Time In Television Narrative

Download or read book Time in Television Narrative written by Melissa Ames and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012-08 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection analyzes twenty-first-century American television programs that rely upon temporal and narrative experimentation. These shows play with time, slowing it down to unfold the narrative through time retardation and compression. They disrupt the chronological flow of time itself, using flashbacks and insisting that viewers be able to situate themselves in both the present and the past narrative threads. Although temporal play has existed on the small screen prior to the new millennium, never before has narrative time been so freely adapted in mainstream television. The essayists offer explanations for not only the frequency of time play in contemporary programming, but the implications of its sometimes disorienting presence. Drawing upon the fields of cultural studies, television scholarship, and literary studies, as well as overarching theories concerning postmodernity and narratology, Time in Television Narrative offers some critical suggestions. The increasing number of of television programs concerned with time may stem from any and all of the following: recent scientific approaches to quantum physics and temporality; new conceptions of history and posthistory; or trends in late-capitalistic production and consumption, in the new culture of instantaneity, or in the recent trauma culture amplified after the September 11 attacks. In short, these televisual time experiments may very well be an aesthetic response to the climate from which they derive. These essays analyze both ends of this continuum and also attend to another crucial variable: the television viewer watching this new temporal play.

Download or read book Time, Technology and Narrative Form in Contemporary US Television Drama written by JP Kelly and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-09 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how television has been transformed over the past twenty years by the introduction of new viewing technologies including DVDs, DVRs and streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. It shows that these platforms have profoundly altered the ways we access and watch television, enabling viewers to pause, rewind, record and archive the once irreversible flow of broadcast TV. JP Kelly argues that changes in the technological landscape of television has encouraged the production of narrative forms that both explore and embody new industrial temporalities. Focusing on US television but also considering the role of TV within a global marketplace, the author identifies three distinct narrative temporalities: “acceleration” (24; Prison Break), “complexity” (Lost; FlashForward), and “retrospection” (Mad Men). Through industrial-textual analysis of television shows, this cross-disciplinary study locates these narrative temporalities in their socio-cultural contexts and examines connections between production, distribution, and narrative form in the contemporary television industry.

Download or read book Prime Time Law written by Robert M. Jarvis and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an in-depth survey of how lawyers are portrayed in television dramas and comedies. Spanning five decades, 18 contributions refer to about 350 shows (both the famous and the obscure) as well as to more general topics such as science fiction, situation comedies, soap operas, westerns, and lawyers who are female and/or young. The volume features a foreword by the legal advisor to the shows L.A. Law and Paper Chase. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Time on TV written by Lorna Jowett and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-22 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From early examples such as Star Trek and Sapphire and Steel to more contemporary shows including Life on Mars and The Vampire Diaries, time has frequently been used as a device to allow programme makers to experiment stylistically and challenge established ways of thinking. Time on TV provides a range of exciting, accessible, yet intellectually rigorous essays that consider the many and varied ways in which telefantasy shows have explored this subject, providing the reader with a greater understanding of the importance of time to the success of genre on the small screen.

Download or read book Complex TV written by Jason Mittell and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and sustained analysis of the development of storytelling for television Over the past two decades, new technologies, changing viewer practices, and the proliferation of genres and channels has transformed American television. One of the most notable impacts of these shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming rarely seen in a medium that is typically viewed as formulaic and convention bound. Complex TV offers a sustained analysis of the poetics of television narrative, focusing on how storytelling has changed in recent years and how viewers make sense of these innovations. Through close analyses of key programs, including The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Veronica Mars, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Mad Men the book traces the emergence of this narrative mode, focusing on issues such as viewer comprehension, transmedia storytelling, serial authorship, character change, and cultural evaluation. Developing a television-specific set of narrative theories, Complex TV argues that television is the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time.

Download or read book Time Travel written by David Wittenberg and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “stimulating contribution to literary theory” reveals the deeply philosophical concerns and developments behind popular time travel sci-fi (London Review of Books). In Time Travel, literary theorist David Wittenberg argues that time travel fiction is not mere escapism, but a narrative “laboratory” where theoretical questions about storytelling—and, by extension, about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity—are presented in story form. Drawing on physics, philosophy, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and film theory, Wittenberg links innovations in time travel fiction to specific shifts in the popularization of science, from nineteenth-century evolutionary biology to twentieth-century quantum physics and more recent “multiverse” cosmologies. Wittenberg shows how popular awareness of new science led to surprising innovations in the literary “time machine,” which evolved from a vehicle used for sociopolitical commentary into a psychological device capable of exploring the temporal structure and significance of subjects, viewpoints, and historical events. Time Travel draws on classic works of science fiction by H. G. Wells, Edward Bellamy, Robert Heinlein, Samuel Delany, and Harlan Ellison, television shows such as “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek,” and other popular entertainments. These are read alongside theoretical work ranging from Einstein, Schrödinger, Stephen Hawking to Gérard Genette, David Lewis, and Gilles Deleuze. Wittenberg argues that even the most mainstream audiences of popular time travel fiction and cinema are vigorously engaged with many of the same questions about temporality, identity, and history that concern literary theorists, media and film scholars, and philosophers.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Narrative written by David Herman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-19 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Narrative provides a unique and valuable overview of current approaches to narrative study. An international team of experts explores ideas of storytelling and methods of narrative analysis as they have emerged across diverse traditions of inquiry and in connection with a variety of media, from film and television, to storytelling in the 'real-life' contexts of face-to-face interaction, to literary fiction. Each chapter presents a survey of scholarly approaches to topics such as character, dialogue, genre or language, shows how those approaches can be brought to bear on a relatively well-known illustrative example, and indicates directions for further research. Featuring a chapter reviewing definitions of narrative, a glossary of key terms and a comprehensive index, this is an essential resource for both students and scholars in many fields, including language and literature, composition and rhetoric, creative writing, jurisprudence, communication and media studies, and the social sciences.