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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

The Book and the Box: U.S. fiction, television, and authorship in the conglomerate era

Bartlett, Christopher 23 February 2022 (has links)
The Book and the Box takes a new approach to understanding the relationship between the rise of television, the history of twentieth century fiction, and the shifting definitions of authorship in the United States during a period in which large media conglomerations began acquiring and merging with literary publishing houses. I demonstrate that the mechanisms of media convergence threatened previous, romantic notions of authorship and resulted in crises of agency and authority for many writers struggling to survive in a new world of transitioning media forms and audiences. My study uncovers a shadow history of postmodernism that has thus far been left buried by lagging scholarship on individual authors’ careers. The first chapter sets up the context for my dissertation by offering a new approach to looking at the history of media studies as it relates to the televisual and literary author. I argue that the major strands of media studies as an academic discipline have largely sacrificed the writer/author in order to emphasize television’s status a cultural mirror and institutional product. I believe that emphasizing the problem of authorship helps us better appreciate the aesthetic and cultural history of television and literature. Chapter 2 examines Rod Serling’s struggles to gain control over his television scripts despite the collaborative nature of the medium. Serling, I argue, made myriad sacrifices with his series The Twilight Zone, embracing a genre that wasn’t taken seriously and becoming a salesman for his series and the products sold by the sponsors of his series. Chapter 3 argues that Harlan Ellison’s idealized notion of writing as a solitary act was irreconcilable with the collaborative nature of the televisual medium, pitting him against producers and fans. Finally, chapter 4 looks at Ishmael Reed and Bill Gunn’s little-discussed meta soap opera Personal Problems. I argue that, contra Ellison and Serling, Reed and Gunn embrace the collaborative nature of television as a means of creating what they saw as authentic representation of Black life in America thus far missing from mainstream television.

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