This course will focus on the industrial, technological, and aesthetic history of television.

This course introduces students to the history of television and its place in American culture, from the earliest days of broadcasting to the contemporary convergence landscape. Course texts provide factual foundations in television history; critical frameworks for understanding the mutual influence of technology, industry, and culture; and the critical procedures of close reading and ideology critique that students will practice in written assignments. Each topic-focused unit mobilizes materials from different phases of television history in order to diachronically demonstrate the contours of the field. Scholarship will provide the conceptual apparatus through which to investigate how televisual narrative, aesthetics, and genre participate in the ideological project of constructing American ideas about race, class, gender, family and nation, history and modernity, private and public space.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.