The Joy of Text?: Television and Textual Analysis

Abstract

I guess semiotics was originally to blame for my current predilection towards the text. John Fiske and John Hartley’s Reading Television was one of the first academic books on television I ever read. The way it looked at TV was suggested in its title, ‘reading’ television almost like a literary text, but how refreshing it was to find a book that took television (and the study of it) seriously. The semi scientific discourse that semiotics initially brought to the study of television (and popular culture in general) was crucial to its gradual acceptance into the academy, slowly giving the whole enterprise some greatly needed academic credibility. Just as importantly, it also allowed television studies to skilfully dodge the inevitable question about whether television was actually worthy of critical attention at all. As Mythologies – Roland Barthes’ 1957 seminal account of popular culture – made so clear, semiotics could be applied to any cultural form (from wrestling matches to washing powder), so that the question of whether TV merited critical attention suddenly seemed unimportant and even irrelevant. The ‘decoding’ of every cultural form was suddenly allowed; you were not necessarily saying it was ‘Great Art,’ you were simply exposing the mechanics by which your chosen text operated. (At least that was our story and we were sticking to it). Important textbooks like Robert C. Allen’s edited Channels of Discourse in 1987 followed, expanding the study of television further by introducing primarily textual methodologies such as semiotics, ideology, genre, narrative theory, postmodernism and psychoanalysis more forcefully into the field. However, the book The Joy of Text?: Television and Textual Analysis