Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (Paperback, New)

"Holling is tormented by Koyaanisqatsi dreams until he goes out and does the wild thing with a young stag . . . . "--Synopsis from production company "Bible," "Northern Exposure, " March 30, 1992 The collision of auteurism and rap--couched by primetime producers in the "Northern Exposure "script--was actually rather commonplace by the early 1990s. Series, and even news broadcasts, regularly engineered their narratives around highly coded aesthetic and cultural fragments, with a kind of ensemble iconography. "Televisuality" interrogates the nature of such performances as an historical phenomenon, an aesthetic and industrial practice, and as a socially symbolic act. This book suggests that postmodernism does not fully explain television's stylistic exhibitionism and that a reexamination of "high theory" is in order. Caldwell's unique approach successfully integrates production practice with theory in a way that will enlighten both critical theory and cultural studies.