Televisual Encounters with/in the Humanities

Cross-Media Seminar 2012-2013, Semester 2

Registration | M.Stauff@uva.nl

The Cross-Media seminar, organized in cooperation with ASCA, RMES and NICA, continues its work in the second semester with three meetings (all Friday, 3pm to 5.30pm) around the topic:

Televisual Encounters with/in the Humanities

Numerous texts across disciplines, and in the humanities have constructed and engaged with concepts whose relevance for the study of media has often been only implicit. Media scholars in turn have analyzed both the history of media and their representations,  and  contemporary transformations using concepts developed in cultural theory or “Theory” often implicitly. In the three sessions of this semester, the research seminar will focus on specific themes for each session developed with/in the Humanities. In particular, the concepts of (1) the politics of form (2) space/time and history, and (3) the politics of the spectacle, will be addressed and discussed.

TV Studies as a discipline will be brought into encounter with the fields of historiography, sociology, psychoanalysis, literary theory and philosophy.

Preparatory Reading before March 1 [on Disciplinary (De)formations]:

1. Spigel, Lyn, “TV’s Next Season?”, Cinema Journal 45(1), 2005, pp: 83-90
2. Andrew, Dudley, “The Core and the Flow of Film Studies”, Critical Inquiry 35 (summer 2009), pp: 879-915.
3. http://www.necsus-ejms.org/a-multiplied-medium-reviewing-recent-publications-on-televisions-transitions/

8 March: The Politics of Form

1. Benn Michaels, Walter, “The Blank Page” and “Historicism”, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History, Princeton University Press, Princeton and London, 2004, pp: 1-15, 140-158.
2. Mittell, Jason, Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television, The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall 2006), pp: 29-40
3. Dasgupta, Sudeep, Policing the ‘people’: Television Studies and the problem of ‘quality'”, European Journal of Media Studies 1(1), 2012,  http://www.necsus-ejms.org/policing-the-people-television-studies-and-the-problem-of-quality-by-sudeep-dasgupta/

Supplementary Reading:

1. Dasgupta, Sudeep, “Multiple Symptoms and the Visible Real: Culture, Media and the Displacements of Vision”, [In]visible Culture 10 (2006), pp: 1-18.

5 April : Media, Place, Time and Domesticity

1. McCarthy, Anna, “From Screen to Site: Television’s Material Culture, and its Place”, October 98 (Autumn 2001), pp: 93-111.
2. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography”, in Selected Writings: Vol. 2, 1927-1934, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp: 507-530.
3. Keya Ganguly. “The (Un)moving image: Visuality and the Modern in Charulata”. In Cinema, Emergence and the films of Satyajit Ray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010: 63-91.

Supplementary Reading:

1. Dasgupta, Sudeep, “Conjunctive Times, Disjointed Time: Speculative Philosophy between Enigma and Disagreement”,  Parallax 15(3), 2009, pp: 3-17.

31 May: Politics of the Spectacle

1. Debord, Guy,  Society of the Spectacle,  Zone Books, New York, pp: 1-34.
2. Dasgupta, Sudeep, “Permanent Transiency, Tele-visual Spectacle and the Slum as Postcolonial Monument”, South Asia Studies (2013 forthcoming)
3. Andrew, Dudley, “A film aesthetic to discover”, Cinéma: révue d’études cinématographiques 17 (2-3), 2007, pp: 47-71

Supplementary Reading:

1. Lotz, Amanda, “Using ‘network’ theory in the post-network era: Fictional 9/11 US television discourse as a ‘cultural forum'”, Screen 45(4), 2004, pp: 423-439.