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CS92PROD
Television: The Domestic Medium
ANTH 244
Fall 2007 not offered
Crosslisting: AMST 253, FILM 349

Of all the mass media, television is the most intimately associated with domestic and familial life. Its installation in American homes over the postwar decade coincided with a revival of family life that encouraged an emphasis on private over public leisure. Most television is still watched at home, where viewing practices are interwoven with domestic routines and provide a site for negotiating family roles and relations. Television production is shaped at several levels by producers' images of viewers' domestic lives: schedules reflect socially conditioned assumptions about gendered division of family roles; a common televisual mode of address uses a conversational style in which performers present themselves to viewers as friends or members of the family; families or surrogate families figure prominently in the content of programming across a wide range of genres, including sitcoms, dramas, soaps, and talk shows. Sitcoms, in particular, have responded to and mediated shifts in family forms, and they will be a main focus in this course. We will explore how television has both shaped and been shaped by cultural discourses about family life over the past 50 years.

Essential Capabilities:
This course approaches television programs as visual texts embedded in a variety of contexts; interpretation will entail constructing their relations to specific conditions of production, to other televisual and cinematic texts, and to wider sociocultural
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS ANTH
Course Format: LectureGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (AMST)(ANTH)(FGSS)(FILM-MN)(FILM)(STS)

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
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