Since its original publication in 1987, Channels of Discourse has provided the most comprehensive consideration of commercial television, drawing on insights provided by the major strands of contemporary criticism: semiotics, narrative theory, reception theory, genre theory, ideological analysis, psychoanalysis, feminist criticism, and British cultural studies. The second edition features a new introduction by Robert Allen that includes a discussion of the political economy of commercial television. Two new essays have been added--one an assessment of postmodernism and television, the other an analysis of convergence and divergence among the essays--and the original essays have been substantially revised and updated with an international audience in mind. Sixty-one new television stills illustrate the text. Each essay lays out the general tenets of its particular approach, discusses television as an object of analysis within that critical framework, and provides extended examples of the types of analysis produced by that critical approach. Case studies range from Rescue 911 and Twin Peaks to soap operas, music videos, game shows, talk shows, and commericals. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled suggests new ways of understanding relationships among television programs, between viewing pleasure and narrative structure, and between the world in front of the television set and that represented on the screen. The collection also addresses the qualities of popular television that traditional aesthetics and quantitative media research have failed to treat satisfactorily, including its seriality, mass production, and extraordinary popularity. The contributors are Robert C. Allen, Jim Collins, Jane Feuer, John Fiske, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, James Hay, E. Ann Kaplan, Sarah Kozloff, Ellen Seiter, and Mimi White.

Examines the effects of television culture on how we conduct our public affairs and how "entertainment values" corrupt the way we think.

Lingusitic and communicative dimensions of the propagation of racism through the media, everyday language, and the educational curriculum.

This is a highly original book about the connections between historical moment, social structure, technology, communication systems, and what is said and thought using these systems - notably literature. The author focuses on the differences between 'discourse networks' in 1800 and in 1900, in the process developing a new analysis of the shift from romanticism to modernism. The work might be classified as a German equivalent to the New Historicism that is currently of great interest among American literary scholars, both in the intellectual influences to which Kittler responds and in his concern to ground literature in the most concrete details of historical reality. The artful structure of the book begins with Goethe's Faust and ends with Vale;ry's Faust. In the 1800 section, the author discusses how language was learned, the emergence of the modern university, the associated beginning of the interpretation of contemporary literature, and the canonization of literature. Among the writers and works Kittler analyzes in addition to Goethe's Faust are Schlegel, Hegel, E. T. A. Hoffman's 'The Golden Pot', and Goethe's Tasso. The 1900 section argues that the new discourse network in which literature is situated in the modern period is characterized by new technological media - film, the photograph, and the typewritten page - and the crisis that these caused for literary production. Along the way, the author discusses the work of Nietzsche, Gertrude Stein, Mallarme;, Bram Stroker, the Surrealists, Rilke, Kafka, and Freud, among others.

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is the deliberate harming of one's body without suicidal intent. NSSI tends to be secretive, often involving cutting, bruising, or burning on hidden parts of the body. While NSSI often occurs among adolescents, it is not limited to that age group. Communication and NSSI intersect in many ways, including conversation among family members, consultation with healthcare providers, representation in the media, discourse among people who self-injure, and even communication with oneself. Each chapter in Communicating With, About, and Through Self-Harm: Scarred Discourse addresses a different context of communication crucial to our understanding NSSI. An international group of clinicians and communication specialists describe, analyze, and explain how NSSI is communicated about, what NSSI is communicating, and how can we do a better job in communicating with others about NSSI. This book’s fundamental purpose is to empower individuals who self-injure as well as their families, friends, healthcare providers, and communities to better understand and deal with NSSI and the pressures that cause it.

This book focuses on the rhetoric of food and the power dimensions that intersect this most fundamental but increasingly popular area of ideology and practice, including politics, culture, lifestyle, identity, advertising, environment, and economy. The essays visit a rich variety of dominant discourses and material practices through a range of media, channels, and settings including the White House, social movement rhetoric, televisual programming, urban gardens, farmers markets, domestic and international agriculture institutions, and popular culture. Rhetoricians address the cultural, political, and ecological motives and consequences of humans’ strategic symbolizing and attendant choice-making, visiting discourses and practices that have impact on our species in their producing, distributing, regulating, marketing, packaging, consuming, and talking about food. The essays in this book are representative of dominant and marginal discourses as well as perennial issues surrounding the rhetoric of food and include macro-, meso-, and micro-level analyses and case studies, from international neoliberal trade policies to media and social movement discourse to small group and interactional dynamics. This volume provides an excellent range and critical illumination of rhetoric’s role as both instrumental and constitutive force in food representations, and its symbolic and material effects.