Televisual Experience Research Articles

Eyes out of your head: On televisual experience

This essay empirically explores some of the bodily practices that organize and define televisual experience. From an initial clustering of interview responses, three thematic categories emerge: (1) The experience of the captive phenomenal body and (2) the escape from the cognitive body, both of which combine to produce (3) the discovery of a body‐in‐difference. Thus, televisual experience may be defined as an “eyes out of your head”; phenomenon—not locatable in any one of the five human senses nor in any one viewing body. Rather, televisual experience is a complex ensemble of bodily practices.

On the authenticity of televisual experience: A critical exploration of para‐social closure

This essay argues that critics are caught in the dialectical tension between “technology” and “art” in the study of television. The polar extremes of the dialectic are examined in order to discern how this dialectic informs and constrains examination of television. The claim is made that television critics should draw inferences from practical consideration of everyday televisual experience. To support that claim, “rhetorical aesthetics” is presented as the preferred perspective in the emerging field of television criticism, as it allows for understanding of “television as art” in practice. To illustrate the utility of the preferred perspective, concluding episodes of long‐running American television series broadcast from 1975 to 1985 are analyzed.

‘Goal of the Month’: fact or fiction? Or when is a goal not a goal?

The paper considers one element of the phenomenology of television, urging that full-scale understanding of televisual experience is important for contemporary leisure studies. It considers a fragment of this experience — our experience of the ‘Goal of the Month’ competitions. Two points are made. First, it focuses on the factual/fictional contrast, and urges that considerations from the nature of soccer make it difficult to view the ‘Goal of the Month’ competitions as factual presentation (even given the generally interpretive nature of documentary coverage). Second, and with less confidence, it urges that the central mode of experience and appraisal of these extracts is aesthetic and hence, because aesthetic interest fictionalizes, the extracts may be usefully viewed as fiction. This conclusion is elaborated and defended against major objections. If our own experience of these extracts were primarily of an aesthetic (as opposed to artistic) character, this would explain the acknowledged lack of a plausi...