Faculty of Arts
quotations used in lecture 2 – television and everyday life
“the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes. It belongs to insignificance…. It is the unperceived, first in the sense that one has always looked past it;…. by another trait, the everyday is what we never see for a first time, but only see again.”
• Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” Yale French Studies 73, 1987: 14.
“The temporality of everyday life is complex: it combines repetition with linearity, recurrence with forward movement.”
• Rita Felski, “The Invention of Everyday Life,” New Formations 39: 21.
“Each TV programme may be the same for all the millions of its viewers, but what’s ‘on TV’ – literally on it – is never the same: it’s always personal, private and significant.”
• John Hartley, The Politics of Pictures (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 110.
“How is it that such a technology and medium has found its way so profoundly and intimately into the fabric of our daily lives? How is it that it stays there?”
• Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 2.
“Our experience of everyday life is of a piece with our experience of the world: we do not expect it to be, nor can we imagine it to be, significantly otherwise.”
• Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life, p. 3.
