No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject »

Martha Nochimson teaches at New York University and at Mercy College. Not content with a purely academic approach to her subject, she spent several years as a writer for Ryan's Hope, Search for Tomorrow, Guiding Light, Loving, and Santa Barbara.

"Combines an array of critical methodologies to come to terms with a culturally persuasive but vastly undervalued media form.The scholarship is quite extraordinary. . . . It is the author's working knowledge of the circumstances under which television soap opera is actually written and produced that makes her theoretical arguments so convincing. She does a fine job of interfusing philosophy with praxis."—David A. Cook, author of History of Narrative Film

"The scholarship is quite extraordinary. . . . It deals with . . . its subject with both elegance and passion. . . . It illuminates a great deal about the way in which television soap opera is both produced and consumed . . . could be used quite handily as a text . . . in the same way Tania Modeleski's The Women Who Knew Too Much is used."—David Cook, Emory University

Library Journal

Written by an academic who has also written for several soap operas, this is a psychoanalytic and feministic look at female characters in the often-maligned soap opera genre. Nochimson, whose writing credits include episodes of Search for Tomorrow and Guiding Light , theorizes that ``a character who promotes a femininity shared by women across time and cultures, the soap opera heroine has . . . developed the potential to defy mainstream society's earnest image of itself.'' Drawing on Freud, Greek mythology, and the story lines of several popular daytime dramas, she presents ``soap opera as a legitimate discourse: one that has its own truth, its own beauty, and its own inner logic and self-preservation.'' In all the characters Nochimson uses as points of reference, she neglects one who may be of quintessential importance to her thesis: Erica on All My Children . This interesting study is recommended for academic and large public libraries.-- Carolyn M. Mulac, Chicago P.L.