Critical Analysis #2

Choose a non-fiction, nonnarrative, televisual text, and apply the analytical concepts presented in the textbook to it. Use chapter 4 as your guide. Appropriate texts would include: newscasts, documentaries, sports programs, game shows, and nonnarrative commercials (i.e., commercials that do not tell a story).

Due 4:45 p.m., Friday, March 24 (the day before Spring Break), in the TCF office.. This exercise must be typed, 5-10 pages. Any use of outside sources, including Television: Critical Methods and Applications, must be properly cited. A bibliography and the credits for the text analyzed (unless you choose a commercial or some other text without credits) must be provided. This analysis is worth 25% of your semester grade.

Your credits must include: producer, production company, director, writer, principal "cast" (the names of the TV personalities and social actors involved).

Your paper should address the following issues.

1. Analysis of polysemy
   This is the core portion of your paper. In it you should analyze the ideas that underpin the televisual text you select.
   1. What meanings, what discourses, are encoded on the text, presented for the viewer to decode?
   2. How does the text deal with TV's polysemy? What range of meanings is highlighted? Are some meanings emphasized over others? Are some presented positively and others negatively? How? Are the actions of some social actors condemned? Are others validated?
      To effectively analyze a text's polysemy you must breakdown its visual/sound style and overall textual structure. This is where you explain how meanings are presented positively/negatively.
2. Analysis of Nonnarrative Structure (see questions on p. 95)
   1. Discuss which modes of representation your text utilizes. Be sure to cite specific examples illustrating the mode.
   2. Explain the implied relationship between the television world and the historical world in your text.
   3. Explain the implied relationship between the text and the viewer.
   4. What principles dictate how the text presents its information about the historical world? In other words, how is the text organized?
3. Analysis of Visual/Sound Style
   1. Begin by choosing a two-minute segment (shorter, if you choose a commercial) from your text. List all of the shots for that segment. If it helps to understand the segment, draw a bird's-eye-view diagram of the positions of the social actors, historical world, and camera--as on p. 160 (but without the frames of individual faces)--but this diagram is not required.
   2. How does the historical world mise-en-scene of this segment contribute to the text's meaning? In other words, how do the elements of mise-en-scene communicate aspects of the text's meaning to the viewer?
   3. Which mode of production was used? Was it filmed or videotaped? What advantages/disadvantages does this mode offer the text?
   4. How does the editing support the text's meaning? In other words, why were the shots presented in the order that they were? How does that order affect meaning?
   5. How, in this segment, does the manipulation of sound help to construct the text's meaning?

Sample citation style (endnotes):

For a book:

Jeremy G. Butler, Television: It's My Job (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1994), 173.

For an article in a journal:

Jeremy G. Butler, "The Hegemony of Pluralistic Hierarchies in Leave It to Beaver: An Althusserian Prolegomenon," Journal of Really, Really Important Ideas 17, no. 4 (Spring 1994): 47.