Faculty of Arts
quotations used in lecture 8 – television and postmodernism
“The development of some kind of working relationship between television and postmodernism within the realm of critical studies is inevitable, almost impossible, and absolutely necessary.”
• Jim Collins ‘Television and Postmodernism’ in Peter and Will Brooker (eds) Postmodern After-Images: A Reader (London, Arnold, 1997), p192.
“But in what sense exactly is [postmodernism] post…
– as a result of modernism?
– the aftermath of modernism?
– the afterbirth of modernism?
– the development of modernism?
– the denial of modernism?
– the rejection of modernism?
Postmodernism has been used in a mix-and-match of some or all of these meanings.”
• Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt, Introducing Postmodernism (
“In many ways, postmodern artists and theorists continue the sorts of experimentation that we can also find in modernist works, including the use of self-consciousness, parody, irony, fragmentation, generic mixing, ambiguity, simultaneity, and the breakdown between high and low forms of expression. In this way, postmodern artistic forms can be seen as an extension of modernist experimentation; however, others prefer to represent the move into postmodernism as a more radical break, one that is a result of new ways of representing the world including television, film (especially after the introduction of color and sound), and the computer.”
• Dino Felluga, "General Introduction to Postmodernism."
“The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited; but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, 'I love you madly', because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, 'I love you madly'.”
• Umberto Eco, Reflections on the Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (London: Minerva, 1994), pp. 67-68.
P “Television presents a further problem for theorists of the postmodern…in that TV is not ‘post’-anything. There was no modernist TV.”
• Jane Feuer, Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 6.
P “Television, unlike architecture, literature, or painting, never had a modernist phase that could serve as a departure for postmodern television.”
• Jim Collins, “Television and Postmodernism,” in Postmodern After-Images: A Reader, ed. Peter and Will Brooker (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 193.
P “While the postmodern intervention in the arts is often interpreted as a reaction against modernism, against the stifling elitism canonization of the works of high modernism, the postmodern intervention within television is a reaction against realism and the system of coded genres (sitcoms, soaps, action/adventure, and so on) that define the system of commercial television in the United States. In this sense, postmodern interventions within television replicate the assault on realism and genre which modernism itself had earlier attacked. Modernism never took hold in television…Instead, commercial television is predominantly governed by the aesthetic of representational realism, of images and stories which fabricate the real and attempts to produce a reality effect.”
• Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern (New York, Routledge, 1995), p. 235.
“Television is frequently referred to as the quintessence of postmodern culture, and postmodernism is just as frequently written off as mere ‘television culture.”
• Collins, “Television and Postmodernism,” p. 192.
“It is here that the specificity of the televisual apparatus becomes important, since television may itself be seen as a postmodernist phenomenon in its very construction of a decentred historical spectator, and its obliteration of hitherto sacrosanct boundaries, such as those between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, or between the space of the viewing-subject and that within the TV screen.”
• E Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture (New York :Methuen, 1987), p. 32.
“…a view of TV as constituting the postmodern psycho-cultural condition – a world of simulations detached from reference to the real, which circulate and exchange in ceaseless, centreless flow.”
• Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 191.
“Commercial television developed postmodernist tendencies very early on. For example, the simultaneous broadcast of widely different programs on multiple channels and the frequent interruption of programs by commercials (or, perhaps more to the point, vice versa) can both be cited as examples of postmodern plurality. And these basic characteristics naturally led to the eventual practice of channel surfing, skipping wildly and discontinuously from one channel (one program, one genre, one mode) to another with remote control in hand, a practice that might be cited as a paradigmatic experience of postmodern fragmentation.”
• M. Keith Booker, Strange TV: Innovative Television Series from The Twilight Zone to The X-Files (
“In a sense,
• Booker, Strange TV, p. 101.
