FTVMS 211 - Week 7

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quotations used in lecture 7 – genre 2

“[Ideology is] the frameworks of thinking and calculation about the world––the ‘ideas’ which people use to figure out how the social world works, what their place is in it, and what they ought to do.”

• Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-structuralist Debates,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication. 2:2 (1986), p. 97.

“Since ideology saturates everyday discourse in the form of common sense, it cannot be bracketed off from everyday life as a self-contained set of ‘political opinions’ or ‘biased views’.”

• Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen and Co., 1979), p. 12.

 

“[T]he sitcom has been the genre to attract people to the tube...without understanding the sitcom, we can’t properly understand the role of television  in our culture.”

• Janet Staiger, Blockbuster TV (New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 1.

 

“In addition to the plots and characters of television sitcoms, phenomenologies of the medium and genre have unique importance in the construction of minority sexual identity…. Accommodating such nonfamilial identifications, television sitcoms’ fascination with non-normative or chosen families from I Dream of Jeannie and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father through The Brady Bunch to Cheers and Friends suture the privatized affect of domestic viewership to increasingly self-motivated, collectively maintained forms of affiliation.”

• Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed,  “‘Ah, Yes, I Remember it Well’: Memory and Queer Culture in Will and Grace, Cultural Critique 56 (Winter 2004): 161.

 

“The principal fundamental situation of the situation comedy is that things do not change. No new society occurs at the end. Its messages are messages of defense, of protection, of the impossibility of progress or any other positive change.”

• David Grote, The End of Comedy: The Sit-Com and the Comedic Tradition

(Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1983), p.105.

 

“In the interests of family stability, [the sit-com was] designed with a particular definition of family economy in mind: a working father who could, alone, provide for the social and economic security of his family; a homemaker wife and mother who maintains the family’s environment; children who grow up in neighborhoods undisturbed by heterogeneity of class, race, ethnicity, and age.”

• Mary Beth Haralovich, “Sit-Coms and Suburbs,” in Private Screenings, ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 137

 

“At the heart of Absolutely Fabulous is the question of ‘making a spectacle’ of oneself and the show can be seen to operate within the general modes of ritual spectacle, comic verbal compositions, curses and oaths, disruption of order and general unruliness...of carvival...Edina and Patsy’s spectacular displays challenge propriety, care of the self, female responsibility by parading femininity as a mode to be put on and off rather than something which comes naturally.”

• Pat Kirkham and Beverley Skeggs, “Absolutely Fabulous: Absolutely Feminist?, in The Television Studies Book, ed. Christine Geraghty and David Lusted (London: Arnold, 2000), p. 290.

 

“That so little attention has been devoted to [television animation] attests to its doubly devalued status: as the offspring of a conventionally devalued medium (television) whose cultural products have only recently been considered worthy of scholarly scrutiny, and as the odd recombinant form of two similarly degraded genres – the situation comedy and the cartoon.”

• Carol Stabile and Mark Harrison, “Introduction: Prime Time Animation – An Overview” in Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 2.

 

“Assuming that its audience had grown up on a television diet, The Simpsons offers a text rich with allusions to a body of popular culture history roughly equivalent to the history of television. At the same, The Simpsons (as well as South Park) has created a dense, internal text that depends on a comprehensive knowledge of the program itself and its own history.”

• Stabile and Harrison, Prime Time Animation, p. 9.

 

“Can The Simpsons be both mainstream and oppositional? How do we understand the politics of a show that consistently holds corporate capitalism and consumer culture up to ridicule at the same time that it is the flagship program of a multinational media conglomerate?” Fox network

• John Alberti, ed.,  Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), p. xvii.