Television Culture
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- $45.99
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- $45.99
Publisher Description
This revised edition of a now classic text includes a new introduction by Henry Jenkins, explaining ‘Why Fiske Still Matters’ for today’s students, followed by a discussion between former Fiske students Ron Becker, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Steve Classen, Elana Levine, Jason Mittell, Greg Smith and Pam Wilson on ‘John Fiske and Television Culture’. Both underline the continuing relevance of this foundational text in the study of contemporary media and popular culture.
Television is unique in its ability to produce so much pleasure and so many meanings for such a wide variety of people. In this book, John Fiske looks at television’s role as an agent of popular culture, and goes on to consider the relationship between this cultural dimension and television’s status as a commodity of the cultural industries that are deeply inscribed with capitalism. He makes use of detailed textual analysis and audience studies to show how television is absorbed into social experience, and thus made into popular culture. Audiences, Fiske argues, are productive, discriminating, and televisually literate.
Television Culture provides a comprehensive introduction for students to an integral topic on all communication and media studies courses.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A number of creative ideas regarding television's role in American society are overinvested here with a "scholarly'' vocabulary and, therefore, rendered obscure. In theoretical and practical discussions, however, Fiske, a visiting communications professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, convincingly challenges multiple assumptions: television, he says, is not a ``closed text''a self-contained entity with a single meaning; news, he reminds us, ``is also a commodity,'' one that reinforces a primarily masculine culture; and, while soap operas seem to enforce a traditional patriarchal value system, for many fans the genre often ``whittles away at patriarchy's power to subject women.'' Indeed, Fiske's synthesis of different mediascripts, camera work, lighting, villains and heroesis admirable. But, ultimately, his Marxist political agenda and heavy-handed style detract from the book. His assertion, for example, that ``excessive bureaucracy is a common sign, in capitalist popular culture, of Communism''he cites M.A.S.H. and James Bond as evidencehardly resonates.
