Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism

Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism
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Excellent Overview of Media Studies Methodologies

Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism
Robert C. (ed.) Allen
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Approaches to Popular Film (Inside Popular Film)

Television: The Critical View

Media Analysis Techniques

This Thing of Ours

Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Routledgeclassics)

ASIN: 0807843741

Book Description

Since its original publication in 1987, Channels of Discourse has provided the most comprehensive consideration of commercial television, drawing on insights provided by the major strands of contemporary criticism: semiotics, narrative theory, reception theory, genre theory, ideological analysis, psychoanalysis, feminist criticism, and British cultural studies.

The second edition features a new introduction by Robert Allen that includes a discussion of the political economy of commercial television. Two new essays have been added—one an assessment of postmodernism and television, the other an analysis of convergence and divergence among the essays—and the original essays have been substantially revised and updated with an international audience in mind. Sixty-one new television stills illustrate the text.

Each essay lays out the general tenets of its particular approach, discusses television as an object of analysis within that critical framework, and provides extended examples of the types of analysis produced by that critical approach. Case studies range from Rescue 911 and Twin Peaks to soap operas, music videos, game shows, talk shows, and commericals.

Channels of Discourse, Reassembled suggests new ways of understanding relationships among television programs, between viewing pleasure and narrative structure, and between the world in front of the television set and that represented on the screen. The collection also addresses the qualities of popular television that traditional aesthetics and quantitative media research have failed to treat satisfactorily, including its seriality, mass production, and extraordinary popularity.

The contributors are Robert C. Allen, Jim Collins, Jane Feuer, John Fiske, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, James Hay, E. Ann Kaplan, Sarah Kozloff, Ellen Seiter, and Mimi White.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent Overview of Media Studies Methodologies.......2002-07-04

In a critical writing course I taught in Spring 2002, I used Channels of Discourse, Reassembled as the core text for the course readings. The many chapters within are written by the best of the best in the fields of media studies and cultural studies, and the methodologies are presented in an easy-to-read manner which is informative and full of examples and case studies. This is an excellent book for media studies students, as its chapters lay out the basic information they should know about many of the methodologies often used in media criticism.

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Great Book - Great stories.
An amazing book
Only Book You Need
Everything Beatles! By the Beatles! What could be wrong?
THE BEST CHRONICLE OF THE BEST ROCK AND ROLL BAND: THE BEATLES AGAIN!!!

The Beatles Anthology
Beatles , John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison , and Ringo Starr
Manufacturer: Chronicle Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Beatles Anthology
The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World
Anthology 1
Anthology 2
The Beatles : The Biography

ASIN: 0811826848
Release Date: 2000-10-05

Book Description

Created with their full cooperation, The Beatles Anthology is, in effect, The Beatles' autobiography. Like their music, which has been a part of so many of our lives, this landmark release is warm, frank, funny, poignant and bold. At last, here is The Beatles' own story. Each page is brimming with personal stories and rare, vintage images. Includes over 340,000 words and over 1300 images, including unseen photographs and personal memorabilia.

Customer Reviews:

Great Book - Great stories........2007-05-22

The only negative is the size of the book. There should be a smaller hardcover or paperback edition. The content is superb and a great coffee table book, but it's difficult to curl up with this book in bed.

An amazing book.......2007-05-13

I really liked Anthology. Not because it told the basic story, which I already got from other biographies. What makes this book really valuable is that it gives the view from inside the eye of the hurricane.

I mean, what's it like when the world starts screaming in your face?

Telling moments... There's a snapshot of John and Paul clutching their guitars as they head onstage for a concert, but their eyes are grim and tired. Paul is holding up his guitar like he needs a shield to ward off a punch to the face. It's a rather frightening photograph, and you feel sorry for them.

Or you wonder, what was George Harrison thinking, when he set off on a stroll through Height-Ashbury - that no one would notice him?

Or you sense, how much fun they seem to have had touring Australia.

Or their "family photos" from vacation trips... about as boring as anyone's photos. Except it's them. THEM.

The book seamlessly works fresh material from the three Beatles (and a few others) with parts of old John Lennon interviews, so it all reads smoothly, like it was all done at once - really great. The book is a fascinating trip all over again... I read it for two days through and hardly put it down.

Only Book You Need.......2007-05-11

As a hard core Beatles fan I can recommend many books,but if I had to recommend only one it would probably be this one. This is a complete,definitive biography,told in their own words. Not surprising that they should feel the need to do this. With all the tabloid fiction out there, I'm surprised they didn't do this earlier. I'm also not surprised that some people are calling it incomplete, saying that this seems to be their version of the story that they want put out. Could it be because this IS the actual true story about them? No really! Do they mean to imply that they ( the Beatles) actually know more about this subject (the Beatles) then some idiot who met them twice, or (maybe not at all) and decided to make some money by writing a second rate book? The audacity! This book tells the story from birth to break up. There is no filler, just facts. And it is told in their own funny,matter of fact,no nonsense way.

Of course the music is the spotlight. Each album is gone over with a fine tooth comb and you are lifted right into the atmosphere, and events unfolding behind the scenes that made each album special. Actually everything they talk about,from their childhoods to Beatlemania seems to lift you right into the scene. This is helped by the gorgeous pictures, almost all of them from their personal collections. Even if you are illiterate you will want this book just for the pictures. By the way, John's quarter of the story is told through interviews. Thank goodness he gave so many. Some of the pictures even have his written comments scrawled on them,showing us exactly how he felt at the time. There are hundreds of pictures of documents, handwritten play lists, handwritten lyrics, notes, hotel and restaurant bills,lists of concerts (again with John's handwritten comments about what was going on.) These guys kept everything! I can't beleive that Paul and Ringo actually kept plane and hotel receipts from a long ago trip to Greece with Jane Asher and Maureen Cox.(at that time,the future Mrs. Starkey) There is even a document at the top corner of one of the pages, (I bet a lot of people missed it) which refers to the request for some lice removal medicine to be delivered to one unfortunate Beatle's home. Of course they are NOT talking about head lice,and having read Peter Brown's pointless,vindictive book,The Love You Make,I know that this may have been Paul's way of saying,'Yes it's true but Epstein's creepy,lackey had no right to put it in a book (and make lots of money). Or maybe I read it in that other rag, Yesterday by Chet Flippo. I had the misfortune of reading both books. Don't make the same mistake.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind reading juicy,personal stuff as long as it's true and not embellishment. And there are plenty of interesting,sexy, stories,and stories of John's craziness but coming from their mouths, I know they are true. Except for that peeing on nuns story. Really John! George says it never happened and I beleive him. This book is like a huge memoir. A personal scrapbook and photo album. You will enjoy it's beauty,candidness, and it's entertaining style. And it's not true that most of these stories have been told before. I've read hundreds of books on the Fabs and 90% of this book is fresh, especially the early years. While you're at it, get the Anthology DVD set also. It's completely different from this book! Talk about quality, and value for money! Something that's always been important to the Beatles.

Everything Beatles! By the Beatles! What could be wrong?.......2007-05-09

Take 4 guys from England that changed the world of music forever and have them tell the story of their meteoric rise to fame and dominance of the music industry for decades and what do you have? THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY.

John, Paul, George and Ringo made the music that we listen to today what it is. Without the British Invasion, we would never have had the development of rock and roll as it is today. Elvis and the Beatles, they are the fathers of rock and roll. This is half of that story.

The Anthology is a great compilation of photos, album covers, artwork, lyrics, personal stories, articles and everything else Beatles. If you like the Beatles, then this is the source for every bit of information about the first super-group. You can probably find other books out there about the Beatles, but this was written by the fab four; you really can't go anywhere else to get the information you get in this book.

This is a must have for any Beatles fan. A must have for anyone that appreciates the history of music and rock & roll. Well, this is just a must have.

What more can I say? The Beatles were the original. Their story is great, their music is great, this book is great. Fact, period, end of story.

THE BEST CHRONICLE OF THE BEST ROCK AND ROLL BAND: THE BEATLES AGAIN!!!.......2007-01-10

WoooW!! What an elaborated and extensive material about the best band in the world! this book has every moment, every day, every story about the greatest John, Paul, George and Ringo told by themselves; this book is an invaluable work and every people who likes every kind of music has to buy it! I recommend it especially for the young people who begin to play music and former musical groups with their friends, I'm sure everyone will love this book. THE BEATLES SHOKING ALL THE WORLD AGAIN!!!

Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film

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Silent Films Speaks The Language of Poetry

Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film
Susan McCabe
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0521846218

Book Description

Susan McCabe juxtaposes the work of four American modernist poets with the techniques and themes of early twentieth-century European avant-garde films. The historical experience of World War One and its aftermath of broken and shocked bodies shaped a preoccupation with fragmentation in both film and literature. Film, montage and camera work provided poets with a vocabulary through which to explore and refashion modern physical and metaphoric categories of the body, including the hysteric, automaton, bisexual and femme fatale. This innovative study explores the impact of new cinematic modes of representation on the poetry of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H. D., and Marianne Moore. Cinematic Modernism links the study of literary forms with film studies, visual culture, gender studies and psychoanalysis to expand the usual parameters of literary modernism.

Customer Reviews:

Silent Films Speaks The Language of Poetry.......2005-12-09

This exciting book explains so much about how we think and feel, see and hear. It articules the mysterious relationship between the most precise language, poetry, and silent films, pure image. It makes thrilling original and provoking connections between them which lie in the mechanisms of bodies, the poets', the films' and our own, their lost control, hysteria, automationism, and sexuality. We see Chaplin and Stein, Williams and the Surrealist films of Bunel and others, H.D. and her film Borderline as well as Marianne Moore and the documentary films in a new light. The poet's body and the film's body inform each in both techniquie and the cutting/editing upon the body. A great book that looks at reading film, poetry and reality in a groundbreaking way.

The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800-1953

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The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800-1953
Billie Melman
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 019929688X

Book Description

In this original and widely researched book, Billie Melman explores the culture of history during the age of modernity. Her book is about the production of English pasts, the multiplicity of their representations and the myriad ways in which the English looked at history (sometimes in the most literal sense of 'looking') and made use of it in a social and material urban world, and in their imagination. Covering the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the Coronation of 1953, Melman recoups the work of antiquarians, historians, novelists and publishers, wax modellers, cartoonists and illustrators, painters, playwrights and actors, reformers and educationalists, film stars and their fans, musicians and composers, opera-fans, and radio listeners. Avoiding a separation between 'high' and 'low' culture, Melman analyses nineteenth-century plebeian culture and twentieth-century mass-culture and their venues - like Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, panoramas, national monuments like the Tower of London, and films - as well as studying forms of 'minority' art - notably opera. She demonstrates how history was produced and how it circulated from texts, visual images, and sounds, to people and places and back to a variety of texts and images. While paying attention to individuals' making-do with culture, Melman considers constrictions of class, gender, the state, and the market-place on the consumption of history. Focusing on two privileged pasts, the Tudor monarchy and the French Revolution, the latter seen as an English event and as the framework for narrating and comprehending history, Melman shows that during the nineteenth century, the most popular, longest-enduring, and most highly commercialized images of the past represented it not as cosy and secure, but rather as dangerous, disorderly, and violent. The past was also imagined as an urban place, rather than as rural. In Melman's account, City not green Country, is the centre of a popular version of the past whose central Images are the dungeon, the gallows, and the guillotine.

Distorted Images: British National Identity and Film in the 1920s (Cinema and Society)

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Distorted Images: British National Identity and Film in the 1920s (Cinema and Society)
Kenton Bamford
Manufacturer: I. B. Tauris
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1860643582

Book Description

The 1920s is a neglected period in British film history, yet this is a fascinating period in the cinema when, confronted with audiences' preference for the American cinema of Griffith and deMille, the British cinema-going public was being encouraged to "buy British." In this rigorous, illuminating exploration of the cultural construction of "Britishness" by the British film industry, Kenton Bamford investigates the image of nation and of British men and women that films projected, the class attitudes and values that underpinned those images, and the realities of the reception of British and American films across classes. Using an exciting array of original source materials, he looks at the culture of the stage and popular fiction on which the cinema fed and demonstrates the stultifying aura of middle-class gentility that stifled creativity, innovation and democracy in British films. He also uncovers some unsung heroes of British cinema, including British star Betty Balfour and director George Pearson.

Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (Concise Companions to Literature and Culture)

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Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (Concise Companions to Literature and Culture)

Manufacturer: Blackwell Publishing, Incorporated
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Adaptations | Movies | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1405115106

Book Description

This Concise Companion presents a multidisciplinary range of approaches to a vast multimedia subject, Shakespeare on screen.

The book's contributors use the latest thinking from cultural studies, communications, and comparative media, in dialogue with literary, theatrical, and filmic approaches, in order to push the field forward. They consider Shakespeare on screen not only as a set of finished products but also as a process. For this reason, the volume is organized around topics such as authorship and collaboration, theatricality, sex and violence, globalization, and history.

Book Description

This collection of essays explores the literary and cinematic implications of translating Austen's prose into film. It considers how prose fiction and cinema differ; how mass commercial audiences require changes to script and character; and how continually remade films evoke memories of earlier productions. The essays represent widely divergent perspectives, from literary "purists" suspicious of film renderings of Austen to film-makers who see the text as a stimulus for producing exceptional cinema. The comprehensive study will be of interest to students as well as teachers.

Customer Reviews:

Best book to date.......2004-01-16

This book is much better than the previous "Jane Austen in Hollywood" and would suit anyone interested in the adaptations. I would recommend it highly to janeites and film students alike. Highlight chapters are "Janeite Culture: What does the name jane austen authorize?" and "Sense and Sensibility in a post-feminist world: sisterhood is still powerful". This book is a refreshing look at the adaptations by not hammering the film ethusiasts vs literary purists debate throughout the entire book; rather, dedicating one chapter to it. It is comprehensive study and good value for money.

Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s

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The Other British Invasion
An excellent book for anyone interested in these shows!

Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s
James Chapman
Manufacturer: I. B. Tauris
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Avengers Files
The Avengers
The Complete Avengers: The Full Story of Britain's Smash Crime-Fighting Team!
Diana Rigg: The Biography
The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Film and Television of Leslie Charteris' Robin Hood of Modern Crime, Simon Templar, 1928-1992

ASIN: 1860647545

Book Description

Series like "The Avengers" and "Danger Man", with their professional secret agents, or "The Saint" and "The Persuaders", featuring flamboyant crime-fighters, still inspire mainstream and cult followings. Saints and Avengers explores and celebrates this unique television genre for the first time. James Chapman uses case studies to look at the thrillers' representations of national identity, and the world of the '60's and '70's. Chapman also asserts that this particular type of thriller was a historically and culturally defined generic type, with enduring appeal, as the current vogue for remaking them as big budget films attests.

Customer Reviews:

The Other British Invasion.......2005-09-05

In Saints & Avengers, author James Chapman profiles nine TV series. He says that all but one are available on home video, but he must mean in the U.K., because a quick search shows that only about half are easily available in the U.S. Some of these shows never aired in the U.S., so the American reader may not be as interested in some parts of this book.

The subtitle is British Adventure Series of the 1960s and that is an accurate description of the purpose of this book. Chapman examines how the British TV series differed from the American shows of the same time and how these shows in particular typified the decade.

Even in the 60s, American television was a dominant cultural force, but British series such as The Avengers and The Champions were still able to capture a large American audience. For one thing, there were few spy series in the U.S., with westerns and detective drama more common. When Brit spy shows came to America, we were ready for them. (Come to think of it, I can't even think of any American spy heroes, fictional or not.)

Chapman also looks at how the shows belonged to the Sixties and couldn't succeed beyond the end of the decade. He points out the failure of The New Avengers and The Return of the Saint. On the other hand, it seemes that viewers in the Seventies were receptive to a completely different type of series, as The Prisoner showed.

Chapman's writing is clear and engaging, except in the introduction, when he gets bogged down in academic jargon. Don't let that keep you from moving right on to the rest of this thoughtful and entertaining look at some of the best television there has ever been.

An excellent book for anyone interested in these shows!.......2004-02-14

This book works on three levels:

1. Read as a whole, it provides a fascinating account of the rise and fall of the British TV export market in the 1960s. I always wondered why there are all these great British shows that aired on American network TV back then, but none do now. This book provides the answers.

2. Chapman provides very interesting and well-cited academic insight into these series, examining their themes and cultural implications, and how they fit into their time, without ever becoming dry or boring. This book is not a text book; it's very readable.

3. Read in pieces, the book provides solid backgrounds and analysises of each program it discusses. The most pages are devoted to Secret Agent (Danger Man), The Avengers, The Saint, and The Persuaders, which should make sense to an American reader, since these are the shows most commonly available here on DVD. It is worth buying this book even if you are just into ONE of these shows and want to know more about it. However, I found myself reading every chapter, and becoming interested in the other shows discussed as well, and trying to track them down.

Book Description

Stanley Booth, a member of the Rolling Stones’ inner circle, met the band just a few months before Brian Jones drowned in a swimming pool in 1968. He lived with them throughout their 1969 American tour, staying up all night together listening to blues, talking about music, ingesting drugs, and consorting with groupies. His thrilling account culminates with their final concert at Altamont Speedway—a nightmare of beating, stabbing, and killing that would signal the end of a generation’s dreams of peace and freedom. But while this book renders in fine detail the entire history of the Stones, paying special attention to the tragedy of Brian Jones, it is about much more than a writer and a rock band. It has been called—by Harold Brodkey and Robert Stone, among others—the best book ever written about the sixties. In Booth’s new afterword, he finally explains why it took him 15 years to write the book, relating an astonishing story of drugs, jails, and disasters.

Customer Reviews:

DOWN, ALMOST OUT, BUT NEVER COMPLETELY OUT.......2007-09-23

There is no stronger, clear-minded, and focused writer of American Music Culture than Stanley Booth. He never writes from a distance. In fact, sometimes he writes from too close, within firing range, as with The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones, also published under the title of Down & Out With The Rolling Stones. Booth says it took him years to recover from the experience. I say he hasn't recovered yet. When you are from Georgia and live in Memphis, you learn to survive, but you don't recover. The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones is a historic, deep panorama of a different violent time in America. In order to create, you have to go through the fire. Stanley Booth has done just that.

And when you finish with The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, pick up a copy of Rythm Oil, I think his best book, and then Keith.

There is no one writing about music with the grit and guts of Stanley Booth. All others, with the exception of damn few, are just playing.

CLOSEST TO THE TRUTH.......2007-06-08

STANLEY BOOTH HUNG OUT AND PARTIED WITH THE STONES. HE BECAME FRIENDS WITH AND WAS A KINDRED SPIRIT TO KEITH RICHARD. THIS IS AN EXCELLENT ACCOUNT OF THE MONUMENTAL 1969 STONES TOUR. HE ALSO SEEMED TO HAVE GOOD INSIGHT INTO BRIAN JONES AND THE STONES DYNAMICS WHILE HE WAS IN THE BAND.
HIS EYE MAGAZINE ACCOUNT OF BRIANS 1968 DRUG BUST WAS A MUST READ CLASSIC.

A Book About Writing A Book About the Stones.......2007-03-13

It is not often that any writer/biographer is given such unlimited access to his or her subject as Stanley Booth was given in 1969 to the Rolling Stones. As an invited insider with the world's greatest rock and roll band at their musical apex, Booth ate, drank, took drugs, and traveled with the band and its entourage. What great interviews he could have done! What amazing revelations about the Stones and their often oppositional creative processes he could have shared with Stones fans!

Granted, most people who have reviewed this book have really liked it. Maybe I missed the point, but I did not come out of this book feeling like I knew the Stones any better, and certainly did not learn any more about the dynamics of their musical collaborations and clashing personal and creative styles. What I got was a good look at a writer hired to write a book about the Stones who ended up writing a book about himself writing a book about the Stones, and five hundred pages of insider gossip, most of which doesn't even border on historically significant or interesting.

C'est la vie.

gimme shelter .......2006-11-19

This book is pretty much on the same level as something you would find in People Magazine, but loaded with literary pretensions. That said, it was good read. He does manage to show the hypocrisy of the Stones who deplore authority and the police. Then they find themselves at the Altamont concert with a brawling, disorderly mob and little to no security. His background research is pretty good, but he is mostly interested in Brian Jones and we don't get as much about the other Stones.

please to meet you .......2006-07-19

Stanley Booth got dipped into the Rolling Stones madness like a scoop of virgin vanilla ice cream sunk down into a bubbling, acid-laced chocolate sauce. The book, to me, took awhile to unfurl, slowly gathering momentum with its often hard-to-follow cataloging of who was in the room, who was banging who, who flew the plane, etc. But Booth, addled as he may have been, knew what he was doing and while he's not a great writer, he clearly got "it." And it leads us down the rabbit hole of 60's excess -- drugs, delusion, oppression and violence. Anyone who has seen the brilliant documentary "Festival Express" knows a lot of the hippies back then were selfish jerks, who thought musicians were capitalist pigs who owed everyone in the world a free concert. The free concert was the idiotic principle that guided so many misguided lives, but if you wanted to buy into the the get-together-try-and-love-one-another vibe of the time, you better be hip, man, or whatever. The Stones were guided by the desire to get kids dancing, resisting mind-numbing authority, and breaking out and shaking it, but the deeper they plunge into the drug and touring vortex, the less they see the devil in the underbelly until it is upon them. Booth steers your surely toward the chaos of Altamont but doubles the impact by weaving in the sad demise of Brian Jones. His reportage is strange and excellent as death reveals itself and the final chapters are riveting. The Stones don't get truly known here, which brings it down one notch for me, but their adventures are, and they, along with the tale of the 60's wreckage through these eyes are worth the read whether you are a Stones fan or not, and if you are not, you might be compelled to take a second look at some of the most mesmerizing rock music ever recorded and try to place it in its proper context. This was a time when the voodoo wasn't just taking place in a lounge . . .

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