Module Information

This module introduces key issues in the development of television studies, including the importance of “reading television”, and thus how television’s distinctive textualities have been explored through textual analysis. The module also considers television studies’ relationship with cultural studies and media sociology (alongside its broader debts to the humanities and structuralism/poststructuralism). In order to synthesize key approaches in television studies, a specific case study is explored, combining production ethnography with textual and contextual study. The module then goes on to explore major debates such as that surrounding the cultural status and value of ‘quality TV’, as well as that surrounding historical and contemporary markets for “global” or transnational TV. The final three weeks of the module explicitly address television’s changing place and identity within digital culture, analyzing TV’s digitalisation, “transmedia television” linking TV texts with Web content, and the ways in which “convergence culture” has begun to challenge television’s pop-cultural centrality.

Week 1: The history and development of Television Studies
Week 2: Textual analysis and the rise of the ‘canon’
Week 3: Television audiences (I): The romanticisations of cultural studies
Week 4: Television audiences (II): The questions of media sociology
Week 5: A case study in production, text and context
Week 6: The ‘quality TV’ debate: US and UK traditions
Week 7: Transnational Television
Week 8: “Post-TV” and the emergence of digital television
Week 9: Transmedia Television
Week 10: Living in a convergence culture

NB: each week comprises of a 1 hour lecture, a 1 hour seminar, and a 2 hour screening block

To introduce and explore significant debates in the emergence and history of television studies;

To relate contemporary television to the contexts and technologies of digital culture, addressing TV as a digital medium; considering transmedia television as an intertextual array articulated with participatory cultures (something which the 2nd semester module, ‘Social Television, Fandom and Participatory Media’ will build on); and investigating ‘TV’ as an object in relation to convergence culture.

Distinct in approach from its partner module ‘Small Screen Aesthetics’, this core module instead focuses on linking television studies to the disciplines and schools of thought which have had an impact on its intellectual formation (the humanities and social sciences; English Literature, cultural studies and media sociology; structuralism and poststructuralism).