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69 Literary studies’ extension from the study of printed texts into the study of screen culture is consistent with literary studies’ analysis of how dramatic texts become theatrical events. The stakes for literary studies to consider screen culture as part of the extraliterary devices are consistent with the need to use criticism to excavate how screen culture reshapes our collective life world. As Raymond Williams in “The Analysis of Culture” so elegantly asserts: One generation may train its successor, with reasonable success, in the social character or the general cultural pattern, but the new generation will have its own structure of feeling,1 which will not appear to have come “from” anywhere. . . . the new generation responds in its own ways to the unique world it is inheriting, taking up many continuities, that can be traced, and reproducing many aspects of the organization, which can be separately described, yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently, and shaping its creative response into a new structure of feeling. (37) Increasingly, the screens of televisions, computers, and handheld devices contribute to an emergent and immediate structure of feeling in a way that might not supersede print culture, but certainly complicates it. While Williams claims that each generation has its own innate competency for structuring feelings that it transmutes to the next generation, I sense in the current mediascape, which is dominated by a wide range of immediate and often interactive audiovisual media, Television: The Extraliterary Device Daniel Keyes 4 70 · Daniel Keyes that the sense of discrete generational structures of feeling is less secure and more fragmented. For example, a Skype videophone call on my laptop offers a different structure of feelings than the nightly news program observed on commercial television (hereafter referred to as TV).2 The flow of vivid audio-image media shapes both developed and developing countries’ collective mediascape by generating ideological and discursive formations that offer to structure the feelings3 of viewers. Implied in the complex communication web between advertisers, content providers, broadcasters, and viewers is that decoding and analysis are necessary to navigate and challenge the structure of feelings and interpellationoffered via these screen technologies. For example, older “literary” narrative forms like nineteenth-century stage melodrama inform the structure of feelings of narratives in the new, pithy, cellphone video webisodes,4 where each one-minute episode ends with a cliff-hanger. For television studies and perhaps for the next generation of screen studies scholars, literary studies contributes a valuable set of tools for interrogating and historicizing the emergent structure of feelings in this heterogeneous mediascape. This chapter is an overview of the development of the relatively recent academic discipline of television studies and will demonstrate how literary studies and television studies both adhere to a commitment to interdisciplinary study that comfortably fits within a cultural studies framework. This genealogy of television studies recognizes that the visual and audio elements along with a focus on production, technology , form, and reception in some ways exceeds or at least challenges the limitations of a strict formalist literary analysis of print.5 Although a relative latecomer to the academy, television studies in the 1970s aggregated approaches from the social sciences and humanities around a medium in much the same way as literary or film studies. This interdisciplinary move is consistent with how literary studies since then has borrowed from other disciplines to hone its approaches while tending to privilege the analysis of print text over the analysis of other textual phenomena like performances or the visual arts.6 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s in North America, television studies emerged as a field within communications, cultural studies, media studies, and visual anthropology programs that tend to focus on commercial broadcast programming.7 Michele Hilmes’s account of television studies in Television · 71 America from the late 1970s indicates how it has operated as a marginal program in communications departments at non–Ivy League universities while film studies has tended to be integrated into English departments at prestigious private American universities. English literature and more recent analytical newcomers, like film and television studies, operate in universities and colleges as ways of teaching argument and critical analysis, and displaying cultural capital. A more radical agenda also exists within media studies: television studies as not just about appreciation , but as media literacy and intervention (Kellner, Television and Media Culture; Kavoori). Television studies’ comparatively lowly and new status demonstrates how the academy reinforces what counts as cultural capital in a way that reflects Williams’s impression...

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