment gone overboard. But as Erin C. Tarver demonstrates in this book, sports fandom has become extraordinarily important to our psyche, a matter of the very essence of who we are. Why in the world, Tarver asks, would anyone care about how well a total stranger can throw a ball, or hit one with a b...
Football is the most widely played, watched and studied sport in the world. It’s hard to develop a full understanding of the significance of sport in global society without understanding the significance of football. Studying Football is the first book designed specifically to guide and support the study of football on degree-level courses, across the full range of social-scientific perspectives. Written by a team of leading international football experts, and considering themes of globalization, corporatization and prejudice and discrimination throughout, it introduces key topics in football studies, including: media and celebrity identity, fandom and consumption gender violence racism corruption Every chapter includes up-to-date case study material, a ‘Research in Action’ section and features to aid student understanding and bring theory to life. Studying Football introduces all the key themes and facets of the social-scientific study of football, and is therefore an essential text for students on football studies courses and useful reading for any undergraduates studying the sociology of sport more generally.
A rich account that combines media-industry history and cultural studies, Their Own Best Creations looks at women writers' contributions to some of the most popular genres of postwar TV: comedy-variety, family sitcom, daytime soap, and suspense anthology. During the 1950s, when the commercial medium of television was still being defined, women writers navigated pressures at work, constructed public personas that reconciled traditional and progressive femininity, and asserted that a woman's point of view was essential to television as an art form. The shows they authored allegorize these professional and personal pressures and articulate a nascent second-wave feminist consciousness. Annie Berke brings to light the long-forgotten and under-studied stories of these women writers and crucially places them in the historical and contemporary record.
Everywhere you look in 1970s American cinema, you find white working-class men. They bring a violent conclusion to Easy Rider, murdering the film's representatives of countercultural alienation and disaffection. They lurk in the Georgia woods of Deliverance, attacking outsiders in a manner that evokes the South's recent history of racial violence and upheaval. They haunt the singles nightclubs of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, threatening the film's newly liberated heroine with patriarchal violence. They strut through the disco clubs of Saturday Night Fever, dancing to music whose roots in post-Stonewall homosexuality invite ambiguity that the men ignore. Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men argues ...
Screenwriters are storytellers and dream builders. They forge new worlds and beings, bringing them to life through storylines and idiosyncratic details. Yet up until now, no one has told the story of these creative and indispensable artists. The Writers is the only comprehensive qualitative analysis of the history of writers and writing in the film, television, and streaming media industries in America. Featuring in-depth interviews with over fifty writers—including Mel Brooks, Norman Lear, Carl Reiner, and Frank Pierson—The Writers delivers a compelling, behind-the-scenes look at the role and rights of writers in Hollywood and New York over the past century. Granted unprecedented access...
The television programme American Idol provides a stage where the politics of national, regional, ethnic, and religious identity are performed for millions of viewers. Meizel demonstrates that commercial music and the music industry are not simply forces to be criticised or resisted, but critical sites for redefining American culture.
This entertaining and innovative book focuses on vocal performance styles that developed in tandem with the sound technologies of the phonograph, radio, and sound film. Writing in a clear and lively style, Jacob Smith looks at these media technologies and industries through the lens of performance, bringing to light a fascinating nexus of performer, technology, and audience. Combining theories of film sound, cultural histories of sound technologies and industries, and theories of performance, Smith convincingly connects disparate and largely neglected performance niches to explore the development of a modern vocal performance. Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media demonstrates the voice to be a vehicle of performance, identity, and culture and illustrates both the interconnection of all these categories and their relation to the media technologies of the past century.
The Politics of Reality Television encompasses an international selection of expert contributions who consider the specific ways media migrations test our understanding of, and means of investigating, reality television across the globe. The book addresses a wide range of topics, including: the global circulation and local adaptation of reality television formats and franchises the production of fame and celebrity around hitherto "ordinary" people the transformation of self under the public eye the tensions between fierce loyalties to local representatives and imagined communities bonding across regional and ethnic divides the struggle over the meanings and values of reality television across a range of national, regional, gender, class and religious contexts. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students on a range of Media and Television Studies courses, particularly those on the globalisation of television and media, and reality television.