ANTH 244
Fall 2007 not offered
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| 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. |
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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
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
SBS ANTH |
| Course Format: Lecture | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (AMST)(ANTH)(FGSS)(FILM-MN)(FILM)(STS) |
Major Readings:
Lynn Spigel, MAKE ROOM FOR TV
Joanne Morreale, CRITIQUING THE SITCOM
Course packet
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Examinations and Assignments:
Three short papers; weekly assignments of streamed videos are accessible from networked computers. |
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