Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"Holling is tormented by Koyaanisqatsi dreams until he goes out and does the wild thing with a young stag . . . . "--Synopsis from production company "Bible," Northern Exposure, March 30, 1992

The collision of auteurism and rap--couched by primetime producers in the Northern Exposure script--was actually rather commonplace by the early 1990s. Series, and even news broadcasts, regularly engineered their narratives around highly coded aesthetic and cultural fragments, with a kind of ensemble iconography. Televisuality interrogates the nature of such performances as an historical phenomenon, an aesthetic and industrial practice, and as a socially symbolic act. This book suggests that postmodernism does not fully explain television's stylistic exhibitionism and that a reexamination of "high theory" is in order. Caldwell's unique approach successfully integrates production practice with theory in a way that will enlighten both critical theory and cultural studies.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This may be the most sophisticated study of the American television medium, industry, and aesthetic to date. Caldwell (California State Univ., Long Beach) ranges through industry bumf and the academic bibliography to rescue the medium from theoretical simplifications. He provides sharp analyses of TV shows from the 1940s on. His most extensive analyses feature the television premiere of Oliver Stone's movie Salvador (1983), the War and Remembrance series (1988), Pee-Wee's Playhouse (1986-91), Northern Exposure (1992), American Chronicles (1990-91), and the Rodney King videos, trial, and riot coverage (1991). He demonstrates how industrial-based televisuality is a new and emerging mode of communication accessible even to the marginalized. Today television has moved from being primarily "word-based rhetoric and transmission" to "a visually based mythology, framework, and aesthetic based on an extreme self-consciousness of style." "Excessive visuality and formal radicality are now legitimate properties of the dominant media, even in trash variants, not the avant-garde." Tables and stills enhance the argument in this dense, insightful, and allusive text that leaves virtually no familiar generalization unchallenged. Upper-division undergraduate and up.