ENGL 3300 TV: Theory and Criticism

Instructor: Anthony Enns

This course will provide an introduction to the academic discipline of television studies. Students will learn about the medium’s technological and economic history, and they will study the evolution of television’s fundamental genres, including cartoons, commercials, music videos, situation comedies, news, soap operas, primetime dramas, and reality television. Over the course of the semester students will also learn and apply a wide range of theoretical approaches to the study of television, including structuralist approaches that analyze the formal elements of televisual texts, ideological approaches that analyze television’s function as a system of representation, ethnographic approaches that analyze how audiences actively participate in the construction of meaning, and institutional approaches that analyze the impact of production metho