Browsing by Subject "Television"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    "Excuse the mess, but we live here": class, gender, and identity in the post-Cold War working-class family sitcom.
    (2009-03) Williams, Melissa Drue
    American television became a national medium in the late 1940s and, at its inception, foregrounded both the family and the American Dream as cornerstones of American culture and identity. An explicitly commercial medium, television used middle- and working-class family sitcoms to promote the commodities necessary for middle-class assimilation, but also to position working-class characters as stern object lessons in the battle to promote a "classless" American post-World War II idyll. Although 1970s television ushered in a much more visible (and in some ways, sympathetic) image of American working-class life, the era's programming nevertheless continued to promote the American Dream through material accumulation and behavioral assimilation in its representations of socio-economic class. A new representation of class, however, emerged just as the Cold War was grinding to a halt. Beginning in the late1980s and continuing into the late 1990s, working-class family sitcoms began to challenge the American Dream paradigm by presenting working-class cultures to be equally valid to the middle-class American culture that television had always promoted. This dissertation explores the rise and fall of this phenomenon, and how the politics, economics, history, and technological developments of the era facilitated this challenge to the hegemonic, middle-class norm.
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    Interview with Sheldon Goldstein
    (University of Minnesota, 1994-07-21) Chambers, Clarke A.; Goldstein, Shelly
    Clarke A. Chambers interviews Sheldon Goldstein, faculty member in the Speech and Communications department. Goldstein was also involved in radio and television at the University.
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    The Media of Memories: Argentine and Brazilian Transitional Justice as Seen on TV
    (2019-03) Hill Cosimini, Amy
    Grounded in my own observation of the recent string of Latin American shows, such as Montecristo (Argentina, 2008) and Amor e revolução (Brazil, 2011), which directly confront traumatic national pasts, this project investigates what representative 21st century Argentine and Brazilian fictional and testimonial televisual accounts (telenovelas, miniseries and testimonial interviews) communicate about the role of television in the construction and mediation of the officially sanctioned memory narratives promoted by normative transitional justice mechanisms. In this vein, this project—The Media of Memories: Argentine and Transitional Justice as Seen on TV—poses a series of interrelated questions:1) How can transitional justice processes take place on the small screen? 2) How can understanding these televisual practices advance existing theories on transitional justice as it relates to the right to memory, and the protection of memory’s productive problematics—such as the respect for silence, gaps and hauntings inherent in remembering mass atrocities? And finally, 3) What alternative spaces for advocacy, if any, are opened up by these television programs? In the end, my project contends that television programs, in the Argentine and Brazilian cases, have the potential to operate as malleable discursive spaces that question hegemonic memory regimes and complicate normative truths put in place by the State. Furthermore, the telenovelas, miniseries, and testimonial interviews analyzed throughout this project function, to varying degrees, as dynamic memory mediums that simultaneously promote memory as memory entrepreneurs, profit from memory, frame what truths should be remembered, and digitally transmit memory. Thus, I maintain that moving televised images have the potential to operate as a widely accessible form of transitional justice that not only translates judicial arguments to the mass populace, but also provides alternative spaces for the re-definition of justice and the performance of multilayered activism. Through its visual depiction and fictionalization of the limit experiences of collective traumas, television stages those realities that resist verbal narration and operates as a form of symbolic reparations that restores dignity to victims, develops a more inclusive narrative of the past, and protects the right to memory.
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    Sitcom Citizenship: Civic Participation within Postwar Suburban Sitcoms, 1952-1972
    (2014-05) Cheyne, Michael
    Postwar suburban sitcoms such as Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show are traditionally thought of as wholly focusing on themes of domesticity. This project argues that such programs also served as instruments of good citizenship, modeling civic participation within neighborhoods. In their depictions of this activism, suburban sitcoms emphasized the importance of individual responsibility and the family, themes which both compelled viewers to become civically engaged and also restrained the potential radicalism of their behavior.