Faculty of Arts
quotations used in lecture 6 – genre 1
Purdue University Online Writing Lab guide
A useful on-line citation guide.
“We need to look beyond the text as the locus for genre and instead locate genres within the complex interrelations among texts, industries, audiences, and historical contexts….Even though texts certainly bear marks that are typical of genres, these textual conventions are not what define genre. Genres exist only through the creation, circulation, and reception of texts within cultural contexts.”
• Jason Mittel, “A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory,” Cinema Journal, vol. 40, no. 3 (2001): 7-8.
• Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Methuen, 1982)
• Ien Ang, Watching
• Martha Nochimson, No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992)
• C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby, Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995)
“Audience discussion programmes challenge existing conceptions of genre, particularly the distinctions between entertainment and current affairs, ideas and emotions, argument and narrative.”
• Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt, Talk on Television: Audience Participation and Public Debate (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 37.
“The audience discussion or participation programme is not quite current affairs or consumer affairs though it deals with current issues as they affect ordinary lives. It uses experts but is not documentary. It shows the impact of current issues on ordinary people’s everyday lives through story-telling but is not soap opera. Like the soap opera, it constructs the viewer as community member and repository of common sense, but it takes issues beyond the private domain of the domestic and local, for the viewer is also constructed as citizen, with a duty to be informed about and act upon the wider world.”
• Livingstone and Lunt, Talk on Television, p. 39.
“The sexually explicit becomes titillation, the political unorthodox becomes a freak show. That is why it is so easy to dismiss talk shows as a spectacle of forced exaggerations. But because of the nature of the format…what is conceived as a confrontational device, becomes an opening for the empowerment of an alternative discursive practice. These discourses don’t have to conform to civility nor to the dictates of the general interest. They can be expressed for what they are: particular, regional, one-sided, and for that reason politically alive.”
• Paolo Carpignano, Robin Andersen,
“For people whose life experience is so heavily tilted toward invisibility, whose nonconformity, even when it looks very much like conformity, discredits them and disenfranchises them, daytime TV talk shows are a big shot of visibility and media accreditation.”
• Joshua Gamson, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 5.
“Daytime talk shows…do indeed thrive on contestation over the difference between normal and abnormal”
• Kevin Glynn, Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power and the Transformation of American Television (
“The first-person ethos of the talk show defies the power-bearing detachment of scientific experts.”
• Glynn, Tabloid Culture, pp. 189-90.
“Talk shows create spaces wherein the diagnosed can boldly express their refusal of such diagnostic discourses and audience members can heretically join in support of their dissident voices.”
• Glynn, Tabloid Culture, pp. 196.
“Multidiscursivity is a product of struggles to assert that marginalized social differences have a right to exist beyond society’s margins, despite attempts of dominant knowledges to silence, speak for, and even eliminate alterity”
• Glynn, Tabloid Culture, pp. 188.
You might also like to look at Bernard M. Timberg’s entry on “Talk Shows” and Robert C. Allen’s entry on “Soap Opera,”at the
