THE WORLD ACCORDING TO TELEVISION

REQUIRED TEXTS:
Bourdieu, Pierre. On Television. New York: The New Press, 1998.
Butler, Jeremy. Television Critical Methods and Applications, 2nd ed. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Postman, Neil, and Steve Powers. How to Watch TV News. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Readings on Electronic Reserve. (All titles in quotation marks are on electronic reserve online and room reserve in Robeson Library.)

Syllabus

Sept. 8: Bourdieu, On Television

Sept. 15: Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death and Bordieu
Charles Weingartner, "What Do We Know?"
W. James Potter, "The Importance of Real-World Information"

Sept. 22: Postman (especially Chaps. 1, 2, & 5) and Bourdieu
Paper 1 due (3 pages on Bordieu or Postman)
W. James Potter, "What Is An Audience"
W. James Potter, "What Is Entertainment?"

Sept. 29: Postman (especially Chaps. 6, 7, 9, & 11) and Bourdieu;
John Fiske and John Hartley, "The Signs of Television" and "The Codes of Television"
Douglas Kellner, "Hegemony, Counterhegemony, and Instrumentalist Theories"

Oct. 6: Butler, Chap. 13 and Appendix
Marcel Danesi, "Television"
Neil Postman, "The Judgment of Thamus" and "From Tools to Technocracy"
S. I. Hayakawa and Alan Hayakawa, "The Empty Eye"
Alan M. Olson, et al. "Video Ergo Sum"
Aletha C. Hurston, et al. "Television Images and Their Effects"
Paper 2 due (3 pages on one of these five essays)

Oct. 13: Butler, Chaps. 1 & 2;
Brian Donohue, "The Electronic Imagination: Requiem for a Narrative"

Oct. 20: Butler, Chaps. 3 & 4;
Charles McGrath, "The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel"
Adrienne L. McLean, "Marshall McLuhan, Television Culture, and 'The X-Files'"
First draft of project proposal due by email at least one day before class

Oct. 27: Butler, Chap. 12
Postman and Powers, How To Watch TV News
Bernard Timberg, "The Unspoken Rules of Television Talk"

Nov. 3: How To Watch TV News
Douglas Kellner, "TV News, Ideology, and Media Mediation"
Herman Gray, "The Politics of Representation in Network Television"
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, "Does Local Television News Shape Our Views of Those of Other Races?"
Paper 3 due (3 pages on television news)

Nov. 10 Presentation of book reports
(Written copy of book reports due)

Nov. 17: Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor"

Nov. 24: Case study (materials to be distributed)

Dec. 1: Project presentations

Dec. 8: Project presentations
All course papers/projects due