The Television Will Be Revolutionized
2nd edition
Amanda D. Lotz
"Television is anything but dead, but we are now fully into the post-network era that Amanda D. Lotz projected when this book was first published. An incredibly prescient book, setting many of the terms through which television studies has understood these changes, the revised edition updates its account to reflect an age when Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon are now competing for Emmy and Peabody Awards, when television content is being funded through Kickstarter, and where web series are diversifying whose stories get told."-Henry Jenkins, co-author of Spreadable Media
"In this second edition, Lotz not only updates us on developments over the past seven years; she digs deeper and thinks harder about the revolutionary changes taking place in the television today. An outstanding contribution to television studies and an invaluable guide for students, scholars, and professionals."-Michael Curtin, co-director, Media Industries Project
Many proclaimed the "end of television" in the early years of the twenty-first century, as capabilities and features of the boxes that occupied a central space in American living rooms for the preceding fifty years were radically remade. In this revised, second edition of her definitive book, Amanda D. Lotz proves that rumors of the death of television were greatly exaggerated and explores how new distribution and viewing technologies have resurrected the medium. Shifts in the basic practices of making and distributing television have not been hastening its demise, but are redefining what we can do with television, what we expect from it, how we use it-in short, revolutionizing it.
Television, as both a technology and a tool for cultural storytelling, remains as important today as ever, but it has changed in fundamental ways. The Television Will Be Revolutionized provides a sophisticated history of the present, examining television in what Lotz terms the "post-network" era while providing frameworks for understanding the continued change in the medium. The second edition addresses adjustments throughout the industry wrought by broadband delivered television such as Netflix, YouTube, and cross-platform initiatives like TV Everywhere, as well as how technologies such as tablets and smartphones have changed how and where we view. Lotz begins to deconstruct the future of different kinds of television-exploring how "prized content," live television sports and contests, and linear viewing may all be "television," but very different types of television for both viewers and producers.
Through interviews with those working in the industry, surveys of trade publications, and consideration of an extensive array of popular shows, Lotz takes us behind the screen to explore what is changing, why it is changing, and why the changes matter.
Click here to read the introduction http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/documents/446/Television%20will%20be%20Revolutionized.pdf
New York University Press
September 2014 352pp 9781479865253 PB £15.99 now only £11.99 when you quote CS1014TELE when you order
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/the-television-will-be-revolutionized-2nd-edition
Cable Guys
Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century
Amanda D. Lotz
"Cable Guys is a remarkable book that will transform the way we think about both television and constructions of masculinity. This clear, well-written, and deeply engaged book refuses to generalize about masculinity and instead reveals the complexity of straight, white men on television. Covering a wide range of programs, from cable to broadcast television, Amanda Lotz offers us an indispensable resource for the fields of media studies, television studies and gender studies." -Sarah Banet-Weiser,author of Authentic(tm)
"Amanda Lotz impressively maps out important features of television's representations of men and shifting masculinities in the 21st century. Her careful analyses of these series makes this book an essential resource for anyone interested in television, gender, and culture."-Ron Becker,author of Gay TV & Straight America
From the meth-dealing but devoted family man Walter White of AMC's Breaking Bad, to the part-time basketball coach, part-time gigolo Ray Drecker of HBO's Hung, depictions of male characters perplexed by societal expectations of men and anxious about changing American masculinity have become standard across the television landscape. Engaging with a wide variety of shows, including The League, Dexter, and Nip/Tuck, among many others, Amanda D. Lotz identifies the gradual incorporation of second-wave feminism into prevailing gender norms as the catalyst for the contested masculinities on display in contemporary cable dramas.
Examining the emergence of "male-centered serials" such as The Shield, Rescue Me, and Sons of Anarchy and the challenges these characters face in negotiating modern masculinities, Lotz analyzes how these shows combine feminist approaches to fatherhood and marriage with more traditional constructions of masculine identity that emphasize men's role as providers. She explores the dynamics of close male friendships both in groups, as in Entourage and Men of a Certain Age, wherein characters test the boundaries between the homosocial and homosexual in their relationships with each other, and in the dyadic intimacy depicted in Boston Legal and Scrubs. Cable Guys provides a much needed look into the under-considered subject of how constructions of masculinity continue to evolve on television.
Click here to read the introduction http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/documents/465/Cable%20Guys.pdf
Amanda D. Lotz is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century (NYU Press), and Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era, co-author of Understanding Media Industries and Television Studies, and editor of Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era.
New York University Press
March 2014 251pp 9781479800483 PB £15.99 now only £11.99 when you quote CS1014TELE when you order
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/cable-guys
The Colorblind Screen
Television in Post-Racial America
Edited by Sarah Nilsen & Sarah E. Turner
"Acknowledging both the way that the election of President Obama became a touchstone for those who wanted to herald a post-racial America and how, in the years that followed, thinly veiled and overt racism has experienced a troubling renaissance in multiple aspects of American culture, The Colorblind Screen forces readers to question the celebratory rationalizations rampant in various corners of American media culture and to examine how race, ethnicity, and the persistence of whiteness all still matter."-Bambi Haggins, author of Laughing Mad
The election of President Barack Obama signaled for many the realization of a post-racial America, a nation in which racism was no longer a defining social, cultural, and political issue. While many Americans espouse a "colorblind" racial ideology and publicly endorse the broad goals of integration and equal treatment without regard to race, in actuality this attitude serves to reify and legitimize racism and protects racial privileges by denying and minimizing the effects of systematic and institutionalized racism.
In The Colorblind Screen, the contributors examine television's role as the major discursive medium in the articulation and contestation of racialized identities in the United States. While the dominant mode of televisual racialization has shifted to a "colorblind" ideology that foregrounds racial differences in order to celebrate multicultural assimilation, the volume investigates how this practice denies the significant social, economic, and political realities and inequalities that continue to define race relations today. Focusing on such iconic figures as President Obama, LeBron James, and Oprah Winfrey, many chapters examine the ways in which race is read by television audiences and fans. Other essays focus on how visual constructions of race in dramas like 24, Sleeper Cell, and The Wanted continue to conflate Arab and Muslim identities in post-9/11 television. The volume offers an important intervention in the study of the televisual representation of race, engaging with multiple aspects of the mythologies developing around notions of a "post-racial" America and the duplicitous discursive rationale offered by the ideology of colorblindness.
Sarah Nilsen is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Projecting America: Film and Cultural Diplomacy at the Brussels World's Fair of 1958. Sarah E. Turner is Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Vermont.
New York University Press
April 2014 363pp 9781479891535 PB £17.99 now only £13.49 when you quote CS1014TELE when you order
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/the-colorblind-screen
The Post-Racial Mystique
Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century
Catherine R. Squires
"With rigor and accessible style, Catherine R. Squires provides an excellent view of the history and contemporary terrain of media and racial discourse in all of its complexity. The Post-Racial Mystique will be a defining book in our long-lasting and complicated conversation about the interrelationship between race and media."-Charlton McIlwain,co-author of Race Appeal
"Far too many Americans today see 'race' self-deludingly through the foggy lens of 'post-racism.' Catherine R. Squires dispels the fog with this insightful study of the enduring grip of 'race' over American life."-John Downing, co-author of Representing 'Race'
Despite claims from pundits and politicians that we now live in a post-racial America, people seem to keep finding ways to talk about race-from celebrations of the inauguration of the first Black president to resurgent debates about police profiling, race and racism remain salient features of our world. When faced with fervent anti-immigration sentiments, record incarceration rates of Blacks and Latinos, and deepening socio-economic disparities, a new question has erupted in the last decade: What does being post-racial mean?
The Post-Racial Mystique explores how a variety of media-the news, network television, and online, independent media-debate, define and deploy the term "post-racial" in their representations of American politics and society. Using examples from both mainstream and niche media-from prime-time television series to specialty Christian media and audience interactions on social media-Catherine Squires draws upon a variety of disciplines including communication studies, sociology, political science, and cultural studies in order to understand emergent strategies for framing post-racial America. She reveals the ways in which media texts cast U.S. history, re-imagine interpersonal relationships, employ statistics, and inventively redeploy other identity categories in a quest to formulate different ways of responding to race.
Catherine R. Squires is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America.
New York University Press
April 2014 243pp 9780814770603 PB £15.99 now only £11.99 when you quote CS1014TELE when you order
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/the-post-racial-mystique
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