Programming Reality

Perspectives on English-Canadian Television
Herausgeber: Druick, Zoë; Kotsopoulos, Aspa

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television, the first anthology dedicated to analyses of Canadian television content, is a collection of original, interdisciplinary articles, combining textual analysis and political economy of communications. It explores the television that has thrived in the Canadian regulatory and cultural context: namely, programs that straddle the border between reality and fiction or even blur it. The conceptual basis of this collection is the hybrid nature of television fare: the widely theorized notion that all mediations of reality involve fiction in the form of narrative or symbolic shaping. Each of the contributions here is a reminder, too, of the significant relationship of television to nation building in Canada-to the imaginative work involved in thinking through the relations that constitute nations, citizens, and communities. The collection focuses on English-language Canadian television because the imperatives guiding its texts are markedly different from those pertaining to their French-lanugage counterparts. The collection, therefore, develops a nuance of perspective on the cultural and political economic specificities that inform the imaginative work of television production for English Canada.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Seitenzahl: 354
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. August 2008
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 226mm x 152mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 522g
• ISBN-13: 9781554580101
• ISBN-10: 1554580102
• Artikelnr.: 26285514

Inhaltsangabe

Table of Contents for
Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television edited by
Zoë Druick and Aspa Kotsopoulos
Introduction Zoë Druick and Aspa Kotsopoulos
Part One: Narrating Nation
Reenacting Canada: The Nation State as an Object of Desire in the Early
Years of Canadian Broadcasting David Hogarth
Representing National History on Television: The Case of Canada: A People's
History Lyle Dick
Canadian Idols? CBC's The Greatest Canadian as Celebrity History Julie
Rak
Canadian Idol and the Myth of National Identity Michele Byers
Hockey Dreams: Making the Cut Derek Foster
Laughing at Authority or Authorized Laughter? Canadian News Parodies Zoë
Druick
Whose Child Am I? The Quebec Referendum and Languages of Affect and the
Body Marusya Bociurkiw
Part Two: Making Citizens
Public Broadcasting/National Television: CBC and the Challenges of
Historical Miniseries Aspa Kotsopoulos
History as Edutainment: Heritage Minutes and the Uses of Educational
Television Katarzyna Rukszto
Education and Entertainment: The Many Reals of Degrassi Michele Byers
Haunting Public Discourse: The Representation of Residential Schools in CBC
Television Drama Mary Jane Miller
Part Three: Mapping Geographies
Representations of Urban Conflict in Moccasin Flats John McCullough
Da Vinci's Inquest: Postmortem Glen Lowry
Imagining National Citizens in Televised Toronto Jen VanderBurgh
Realism and Community in the Canadian Soap Opera: The Case of Train 48
Sarah A. Matheson
Human Cargo: Bridging the Geopolitical Divide at Home in Canada Kirsten
Emiko McAllister
Contributors
Index
Contributors
Marusya Bociurkiw is assistant professor of media theory in the School of
Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto. She is the
author of four literary books, including Comfort Food for Breakups: The
Memoir of a Hungry Girl (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007). She has been producing
films and videos in Canada for the past fifteen years, including, most
recently, Flesh and Blood: A Journey between East and West. Her monograph
on Canadian television, Feeling Canadian: Nationalism and Affect on
Canadian Television, is forthcoming from Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Michele Byers is assistant professor in Sociology and Criminology at Saint
Mary's University. She has written extensively on television, youth, and
identity. In 2001, she was awarded a SSHRC grant to study the Degrassi
series and the production of youth and Canadian identity. In 2004, she was
awarded a second SSHRC grant to engage in a broader study of television,
film, and the production of Canadian youth cultures. She is editor of
Growing Up Degrassi: Television, Identity and Youth Cultures (Sumach Press,
2005).
Lyle Dick is the West Coast historian with Parks Canada in Vancouver. He is
the author of 70 publications on topics in Canadian and American history,
historiography, and Arctic history, including the book Muskox Land:
Ellesmere Island in the Age of Contact (University of Calgary Press, 2001).
He was awarded the Harold Adams Innis Prize for Canada's best
English-language book in the social sciences in 2003. His published work
includes several detailed investigations into the relationships of
narrative form and Canadian history, including earlier articles on the
books and visual content of the CBC series Canada: A People's History.
Zoë Druick is associate professor in the School of Communication at Simon
Fraser University, where she teaches courses in media, film, and cultural
studies. She is the author of Projecting Canada: Documentary Film and
Government Policy at the National Film Board (McGill-Queen's University
Press, 2007) and has published articles on documentary film, educational
media, and cultural policy in Television and New Media, Studies in
Documentary Film, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and Canadian Journal of
Communication. Her current work involves an investigation of the links
between documentary and democracy.
Derek Foster is assistant professor in the Department of Communications,
Popular Culture and Film at Brock University. His PhD dissertation
(Carleton University, School of Journalism and Communication, 2004) studied
the evolution of squeegeeing as a controversial social issue through the
lens of rhetorical theory. His recent publications focus on a wide variety
of communication media studied as visual rhetoric and contesting discourses
surrounding reality television.
David Hogarth is associate professor in Communication Studies at York
University. His research is concerned with the history and current state of
documentary in Canada and worldwide. He is the author of Documentary
Television in Canada: From National Public Service to Global Marketplace
(McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002) and Realer Than Reel: Global
Dimensions in Documentary (University of Texas Press, 2006). He is now
researching the political economy of independent documentary production.
Aspa Kotsopoulos is senior policy analyst in Television Policy and
Applications at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications
Commission (CRTC). In 2004 she received her PhD in Communications from
Simon Fraser University, where her dissertation was nominated for a
Governor General's award. She has published articles about Canadian
television in various journals and anthologies, and has taught courses in
film and media studies.
Glen Lowry teaches in critical and cultural studies at Emily Carr Institute
for Art + Design + Media in Vancouver. A specialist in contemporary
Canadian literature and culture, he edits West Coast Line. His recent
published work looks at the limits of cultural nationalism in relation to
racialized writing, 20th-century poetics, photography, and contemporary
art. He is currently working on a collaborative Research Creations project
on the uncanny mirroring of Vancouver's urban waterfront in the desert West
of Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Sarah A. Matheson is assistant professor in the Department of
Communications, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University. Her research
and teaching interests are in film and television studies, with a recent
focus on reality television in Canada and the U.S. and issues surrounding
taste and popular culture. She has published several articles on the
representation of Toronto on English-Canadian television.
Kirsten Emiko McAllister is assistant professor in the School of
Communication at Simon Fraser University. She has published in the areas of
cultural memory, visual culture, and political violence, focusing on
Japanese Canadian internment camps. Her more recent research focuses on
refugees and discourses of inclusion and exclusion. Some of her
publications include articles in Visual Studies and Cultural Values and a
book co-edited with Annette Kuhn, Locating Memory: Photographic Acts
(Berghahn, 2006).
John McCullough teaches in the Department of Film at York University. He
has a PhD in social and political thought and was the first coordinator of
the graduate programs in interdisciplinary studies in fine arts at the
University of Regina. His current research includes analysis of popular
Hollywood films, Canadian regional television production, and First Nations
in film and television.
Mary Jane Miller is Professor of Dramatic Arts Emerita at Brock University.
She is the author of Turn Up the Contrast: CBC Television Drama since 1952
(University of British Columbia Press and CBC, 1987) and Rewind and Search:
Conversations with Makers and Decision Makers of CBC Television Drama
(McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996). She is completing the forthcoming
book Outside Looking In for McGill-Queen's University Press, about the
representation of First Nations people in series television.
Julie Rak is associate professor in the Department of English and Film
Studies at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Negotiated
Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (2005) and the editor of
Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions (2005). She is co-editor
(with Jeremy Popkin) of On Diary, a new translation of recent essays by
Philippe LeJeune (University of Hawaii Press, 2008) and co-editor (with
Andrew Gow) of Mountain Masculinity: The Life and Writings of Nello (Tex)
Vernon Wood on the Canadian Rockies, 1911-1938 (Athabasca University Press,
2008). She is the editor of a special issue of The Canadian Journal of
American Studies on popular auto/biography (forthcoming 2008). Julie has
published on popular culture, Canadian culture and autobiography theory
most recently in English Studies in Canada, biography, and Life Writing.
Her current book project is about mass-produced memoir and biography in
print and on television in North America.
Katarzyna Rukszto is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at
Wilfrid Laurier University. Her current research examines representational
politics of museums and heritage sites, particularly those that focus on
military history, war, and national identity. She is also revising a book
manuscript on the Heritage Minutes.
Jen VanderBurgh is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Film
and Media at Queen's University, where she working on a manuscript that
compares national approaches to archiving and teaching television. Her
other research concerns representations of urbanity as a problematic of
nation, culture, and technology in Canadian film and television. She has
published in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Topia, Quebec Studies,
and the Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film.