Television Criticism » (1st Edition)

Victoria O'Donnell is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the University Honors Program Professor of Communication at Montana State University-Bozeman. Previously she was the Chair of the Department of Speech Communication at Oregon State University and Chair of the Department of Communication and Public Address at the University of North Texas. In 1988 she taught for the American Institute of Foreign Studies at the University of London. She received her Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University. She has published articles and chapters in a wide range of journals and books on topics concerning persuasion, the social effects of media, women in film and television, British politics, Nazi propaganda, collective memory, cultural studies theory, and science fiction films of the 1950s. She is also the author (with June Kable) of Persuasion: An Interactive-Dependency Approach, Propaganda and Persuasion (with Garth Jowett), and Speech Communication. She is currently writing a book on television criticism. She made a film, Women, War, and Work: Shaping Space for Productivity in the Shipyards During World War II, for PBS through KUSM Public Television at Montana State University. She has also written television scripts for environmental films and has done voice-overs for several PBS films. She served on editorial boards of several journals. The recipient of numerous research grants, honors, and teaching awards, including being awarded the Honor Professorship at North Texas State University and the Montana State University Alumni Association and Bozeman Chamber of Commerce Award of Excellence, she has been a Danforth Foundation Associate and a Summer Scholar of theNational Endowment for the Humanities. She has taught in Germany and has been a visiting lecturer at universities in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Wales. She has also served as a private consultant to the U.S. government, a state senator, the tobacco litigation plaintiffs, and many American corporations.

Television Criticism presents an original treatment of television criticism with a foundational approach to the nature of criticism, an understanding of the business of television, production background in creating television style, in-depth chapters on storytelling and narrative theories and television genres, the interaction of rhetoric and cultural studies theories, representation, and postmodernism. It presents new and comprehensive guidelines for analysis and criticism, and it has a sample critique of the television program "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."

Key Features:

• Original guidelines for television analysis give students the tools they need to create their own critiques
• The use of Narrative theories enhance the recognition that television is a story-making medium in all genres allowing readers to think beyond fiction television
• The presentation of classical and new theories specifically adapted to the criticism of television gives the reader a better understanding of methodology
• Exercises and Suggested Readings appear at the end of each chapter to encourage critical thinking

Introduction
I. ORIENTATION
1. The Work of the Critic
2. Demystifying the Business of Television
II. FORMAL ASPECTS OF TELEVISION
3. Television Style
4. Television, the Nation's Storyteller
5. Television Genres
III. THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO TELEVISION CRITICISM
6. Rhetoric and Culture
7. Representation and Its Audience
8. Postmodernism
IV. CRITICAL APPLICATIONS
9. Guidelines for Television Criticism
10. Sample Criticism of a Television Show
References