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.

America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies

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America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies
Harry M. Benshoff , and Sean Griffin
Manufacturer: Blackwell Publishing Limited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0631225838

Book Description

America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in the Movies is a lively introduction to issues of diversity as represented within the American cinema. The first synthetic and historical text of its kind, America on Film provides a comprehensive overview of the industrial, socio-cultural, and aesthetic factors that contribute to cinematic representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The volume chronicles the cinematic history of various cultural groups, examines forces and institutions of bias, and stimulates discussion about the relationship between film and American national culture.Accessible and user-friendly, America on Film features 101 illustrations, a glossary of key terms, questions for discussion, and lists for further reading and further viewing. The book is organized within a broad historical framework, with specific theoretical concepts - including film genre, auteurism, cultural studies, Orientalism, the "male gaze, " feminism, and queer theory - integrated throughout. Each individual chapter features a concise overview of the topic at hand, a discussion of representative films, figures, and movements, and an in-depth analysis of a single film, including The Lion King, The Jazz Singer, Smoke Signals, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Celluloid Closet.

Average customer rating:

Excellent as a Historical Text Book
Not very good...
A very useful beginners guide to American film.
Movie spoiler

American Cinema/American Culture
John Belton
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Study Guide to Accompany American Cinema/American Culture
Study Guide for American Cinema
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Anatomy of Film

ASIN: 007004466X

Book Description

Developed to accompany the Annenberg-funded telecourse American Cinema, and written under the aegis of The New York Center for Visual History, this text offers a fascinating look at the interplay between the movie industry and mass culture in America.

Ideal for film appreciation and film and culture courses found in Cinema Studies, English, History, American Studies, or other departments, American Cinema/American Culture first examines the industry, its narrative conventions, and its cinematographic style.

Following this introduction, students are exposed to the sweep of film history in the U.S. using five genres as the bases for discussion and focusing on the point at which each had the greatest affect on the industry, film aesthetics, and American culture.

Finally, the book concludes with a look at Hollywood post World War II, giving separate chapter coverage to the effects of the Cold War, television, the counterculture of the Sixties, directors from the film school generation, and the trends of the Eighties and Nineties.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent as a Historical Text Book.......2007-03-24

So, I expected this book to be a bit more fun. Unfortunately, the fun element is missing. However, in fairness, the book serves as a thorough textbook for the history of American Cinema and its techniques and various genres. I did enjoy reading about the early studio system and the vast amount of control this oligopoly held. There were some very good critiques and studies of specific films, and a bit about specific actors and actresses. Even a bit about directors. Though packed with information, the book just lacks an entertainment value that it could and should have pulled off based on the subject matter.

The different genres studied include:

Westerns
War Movies
Silent Films
Film Noire
Screwball Comedies

As well as an overall dissertation on Classical Hollywood Style and its various techniques.

Not very good..........2005-03-05

I got this book for a class on the history of cinema. Unfortunately, as the title implies, it only deals with American Cinema. If this is a book for school, check out the class to see if foreign films and film history will be discussed. This book is, again, as the title implies--one-sided. Most of the movies it discusses, gives away crucial plot-points and endings. Some movies that I've been dying to see were ruined in just one or two sentences. This book is also very puffed-up and biased (I don't know any other way of explaining it). Many times throughout the book, Belton seems like James Lipton of "Inside the Actor's Studio", and goes on and on about the greatness of Hollywood, actors, director's, and films with nothing negative to say. It's not at all critical of anything and the author frequently inserts his own interpretation of films into the general text, which I found a little pompous. The book does offer up some interesting facts about the early history and the birth of cinema, but there's something about the way this book was written that makes it hard to stay interested. I think the chapters about film genres exaggerate the importance of some of them, and neglects other genres completely, ie. Horror, Thriller, Mystery, Sci-fi, Animation, Epics, etc. Again, question the instructor and/or look at the class syllabus before siging up if this is the only book for this class. I don't believe this is a comprehensive and unbiased view of cinema and it's history.

A very useful beginners guide to American film........2003-01-08

Years ago I took an intro-level film class at a community college. This was the text for the class. It was accompanied (at least in my class) by a PBS video series that combined film clips with interviews and historical information. Going into the class I had little more than a passing interest in film and film history. But after taking that class, my passion for film has grown exponentially with each year. But back to the book, I really liked this book and highlighted my way from the front cover to the back cover. There are of course limitations to this book. Firstly, it deals only with American films. Secondly, this book barely breaks the 300-page mark - hardly a comprehensive volume. You aren't going to get any information on John Cassavetes here or anything. Now if you have a chance to use this book in conjunction with the PBS films, I think you'll do much better (in fact I think the vids even give a nod to Cassavetes), but even then please note that this material is for an INTRO-level film class, and won't be much good for someone who already knows a fair amount about American film. But with that in mind, the book still has a lot to offer someone looking to introduce themselves to film history.

The first third of the book starts with the birth of film, moves quickly on to the Hollywood studio system, and walks us through the basics of film style (camerawork, lighting, editing, etc.). The second third covers the basics of film genre; there is a chapter about film noir, one on comedies, one on war films, and one on westerns. This second section was particularly useful to me. I could read each chapter, jot down a list of promising titles, hit my local video store, and I was good to go. The third section covers American film after World War II. In this section things seem a little compressed. 110 pages for 50 years of film? A lot is lost on the cutting room floor. But there's lots to dig into all the same. There's a chapter on Hollywood during the McCarthy years (yikes!), one on film's evolution during the emergence of television, a chapter on 1960s counterculture films, one on the film school directors of the 1970s and 1980s, and finally a pretty weak chapter on film in the 1990s. Oh yeah, and at the end of the book there's a handy glossary (in case you're ever stuck on what point-of-view editing is) and a pretty thorough index.

Again, not a book for someone who already has a good feel for film history. But definitely a great resource for someone new to film studies, or for someone who has trouble finding a movie at Blockbuster on Fridays. It did a great job getting me excited about movies, and I imagine its done the same for others.... A good companion to this text (or possibly an all-out replacement of it) is Scorsese's VHS/DVD, "A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies."

Movie spoiler.......2002-10-08

This would be a great book to read if you have no intention of watching the films discussed within, or if you've already seen them. On quite a few films, it tells the whole plot, in detail, from opening to end credits.

I also don't like the prose of the author, as he excessively uses sentences "in quotations". The writing structure is very formulaic and boring. The "5 paragraph essay" format is good for high school students learning to write, but imagine an entire book written that way. I can only read it for 15 minutes before losing interest.

The book does, however, provide plenty of examples from a variety of films.

Book Description

What precisely, W. J. T. Mitchell asks, are pictures (and theories of pictures) doing now, in the late twentieth century, when the power of the visual is said to be greater than ever before, and the "pictorial turn" supplants the "linguistic turn" in the study of culture? This book by one of America's leading theorists of visual representation offers a rich account of the interplay between the visible and the readable across culture, from literature to visual art to the mass media.

Customer Reviews:

A classic.......2001-12-04

This book has to be considered as a classic in the field. Ironically, Mitchell's term 'pictorial turn' seems to be more widespread than knowledge of this book, with the unsettling consequence that many people talk about pictures *replacing* the word, and few about the intricate and complex relationship between the two.
The book is surprisingly well written, rarely has an academic book entertained me so much. For everybody who wants to know what *pictorial turn* means from the point of view of the person who coined this phrase, I can only recommend it warmest.

Approaches to Popular Film (Inside Popular Film)

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Approaches to Popular Film (Inside Popular Film)

Manufacturer: Manchester University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 071904393X

Book Description

An invaluable introduction to popular film and the way in which it is studied this book brings together the critical approaches and issues that have sought to define popular film from the 1950s to the present day. It includes discussion of mass culture theory and political economy; auteur theory; genre theory; star studies; historical poetics; screen theory; feminism and cultural studies. Written by specialists, Approaches to popular film is an ideal textbook for students coming to film theory for the first time.

Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Sightlines)

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A Provocative, Seminal Work
A Provocative, Seminal Work
A Majestic, empowering work

Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Sightlines)
Ella Shohat
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415063256

Book Description

Unthinking Eurocentrism explores issues of Eurocentrism and multiculturalism in relation to popular culture, film and the mass media. The book "multiculturalizes" media studies by looking at Hollywood movie genres such as the western, the musical and the imperial film from multicultural perspectives, examining issues from the racial politics of casting to colonialist discourse and gender and Empire.

More than just a critique of Eurocentricism and racism, Unthinking Eurocentrism also confirms artistic, cultural and political alternatives, discussing a wide range of non-Eurocentric media including Third World films, rap video and indigenous media. Synthesizing literary theory, media theory and cultural studies to form a challenging interdisciplinary study, the authors agree that current debates about Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism are merely surface manifestations of a deep-rooted shift: the decolinization of global culture.

Customer Reviews:

A Provocative, Seminal Work.......2000-06-03

I started reading Unthinking Eurocentrism one night and couldn't sleep until I had finished it. Shohat and Stam's briliantly written, often witty, book is an intellectual page turner. I plan to read it again.

A Provocative, Seminal Work.......2000-06-03

A Majestic, empowering work.......1998-04-01

As a social science student, I found this book invaluable in its incisive exposure of Eurocentrism. The authors treat the subject in a mature manner, and offer an alternative, that of decentering the discussion and making it multi-centric rather than Euro-centric. This book is sensitively written and does not offend Europeans, but seeks to reveal the hidden ways in which Eurocentrism manifests itself. I experienced the reading of this book as liberating and as a validation of my own thinking. I read a university library copy, but I intend to purchase a copy for my children to read - and to refer back to time and time again. It is a timeless work.

Average customer rating:

Great resource for teaching

Film, Form, and Culture w/ DVD-ROM
Robert Phillip Kolker
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0073123617

Book Description

This text looks at film from part to whole--from the shot and the cut to the cultural, political, and economic contexts in which films are made. "Teaching Film is about getting control of the image and handing that control over to students," argues author Robert Kolker, and that's just what he does in his teaching and writing about film, including in this outstanding textbook and DVD-ROM package.

The new edition includes more detailed discussion of the shot, composition, editing, and genre; a thorough discussion of the technical and aesthetic changes resulting from film's digital transformation; and a revised discussion of the cultural context of film. The companion interactive DVD-ROM includes segments from classic and contemporary films, with explanatory text, stills, and animations illustrating key film elements and strategies.

Customer Reviews:

Great resource for teaching.......2007-09-13

I bought this book along with a few others and it has truely helped me develop a curriuclum for my high school Art of Film class. The DVD examples help to visually understand the concepts and I enjoyed it for my own knowledge as well.

Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (Rutgers Depth of Field Series)

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Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (Rutgers Depth of Field Series)

Manufacturer: Rutgers University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0813532353

Book Description

Reflecting the burgeoning academic interest in issues of nation, race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of identity, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media brings all of these concerns under the same umbrella, contending that these issues must be discussed in relation to each other. Communities, societies, nations, and even entire continents, the book suggests, exist not autonomously but rather in a densely woven web of connectedness.

To explore this complexity, the editors have forged links between usually compartmentalized fields (especially media studies, literary theory, visual culture, and critical anthropology) and areas of inquiry—particularly postcolonial and diasporic studies and a diverse set of ethnic and area studies. This book, which links all these issues in suggestive ways, provides an indispensable guide for students and scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. Essays in this groundbreaking volume include Julianne Burton-Carvajal on ethnic identity in Lone Star; Manthia Diawara on diasporic documentary; Hamid Naficy on independent transnational film genres; Robyn Wiegman on whiteness studies; Faye Ginsburg on indigenous media; and Jennifer Gonzáles on race in cyberspace; Ana M. López on modernity and Latin American cinema; and Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan on Warrior Marks and multiculturalism and globalization.

Pre-Code Hollywood
Average customer rating:

OK, but there's better out there

Better Ones Out There

Exciting subject matter, dull reading

GREAT SUBJECT, PASSIONLESS TREATMENT

Censorship and Politics (And Who Can Tell the Difference)

Pre-Code Hollywood
Thomas Doherty
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood

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ASIN: 0231110952

Amazon.com

Who says the world of classic Hollywood moviemaking was never risqué? We tend to think of black-and-white movies as representing a sanitized world, where crime never paid, ladies of the evening had hearts of gold, and married couples slept in separate beds. But in fact, censorship in American cinema didn't begin in earnest until 1934, when Will Hays and Joseph Breen began enforcing the legendary Hollywood production code. In this revelatory book, Thomas Doherty looks at sound movies of 1930-34--what is now known as the "pre-code" era.

This was a Hollywood of loose dames, hot whoopee, and coked-up killers who'd do anything for a pot of jack. It was a world that was often amoral and anarchic--an industry that allowed James Cagney and Paul Muni wild orgies of violence, openly flaunted the sexuality of Marlene Dietrich and Mae West, gave King Kong permission to crush cars and eat people, and allowed Tod Browning to make Freaks, one of the ghastliest, most sensationalistic, and greatest American movies.

Doherty's book captures this mad universe beautifully, describing films in such delightful detail that you may find yourself tossing it on your couch and racing to the video store. He also documents the downfall of the period, the outrage that was leveled against early sound films, and the emerging code that repressed American movies for almost 30 years. Film fans reveling in the debauchery of Hollywood's naughtiest era will also want to see Mark A. Vieira's Sin in Soft Focus. --Raphael Shargel

Book Description

Pre-Code Hollywood explores the fascinating period in American motion picture history from 1930 to 1934 when the commandments of the Production Code Administration were violated with impunity in a series of wildly unconventional films -- a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. Though more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, the films of the period do indeed have the look of Hollywood cinema -- but the moral terrain is so off-kilter that they seem imported from a parallel universe.

In a sense, Doherty avers, the films of pre-Code Hollywood are from another universe. They lay bare what Hollywood under the Production Code attempted to cover up and push offscreen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored, economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded -- in sum, pretty much the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled.

No other book has yet sought to interpret the films and film-related meanings of the pre-Code era -- what defined the period, why it ended, and what its relationship was to the country as a whole during the darkest years of the Great Depression... and afterward.

Customer Reviews:

OK, but there's better out there.......2002-07-01

I love this era, and I love reading about this era, but even so, I gave up reading this book about halfway through. There are better books about pre-Code, at least two or three. Geoffrey Blake has a great book about how the Code came to be, and Mick LaSalle and Mark Vierra also have excellent books about the artistry and the gossip and the history. This one is OK, but I'd recommend it only to people like me who just can't get enough. And even then, I found out, I can.

Better Ones Out There.......2001-08-01

This is a very respectable but uninspired treatment of the pre-Code era. Its virtues come mainly in the beginning, with an interesting introduction. Its weakness stems from the fact that the author seems more fascinated by the politics of the era than with the movies -- and that he fails to connect the politics with the movies in a way that ultimately illuminates THE FILMS, on an artistic level. I don't think he has a feel for the ART of the era at all, and as a result the best chapters are about Franklin Roosevelt and the newsreels of the day. A decent treatment, but better books are out there.

Exciting subject matter, dull reading.......2001-06-10

This is a good book, but it doesn't capture the excitement of its subject matter. All kinds of wild & crazy things were happening in pre-code (1930-1934) Hollywood movies (extramarital affairs, prostitution, robbery, violence, etc.), & they happened for the most part without moral judgment on the parts of the movie makers. But this book presents this exciting period in a rather dry, humorless way. It contains lots of useful information about the era & its surrounding politics, but also leaves out a lot of things that should be mentioned. On the plus side, it contains a complete version of the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 (which is referred to in so many books, but hard to find a copy of). The photos are great, but small in size & printed on the same porous paper used for the text (which results in less sharpness than if printed on glossy paper). The biggest negative, in my opinion, is that a number of important pre-code movies are not even mentioned in this book (for example, Norma Shearer's "The Divorcee"). And why the author spends 4+ pages analyzing "Congorilla" (a 1932 African documentary that was made during the pre-code era but has little to do with Production Code censorship) is beyond me; it's a good analysis but perhaps belongs in a different book!

GREAT SUBJECT, PASSIONLESS TREATMENT.......2001-04-13

While there may be no more fascinating subject in film history, this book just does not capture its magic. Most of the book consists of plot summaries, and the social analysis contains a lot of specious correlations between film content and the transition between the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. The author doesn't really seem to like pre-Code films all that much--rather he seems to find them sociologically interesting. This is hardly a bad book. A lot of research clearly went into it. But this is not the book to make non-aficionados interested -- or lovers of pre-Code enlightened.

Censorship and Politics (And Who Can Tell the Difference).......2001-02-19

Thomas Doherty's Pre-Code Hollywood (Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930 - 1934) is a wonderful study of Hollywood and the movies it produced before the Production Code gained its censorious teeth and bloodied them on celluloid. The most significant and interesting aspects of the book were the politics involved, both in the production of the movies and the movies themselves. Movies looked at vice, poverty, and politics, for example, with eyes wide open and this frightened many people in power who led a successful campaign against the industry. This book tells that tale very effectively. It is a joy to read.

Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Studies in Culture and Communication)

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Outstanding Analysis of the Culture of Television Fandom
Still the best account of fan culture and fan use of texts
Dining at the Television Buffet
Excellent resource for fan fiction authors and fans

Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Studies in Culture and Communication)
Henry Jenkins
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415905729

Book Description

"Get a life," William Shatner told Star Trek fans. Yet, as Textual Poachers argues, fans already have a "life," a complex subculture which draws its resources from commercial culture while also reworking them to serve alternative interests. Rejecting stereotypes of fans as cultural dupes, social misfits, and mindless consumers, Jenkins represents media fans as active producers and skilled manipulators of program meanings, as nomadic poachers constructing their own culture from borrowed materials, as an alternative social community defined through its cultural preferences and consumption practices.

Written from an insider's perspective and providing vivid examples from fan artifacts, Textual Poachers offers an ethnographic account of the media fan community, its interpretive strategies, its social institutions and cultural practices, and its troubled relationship to the mass media and consumer capitalism. Drawing on the work of Michel de Ceteau, Jenkins shows how fans of Star Trek, Blake's 7, The Professionals, Beauty and the Beast, Starsky and Hutch, Alien Nation, Twin Peaks, and other popular programs exploit these cultural materials as the basis for their stories, songs, videos, and social interactions.

Addressing both academics and fans, Jenkins builds a powerful case for the richness of fan culture as a popular response to the mass media and as a challenge to the producers' attempts to regulate textual meanings. Textual Poachers guides readers through difficult questions about popular consumption, genre, gender, sexuality, and interpretation, documenting practices and processes which test and challenge basic assumptions of contemporary media theory.

Customer Reviews:

Outstanding Analysis of the Culture of Television Fandom.......2004-10-12

Culture studies has been one of the most provocative and controversial areas of investigation in the social sciences during the last score years or so. Using the tools of postmodern analysis of texts, and the deconstruction of ideas, institutions, and forms scholars have reshaped our understanding of everything from the mundane to subjects acknowledged by all as critical to our modern society. In this important book Henry Jenkins turns his considerable analytic skills on the role of television fans in adopting and making their own several important series and movies. Jenkins, on the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes both as a scholar and a fan fully immersed in the culture that produces conventions and a wide range of artistic products associated with television.

"Textual Poachers" emphasizes how fans of various television shows and movies have embraced the characters and "universe" of the shows and made them their own. In most cases they participate in the continuing saga of the characters of the story by fashioning their own narratives based on the series. Be far the most famous of these participatory series is "Star Trek," which was the first series to attract this type of fan following, and still the largest of all of them. It has spawned not only multi and varied clubs for those interested in the ideals of the series, but also inspired a range of creative responses in art, literature, costume, engineering, erotica, music, and drama. In so doing, those that are a part of the fan culture of the series emphasize the interplay of the crew "family" aboard the Star Ship Enterprise, the ideals of the United Federation of Planets, and the challenges of moving beyond the humdrum of existence on Earth to a more exciting and rewarding life within the broader cosmos. The ranges of responses are almost as broad as the number of people involved, and Henry Jackson makes clear that all of those responses are legitimate in the "universe" of fandom.

Jenkins writes at length about the responses of fans to several television programs beyond the famous "Star Trek" phenomenon. These include "Alien Nation" (1989-1990), "Dr. Who," (1963- ), "Magnum, P.I." (1980-1988); "The Man from Uncle" (1964-1968), "Remington Steele" (1982-1987), "Simon and Simon" (1981-1988), "Twin Peaks" (1990-1991), and others. But the series fans that Jenkins spends the most time analyzing are those attracted to "Beauty and the Beast" (1987-1990). The romance between Catherine (Linda Hamilton) and Vincent (Ron Perlman) captured the imagination of a larger number of viewers and they used that on-screen relationship as the cultural materials from which they created a vast array of "stories, songs, videos, and social interactions." It proved a powerful inspiration for enormously romantic depictions.

Henry Jenkins also draws attention to the fact that the vast majority of those a part of this fandom, are white, middle-class women seeking something more than they experience in their everyday lives. They seem drawn to television series with compelling characters interacting in a sophisticated manner. They emphasize relationships and tend to soft-pedal action and adventure in their formulations. At sum they seem to be creating through their efforts a place of refuge, acceptance, and intimacy for themselves and their co-participants. This is captured well in a song, "In My Weekend-Only World," written by T.J. Burnside Clapp to express her love of the fan conventions that she attends:
"In an hour of make-believe
In these warm convention halls
My mind is free to think
And feels so deeply
An intimacy never found
Inside their silent walls
In a year or more
Of what they call reality.

In my weekend-only world,
That they call make-believe,
Are those who share
The visions that I see.
In their real-time life
That they tell me is real,
The things they care about
Aren't real to me." (p. 277)

Henry Jenkins' study is a superb analysis that will change the perspective all who read it about the fan culture and its place in modern society. It is difficult not to emerge from reading this book without a sense of wonder about the talented individuals who are a part of this fan culture and how they seek to live their lives on their own terms, in the process creating for themselves idealized "universes" more like those they glimpsed in the television fictions that they embrace.

Still the best account of fan culture and fan use of texts.......2001-07-07

This is a gem of a book. Jenkins combines an "insider's" understanding of media fandom with serious, well-grounded scholarship to provide one of the few scholarly works on this subject which is not riddled with unacknowledged biases or factual errors (you know, the sort of misrepresentations of series content which suggest that the scholar didn't think enough of the subject matter or their fan informants to bother to get it right). As someone who was practically raised by classic "Star Trek" re-runs and who continues to find inspiration and healing in many science fiction TV programs -- and who hopes to continue to do scholarly research in this field -- I would hold Jenkins up as a model to other scholars. The major drawback of this volume is that it is now almost ten years old. There have been many wonderful series with growing fan cultures of their own (including the rise of such female heroes as "Xena" and "Buffy") since TEXTUAL POACHERS was written, but Jenkins provides a methodology and a model which can still help to interpret these more recent phenomena. Read this, and enjoy.

Dining at the Television Buffet.......1999-12-05

Jenkins starts by dispelling the stereotype of the media fan as teenaged geek in Spock ears, and explores the very real and dynamic interactions between fans and their media. He has a clear understanding of the subject and a good relationship with the people whose culture he describes, as well as a readable and intelligent style of writing. The book is not only interesting but also fun to read.

Excellent resource for fan fiction authors and fans.......1999-10-28

While dated, and slightly insular, this text is an excellent introduction to the sub-culture of fanzines and fan fiction. While many of the current generation of fans seem to believe fan fiction was born online around 1994, they should be surprised and hopefully pleased to discover the rich (off-line) history of the phenomenon, dating all the way back to the pulp magazines of the 1930s.

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