Lexington Books
Pages: 304
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-0-7391-7957-4 • Hardback • April 2013 • $101.00 • (£78.00)
978-1-4985-1104-9 • Paperback • February 2015 • $56.99 • (£44.00)
978-0-7391-7958-1 • eBook • April 2013 • $54.00 • (£42.00)
Kathleen M. Ryan spent more than twenty years in network and local news production and she continues to work as an active multimedia director and producer. She holds a PhD in communication and society from University of Oregon, an MA in broadcast journalism from University of Southern California, and a BA in political science from University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado.
Deborah A. Macey holds a PhD in communication and society from the University of Oregon, an MA in Communication and a BS in Business Administration from Saint Louis University. She is a visiting assistant professor at Saint Louis University, where she teaches courses in human communication and media studies.
Chapter 1: Introduction
Kathleen M. Ryan & Deborah A. Macey
Part 1: The Electronic Hearth, or the (un)Real World
Chapter 2: The Way We Were: Ritual, Memory and Televsion
Leah A. Rosenberg
Chapter 3: Becoming-Spectator: Tracing Global Becoming Through Polish Television in a Canadian Family Room
Marcelina Piotrowski
Part 2: Father (and Mother) Knows Best
Chapter 4: As Seen On TV: Media Influences of Pregnancy and Birth Narratives
Jennifer G. Hall
Chapter 5: All About My HBO Mothers: Talking Back to Carmela Soprano and Ruth Fisher
Andrée E. C. Betancourt
Chapter 6: Mad Hatters: The Bad Dads of AMC
David Staton
Part 3: Family Ties
Chapter 7: Family Communication and Television: Viewing, Identification, and Evaluation of Televised Family Communication Models
Ellen E. Stiffler, Lynne M. Webb, and Amy C. Duvall
Chapter 8: Reality Check: Real Housewives and Fan Discourses on Parenting and Family
Jingsi Christina Wu and Brian McKernan
Chapter 9: Keeping Up with Contradictory Family Values: The Voice of the Kardashians
Amanda S. McClain
Part 4: The Facts of Life
Chapter 10: The Selling of Gender-Role Stereotyping: A Content Analysis of Toy Commercials Airing on Nickelodeon
Susan G. Kahlenberg
Chapter 11: “Stand by, Space Rangers”: Interstellar Lessons in Early Cold-War Masculinity
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Chapter 12: The Avengers and Feminist Identity Development: Learning the Example of Critical Resistance from Cathy Gale
Robin Redmond Wright
Chapter 13: Juno for Real: Negotiating Teenage Sexuality, Pregnancy, and Love in MTV’s 16 and Pregnant/Teen Mom
Tanja N. Aho.
Part 5: As Not Seen on TV
Chapter 14: Race, Aging and Gay In/visibility on U.S. Televsion
Michael Johnson, Jr.
Chapter 15: Eighty is Still Eighty, but Everyone Else Needs to Look Twenty-Five: The Fascination with Betty White Despite our Obsession with Youth
Deborah A. Macey
The strength of Television and the Self is its effort to create conversation across and within areas of television studies, theoretically, thematically, and methodologically. Perhaps most noteworthy are the diverse methodological perspectives employed here—ranging from discourse and textual analysis to autoethnography, content analysis, and reflections on media history — which point to the breadth and plurality of the field. The autoethnographies (Marcelina Piotrowski’s essay on 'becoming Polish' through television viewership and Andree Betancourt’s reflection on motherhood as portrayed through characters on HBO’s Six Feet Under and The Sopranos) are especially powerful, merging academic critique with personal stories, narrated by authors who reflect—thoughtfully and, at times, emotionally—on the ways in which their relationship to TV has impacted their identities and lives. . . .Television and the Self speaks to multiple perspectives, inviting readers to consider the ways in which our own identities, values, and everyday lives have been shaped and molded, influenced and informed, by our engagement with televisual narratives.
— Journal of American Culture
[This is a] well-written and researched chapters of this edited volume. . . .The book is an excellent text and each chapter is well researched and the editors contribute much to the discipline.
— Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation is a fresh, lively approach to thinking about television in our everyday lives. The chapters in this edited volume highlight the importance of interrogating television programs as text. The reflexive collection makes an important contribution to our understanding of role of television in our lives, how TV contributes to identity formation, and above all how and why we enjoy it as much as we do.
— Debra Merskin, University of Oregon