Televisuality: style, crisis, and authority in American television

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.