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Soap Opera Studies
It is my aim here to comment on the main aspects taken into account by
some prominent works on what is perhaps the most popular form of
fictional consumption in the contemporary world (Gledhill, 1997: 340).
The actual phrase soap opera is the starting point for this review, for all
the meanings the term has acquired since it was coined in the United
States back in the late 1930s. According to Robert Allen,
The soap in soap opera derives from the sponsorship of daytime
serials by manufacturers of household cleaning products []. Opera
acquires meaning only through its ironic, double inappropriateness. Linkedwith the adjective soap, opera, the most elite of all narrative art forms,
becomes a vehicle for selling the most humble of commodities.
(Allen, 1985:8)
Most people in contact with the medium of television will say that they
know what a soap opera is. However, when it comes to giving a clear
definition, the picture is not so clear. In fact, discussion about this
narrative genre takes place directly or indirectly amongst a wide range of
different groups with different interests at heart: producers and
broadcasters, advertisers, viewers, critics, and of course, academics. How
can it be so difficult to agree upon a definition of something most people
believe to be able to define? Different points of view would be the obvious
answer. Certain texts which seem to be different from each other for
some, whether in terms of their content or in terms of their form, are all
considered to be soap operas by others, and vice-versa. This becomes
considerably complex when one realises that the question of soap opera
as a genre is in fact a socio-semiotic/linguistic-pragmatic issue. In Social
Semiotics, Hodge and Kress define genres of texts as typical forms of
texts which link kinds of producer, consumer, topic, medium, manner and
occasion (1988: 7) and point out that genres of text control the
behaviour of producers of such texts, and the expectations of potential
consumers (1988: 7). Altman, emphasising the dynamicity of such
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process, adds that each genre is simultaneously defined by multiple
codes, corresponding to the multiple groups who, by helping to define the
genre, may be said to speak the genre (1999: 208). Altman does not
mention Hodge and Kress and appears to be more concerned withdemonstrating the shortcomings of the view of genre from the perspective
of reception studies such as Hall (1980) and De Certeau (1984) due to the
fact that they do not address the broader problems covered by
pragmatic analysis (1999: 211). Nevertheless, it seems to me that both
Altman (1999) and Hodge and Kress (1988) share similar views when
Altman indirectly acknowledges the necessary, and in fact pragmatic,
control that Hodge and Kress refer to above:
If every meaning depends on an indeterminate number of conflicting
users, then no stable communication can take place; so society artificially
restricts the range of acceptable uses, thus controlling the potential
dispersion and infinite regression of the meaning-making series. If every
meaning had to be deferred, then communication would literally be
impossible; society far prefers to restrict communication (which is thus
always slight miscommunication) rather than risk full freedom, which
might destroy communication altogether.
(Altman, 1999: 210)
Genre, as Allen asserts describes not so much a group of texts or textual
features as it does a dynamic relationship between texts and
interpretative communities (1989: 45). On this basis, he suggests that
soap opera as a text is appropriated within several discursive systems
and that these will also vary from one culture to another and,furthermore, the term soap opera, or its translation is also applied to
distinct ranges of texts across different countries/cultures. In order to
elucidate this idea he metaphorises:
It is a bit like ornithologists, taxidermists, and bird watchers from a dozen
different countries all talking about birds, but in one country there are only
eagles; in another pigeons and chickens, but no eagles; in another
macaws and pigeons, but no eagles or chickens; and so on.
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(Allen, 1989: 45)
In the light of what Allen terms contemporary criticism, that is, a family
of critical approaches growing out of, being strongly influenced by, or
developed in reaction to the insights into language and culture providedby structuralist linguistics and semiotics (1992:5), the following
commentators not only have defined, discussed and analysed soap operas
in their own particular ways, but have also unintentionally demonstrated
that it is within this pragmatic gap of indeterminacy that lies the
disagreement upon the definitions of soap opera.
A US perspective with a theoretical and methodological lens
Robert Allen has published work of his own and others on soap operas
from all continents (1985, 1992, 1995, 2004). As Hobson puts it, his work
has traced the global nature of the genre and discussed its importance in
many academic disciplines (). He has studied the form and traced it as a
genre through its narrative development and relationship with audiences
(2003: 24). For Allen, what makes a soap opera a soap opera is its
distinctive narrational structure: its segmentation interrupts the readingprocess (1995: 1), that is, the narrative is segmented into various
episodes sequentially broadcast a number of times per week for a certain
period of time, which depending on the case lasts from months to years or
even decades, while its story goes on. It could be said that, for Allen,
what defines the genre is its syntax and not its semantics, for the latter
varies considerably more than the former from one culture to another. In
Speaking of Soap Operas (1985), Allen discusses US daytime radio and TVsoaps, mainly criticising the way they have been studied, arguing that the
meaning of soap opera across discourses, and within academic discourse
particularly, have been conditioned by the supervisory discourses of
criticism (aesthetic discourse) and sociological research. By examining
historically the manner by which the US daytime soap opera was taken up
by these discourses, without forgetting to acknowledge the importance of
the discourse of commercial broadcasting, he successfully exposes someof the layers of encrusted meaning that we confront today whenever we
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approach the soap opera as an object of inquiry (1985: 10). Although
Allen acknowledges the body of research generated by empiricist mass
communication researchers and the importance of the issues addressed,
he points out that it would be shortsighted, however, to acceptunquestioningly the results of these studies as knowledge of the
phenomena they claim to explain (1985: 43). Thus he calls for a
reconceptualisation of soap opera as an object of study which accepts
rather than combats its complexity and which acknowledges the
limitations in grasping such complexity (1985: 44). In other words, what
Allen is trying to say is that there is a lot more to be taken into account if
one wants to thoroughly investigate soaps. To begin with, he states:
If the elaboration of the soap opera as textual system is to be more than a
mere formalist exercise or rhetorical counter to the antitextualism of
empiricism, however, it must be tempered by a concern for both the
functions the soap opera is designed to serve by the institution that
produces it and the manner by which it is engaged by its readers.
(Allen, 1985:62)
Attempting to achieve such balance, Allen provides the reader with a rich
account of the institutional history of soap operas in the United States,
demonstrating that the primary generative mechanisms responsible for
the soap opera form () can be located in the institutional requirements
of American commercial broadcasting (1985: 128), and that indeed the
idea of presenting continuing stories focusing upon domestic concerns on
daytime radio was the result of the conjunction of corporate desire to
reach a particular audience () and broadcasters need to fill daytime
hours with revenue generating programming (1985: 129), and concluding
that
The adversarial relationship we traditionally assume to exist between
artistic and economic interests under capitalism simply does not obtain in
the case of soap operas (nor, I would venture, in many other cases of
contemporary cultural production).
(Allen, 1985: 129)
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As for the manner by which a soap opera is engaged by its readers, it
could be said that Allen is one of the first names in the United States to
foreground the active role of the viewer in making meanings. What Allen
proposes in Speaking of Soap Operas is, above all, an understanding ofthe history of soap opera reception which would entail
1. grounding of the overall inquiry in the functions served by soap
operas within the institutions that have produced them;
2. consideration of the strategies employed within the textual system
of the soap opera that mark out a position for the reader and of
changes in the strategies over time;
3. analysis of the social positions of soap opera audiences () and
changes in them over time;
4. () a reconstruction of the interpretative horizons against which
soap operas have been read; and
5. examination of the articulated responses to soap operas,
particularly within supervisory discourses that have conditioned the
terms by which readers are likely to have engaged them.
(Allen, 1985: 133)
He admits, however, the enormous proportions of such undertaking, as
well as its theoretical and logistical difficulties (1985: 133). In order to
illustrate the complexity of this task he briefly discusses some
shortcomings he sees in a couple of major empirical reception studies,
namely Morley (1980), and Radway (1984), nevertheless acknowledgingtheir importance. It is interesting to note, however, that in Speaking of
Soap Operas Allen appears to be completely unaware of Dorothy Hobsons
study of British the soap opera Crosswords. As a matter of fact, Allen
attempts to justify that in the introduction of his anthology To be
continued Soap Operas Around the World, acknowledging the
importance of Hobsons work and arguing that because the soap opera
was not shown in the United States her book was not widely distributed
(Allen, 1995: 9).
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A British perspective with an ethnographic lens
Dorothy Hobsons Crossroads, the drama of a soap opera (1982), together
with the BFI monograph on Coronation Street(1981) mark the inclusion of
soap operas as an object of study in the field of cultural studies (Allen,
1995: 8). Even though Hobsons book carries the name of the soap opera,
it is in fact a book about issues concerning the production, broadcast and
viewing of such television text, as its subtitle hints. Moreover, as Hobson
herself puts it, it is as much about the television audience as it is about
the programme makers and it reveals the important contribution which
the viewers make to any television programme which they watch (1982:
12). Hobson organises her account around the announcement that one ofthe main characters of the programme is to be dispensed. Due to the
characters popularity, the decision becomes a controversial issue in the
popular press prompting a big public reaction in the form of thousands of
disapproving letters.
Because Hobson was one of the first academics in Britain who were
seriously considering the form of soap opera as a legitimate subject of
academic study, her book was greeted with surprise and great interest by
the media, as she recounts in Soap Opera: The genre had been largely
overlooked as though it was not worthy of the effort of academic
analysis (Hobson, 2003: 23). More important than pioneering the field of
soap opera academic writing, however, was Hobsons approach, not just
discussing the actual text, but mainly dissecting its several layers from
both the viewpoint of people involved in its design, production and
distribution, as well as people who watched it and had their own particular
views on the programme, which often differed from the expectations of
the former. Hobson (1982) is, to some extent, precisely what Allen (1985)
was calling for. As he later puts it:
Methodologically, what distinguishes Hobsons study is what might be
called its ethnographic orientation. Hobson is not concerned with
Crossroads as a text but how as a production challenge, enacted script,
subject of public discourse, or viewing experience it takes on meaning
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for the various groups that encounter it in any of its varied manifestations.
Her role, then, is not so much critic as observer and commentator on the
observations of those whom she interviews about Crossroads. Hobsons
account of the audience for Crossroads replaces the American
functionalist model of viewer/text interaction with one that foregrounds
the production of meanings and pleasures. Furthermore, she argues that
those meanings and pleasures cannot be read off the text in isolation but
rather are deeply embedded in the social contexts of its viewing. Thus,
they vary from viewer to viewer: Crossroads is a different experience for
the young mother who feeds her child while she watches than for the
widowed grandmother who views alone. Hobsons finding of the diversity
of meanings and pleasures connected with watching Crossroads also
suggests that they may be quite different than those assumed by its
producers, writers, actors, or sponsors.
(Allen, 1995: 9)
In terms of defining the genre, it is worth pointing out that whilst Allen
favours a syntactic generic definition, Hobson, on the other hand, gives
much more importance to the semantic features of the genre. This is
probably due to the fact that Hobson is specifically dealing with British
soaps. In fact, what Hobson (1982) terms as her definition of soap opera,
besides rather lengthy, appears to be a semantic description of the genre
instead:
Soap opera has a specific location and a core set of characters around
whose lives the main stories are woven. There are additional characters
who may come and go and whose lives in some way touch those of the
main characters. Each episode has a number of themes or stories running
through it and there is a cliff-hanger at the end of the episode to hold the
audience in suspense until the next episode, and to encourage them to
watch again.
These serials have traditionally offered a range of strong female
characters and this has proved a popular feature of the genre for its
audience. They show women of different ages, class and personality types,
and offer characters with whom many members of their female audience
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can empathise. They also include male characters often for romantic
interest, sometimes as comic characters or bad characters, but in the
main the men do not have the leading roles within the serials. There are
few children in soap operas, which does tend to detract from their
representation of real life, but this is caused by the difficulties in
sustaining babies and children in a long-running serial.
(Hobson, 1982: 33)
In her latest book Soap Opera (2003), Hobson, nevertheless,
acknowledges what is perhaps the main syntactic feature (at least in the
cases of the US and British varieties of) soaps, that is, their endless
closure procrastination:
The main differences which determine whether drama series are soap
operas are connected with the number of episodes and, thus, the
production process and the regularity of transmission.
(Hobson, 2003: 32)
Soap Opera is a more comprehensive book than Crossroads in the sense
that it takes into account not only the numerous aspects comprising themultifaceted chain within which a soap opera as a text is located in the
British context, but also a great deal of internal aspects of such texts
regarding both their semantic, as well as syntactic features.
Hobson starts by providing the reader with a brief historical account of the
growth of television studies as an academic discipline, summarising the
main ideas of her own works (1982, 1989) and commenting on the major
reader-oriented studies of soap operas, such as Ang (1985), Allen (1985,
1992, 1995), Seiter et al. (1989), Buckingham (1987), Liebes and Katz
(1989), Livingstone (1990), Geraghty (1991), and Gillespie (1995), to
make the point that while soap opera is studied in relation to television
theory and theories of audience, it is, in fact, to literature and literary
theory that she wants to look for the closest relationships. She points out
that when the nineteenth-century realists wrote about their own works,
they could be writing in defence of the soap opera (2003: 28), arguing
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that while it is not seen as a pure literary form, soap opera can be seen
as developing directly from the novel (2003: 29). Even though the book
spends a great deal of its initial pages on The Soap Business (which
could perhaps be described as a more up to date, less theoretical andarguably anecdotal British version of the third chapter of Allen (1985)
Soap Opera as a Commodity), and a great deal of its final pages on The
Soap Opera and its Audiences (a summary of her previous studies with
added comments based on her experiences as an independent media
consultant), the actual core of Hobsons Soap Opera, The Content of
Soap Operas, consists of a comprehensive discussion of British soap
operas as texts in the Barthian sense of the word, as opposed to work.
Attempting to draw comparisons between soaps and novels, she performs
the work of a thorough reader scrutinising the role of the actors and
actresses as characters, stars and icons, the thematic of domestic drama,
and the so called big issues, inferring and discussing numerous potential
meanings in this continuous and much more dynamic process (than in the
case of a novel) of viewers reading producers and producers reading
viewers, so to speak.
As for defining the genre, her attempt to update her 1982 definition of
soap opera in order to provide the reader with a definition of soap opera
in its purest sense (Hobson, 2003: 35) is, as a matter of fact, an updated
overall description of specific syntactic aspects of the current British
soaps, combined with some of their semantic features:
Soap opera is a radio or television drama in series form, which has a core
set of characters and locations. It is transmitted at least three times a
week, for fifty-two weeks a year. The drama creates the illusion that life
continues in the fictional world even when viewers are not watching. The
narrative progresses in a linear form through peaks and troughs of action
and emotions. It is a continuous form with recurring catastasis as its
dominant narrative structure. It is based on fictional realism and explores
and celebrates the domestic, personal and everyday in all its guises. It
works because the audience has intimate familiarity with the characters
and their lives. Through its characters the soap opera must connect with
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the experience of its audience, and its content must be stories of the
ordinary.
(Hobson, 2003: 35)
Feminist soap studies
Because soap operas were initially produced to cater for female
audiences, there are quite a few soap opera studies, whose primordial
intentions are to discuss gender, that is, the ways which men are
represented in a society as opposed to women, the notions of masculinity
and femininity and so forth.
Charlotte Brunsdon has looked at soap operas, as well as other television
series and films, from a metafeminist perspective so to speak. By
foregrounding the ambivalent relation between feminism and femininity,
not only has she challenged the traditional, masculinist constructions of
meanings, but also questioned and criticised nave aspects of early
feminist studies such as the repudiation of the conventional
accoutrements of femininity (Brunsdon, 1997: 4).
Screen Tastes (1997) is a compilation of essays on the critical studies she
developed in the two previous decades, chronologically organised and
historically contextualised. Four of the essays in this collection deal with
soap operas as their object of study and are therefore worth commenting:
Brunsdon (1981, 1984, 1987 and 1995). The first of these essays
discusses the issue of the gendering of the spectator, both textually and
contextually. By looking at syntactic and semantic aspects of Crossroads,
Brunsdon argues that
Just as a Goddard film requires the possession of certain forms of cultural
capital on the part of its audience to make sense an extra-textual
familiarity with certain artistic, linguistic, political and cinematic discourses
so too does Crossroads and soap opera.
(Brunsdon, 1997: 17)
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She divides such competences into three categories, namely generic
knowledge, serial-specific knowledge and cultural knowledge, and argues
that in Crossroads a feminine viewer is implied, and moreover, a feminine
viewer competent within the ideological and moral frameworks, the rules,of romance, marriage and family life to make sense of it (1997: 18). She
does not, however, make any comments in the sense that such contextual
knowledge may vary considerably depending on important variables such
as the ones Hobson (1982) takes into account.
Brunsdon (1984) looks at British soaps in general as works, in the Barthian
sense of the word, that is, as an object of consumption, particularly to the
viewers. Differently from Allen (1985) or Hobson (2003) who look at soapsas commodities in the sense that broadcasters buy them from producers,
or sell timeslots to advertisers, Brunson pays particular attention to the
commodities generated and consumed outside the world of soap operas:
Newspaper articles, novels, souvenir programmes, TV Times promotions,
even cookery books, function to support the simultaneous co-existence of
them and us. It is possible to wear the same clothes, use the same dcor,
follow the same recipes and even pore over the same holiday snaps as the
people in the Street, the Close and the Motel.
(Brunson, 1997: 19)
By exploring the relation between the fictional world of the stories and the
real world of the viewers, she attempts to demonstrate the verisimilitude
of British realist soap operas as a combination of realist conventions which
make the characters problems recognisable, with cultural, generic andspecific knowledge of the viewers. Such knowledge is indeed acquired by
the practice of watching soaps, and reinforced by the consumption of all
sorts of products directly or indirectly related to the programmes.
Brunsdon (1987) is a short metafeminist essay touching upon the issues
of plausibility of realism and relativity of the concept of reality. She argues
that
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Soaps are dependent on already existing discourses in the papers, on
the news, about laws and order, about young people to represent the
real world to us. But the representations they produce also contribute to
our understanding of what that world is.
(Brunson, 1997: 27)
Thus, for Brunsdon
Feminists are quarrelling not just with soap opera, but fundamentally, with
the Real World there represented. Arguing for more realistic images is
always an argument for the representation of your version of reality.
Realistic to a feminist will often seem propagandistic and thin to a
political opponent.
(Brunson, 1997: 28)
The role of soap opera in the development of feminist television
criticism was first published in Allens anthology (1995). As its title
suggests, here Brunsdon explores the reasons why feminist critics have
been so interested in soap opera. She does that by providing a historical
account of when, from where and how feminist studies came about, andcomes up with four reasons: (1) Because soap opera is a womans
genre, for women have been targeted by makers of soap opera, for
women have been investigated as the viewers of soap opera, and for the
genre is widely and popularly believed to be feminine, despite stubborn
evidence that it is not only women who watch (1997: 38). (2) Because
the personal is political, that is, while traditional leftist critique of the
media was drawn to the reporting of the public world, for instance, toindustrial disputes, to the interactions of state and broadcasting
institutions, to international patterns of ownership and control, emerging
feminist scholarship had quite another focus. The theoretical impulse of
feminism pushed scholars not to the exceptional but to the everyday
(1997: 39). (3) Because soap opera has a metaphoric meaning, in the
sense that there are at least four different types of programmes which are
referred to as soap operas: South American telenovelas, US daytimeserials, British social realist serials and US prime-time shows. The
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metaphoric meaning, for Brunsdon, would be the idea of the feminine as
contemptible, as banal, as beneath serious critical attention. As she puts
it:
Thus the unity of these different programmes the reason why, in acertain sense, it was correct to call them all soap in a particular
period lies in their shared place at the bottom of the aesthetic
hierarchy.
(Brunson, 1997: 40)
(4) Because they shouldnt be: feminist ambivalence, that is, the
aforementioned relation between feminism and femininity: while early
feminists would repudiate the genre, all other women non-feminists
watched and enjoyed soaps, which would offer a political rationale for an
engagement with the genre. For many feminists, she argues,
Writing about soap opera, comparable genres and media such as romance
fiction and womens magazines entailed an investigation of femininities
from which they felt, or were made to feel, a very contradictory distance.
(Brunson 1997: 40)
In other words, Brunsdon is simultaneously acknowledging the importance
of soap operas for feminists to engage with debating crucial matters of
representation whilst she claims that the current status of soaps as major
objects of investigation in the field of media studies is due to the
pioneering interest of feminist scholars:
On the one hand, there is a perceived incompatibility between feminismand soap opera, but, on the other, it is arguably feminist interest that has
transformed soap opera into a very fashionable field for academic inquiry.
(Brunsdon, 1997: 30)
Geraghtys Women and Soap Opera obviously deals with the role of
women, more specifically in prime time soap operas, and the pleasures
and values which are offered to them as the implied audience for these
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programmes (1991: 6). She is also interested in looking at the way in
which prime time soaps have stretched the boundaries of the genre, by
introducing stories which are different from the traditional soap format
(1991: 6). The remarkable thing of Geraghtys study is the way she looksat the role of women in soap operas by examining the programmes
narrative organisation and aesthetic characteristics, acknowledging the
dynamicity of the practice of defining genres, taking into account
textual, as well as audience perspectives. That is to say, she is not only
concerned with gender representations just in semantic terms, as it is
generally done (cf. Hobson 1982, 2003; Brunsdon 1997), but also in
syntactic terms. Geraghtys point of departure is a brief syntactic
discussion in terms of how time and space are represented in soap
operas, as opposed to serials and series. She claims that there is a
pattern, despite differences in the degree to which such variables are
represented, and moreover, that it is not necessary for each soap to
display to the same degree all the characteristics which they share
(1991: 12). A semantic generic discussion is then provided with the
intention to demonstrate that just as the syntactic generic aspects, the
semantic ones also serve simultaneously to engage and distance the soap
audience, working to draw the viewer into the programme and to permit
her to stand back and comment on the effects. Geraghtys argument is
that
Soaps are not dominated by one aesthetic tradition but offer a range of
experiences based on the different and sometimes competing values of
light entertainment, melodrama and realism.
(Geraghty, 1991: 25)
By problematising each of these aesthetic traditions and subsequently
their interplay, she attempts to demonstrate the importance of analysing
this shifting in order to understand particular aspects of the aesthetic
experience of watching soaps. According to her,
Acting in soaps is required to register in three different ways which arealmost inevitably at odds with each other.
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(Geraghty, 1991: 36)
As she attempts to exemplify her suggestion, however, she
unintentionally demonstrates the opposite. Geraghty fails to identify the
three aspects in one single subgenre of soap as she proposes, thuscontradicting her argument despite her initial disclaimer that such
elements occur to varying degrees. The discussion is nevertheless
relevant for the purposes of clearly outlining different aesthetic aspects
which can be found in different types of soaps.
Attempting to study both US and British prime time soaps together is
undoubtedly a rather difficult undertaking, for despite several similarities,
particularly in syntactic terms, when it comes to the semantics of these
subgenres, they appear to be very different from each other, even though
perhaps not so much in terms of the ways which women are generally
represented, which is in fact the main concern ofWomen and Soap Opera.
A European overview with a comparative lens
In 1999, Hugh ODonnell published Good Times, Bad Times: soap operas
and society in Western Europe. As he puts it, his neo-Gramscian approach
treats the soaps he investigates not merely as texts in themselves, but
rather, as sites of a complex ongoing process of negotiation between
producers and consumers, itself taking place within a much larger
framework (1999: 10). Indeed, he does take into account numerous
important aspects of such process when outlining the comprehensiveanalytical model he proposes to follow as he discusses the soaps
produced and broadcast in each of the chosen countries (Belgium,
Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway,
Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom). As he further details
each of the elements comprising his framework, however, it becomes
clear that most of them will in fact not be receiving as much attention as
they should, for reasons of time or space. As a matter of fact, it issomewhat frustrating to learn that ODonnell overtly chooses not to
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discuss the viewers perspective, not only for a question of logistics and
feasibility, but also because he believes that the current methodologies
for this are rather problematic, for the outcomes of interviews, focus
groups, discussion groups and the like are themselves texts, and ananalytical model of some considerable complexity is required to establish
exactly what range of meanings might reasonably be extracted from
them (ODonnell, 1999: 25).
Even though ODonnell acknowledges the importance of reception
studies such as Morley (1980) and Fiske (1987), he justifies his opting not
to develop work in the same fashion due to the fact that they appear to
pay little attention to the production side of the equation (ODonnell,1999: 25). From my own perspective, Morley (1980) and Fiske (1987) do
pay little attention to the design, production and distribution of television
texts. ODonnell, however, ends up doing the same thing in the sense that
he also underrates one of the sides of the equation in his analyses. His
argument is that it makes more sense to simply attempt to derive the
model reader from the text itself, for it is both feasible and more fruitful
since if the real readers do not coincide closely enough with the modelreader in sufficient numbers, the serial will either fail () or it will attempt
to alter its model reader in order to achieve a greater degree of fit with
the actual ones (1999: 26). If that is the case, then it would have made
more sense, to attempt to derive the implied reader directly from the
other side of the equation, namely the producers, as Hobson does to
some extent, particularly when the case in point is an open text which is
constructed according to a wide range of variables on both sides of theequation. Nevertheless, it is no wonder that so much had to be left out,
for writing about almost every single domestic soap broadcast in the
1990s in twelve different countries is a rather ambitious undertaking.
Allen (1995), for instance, is a collaboration of twenty-two specialists from
twenty-two particular contexts. All in all, Good Times, Bad Times is an
informative collection of well fundamented textual analyses offering
interesting views on some sociolinguistic, pragmatic and cultural aspectsof these contexts.
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A European Perspective with a theoretical and methodological
lens
Jostein Gripsruds The Dynasty Years: Hollywood Television and CriticalMedia Studies (1995) investigates a specific prime time American soapopera, namely Dynasty, and its reception in Norway.
(Gripsrud appears to have the most balanced perspective of all for the
simple fact that he. when discussing the text he chooses to focus on
Dynasty.)
His approach is informed by
There is a text, obviously. Centrality. Textual analysis WITH reception and
contextual and production AND etc!
One cannot move through a text to reach its foundational codes and
processes without reading it and thus implicitly performing some kind of
interpretation p15.
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P18/19(quote) importante: receita!!! Anlise de imprensa, editora
globo, marketing of the serial (IMPORTANT OBS SUA p20!!!
P22 seeks to integrate empirical analysis of public debate and printed
media coverage!!! Bela ideia a ser seguida simples e facil de
implementar
P48/49 P/ Formulao de perguntas para PRODUTORES!
P51 MODELO!!!]
P104 Contatinhos
(UN)REALISTIC p116 Globo website, a favorita, 25/08/08 Florase veste de enfermeira e mata Maira- Drama, som,
impresses, etc, e na mesma pgina Juliana Paes diz adeus a
Mara a gente sempre sente quando deixa um bom trabalho
(porcentagem mnima de leitores do site, porm na tv, a
dinmica complementada do mesmo modo com
programassobre os programas da Globo e seu elenco, e.g
Fausto, Video Show...
SOBRE SUPORTE ATRAVS DE MDIAS diretamente ouindiretamente controladas por produtores (pg 142/143): Muitoembora no Brasa haja nao s analfabetismo, como tb falta dinheiro p/ acompra de revistas, jornais, etc, e o uso da internet... Ver quem, onde,quando e QUANTO utiliza esses ditos TEXTOS SECUNDRIOSSSS......nEstruturacao de vinhetas narradas pela pr opria grobo e a VOZ donarrador de miliano..... (p144). Se bem que na GROBO os esteretipos sao
REDUNDANTES, repetidos, reinforcados a cada novela...(Schroeder 1988:53) Quoted in (GRIPSRUD 1995:151) continuousjigsaw puzzle, weekly reconstruction of confidence, comptetence, etc... olance de tentar adivinhar oq vai acontecer assistindo junto p e tal... =AGOSTIM, antecipacao e memria (em Narrative). Tcnicas narrativas,audiencias sempre melhor informadas doq os presonagens...
EMOTIONAL REALISM (Ang 1985: 41-7)...
MAIS, MUITO MAIS sobre a PESQUISA em si: 154!!!!! Mto interessante,
entrevistas sobre outros assuntos e a novela inseridadespercebidamente........ Tipo falar da vida e atividades do tempo
7/30/2019 Soaps Nov 2008
19/22
ocioso ate chegar na tv e oq e como e qdo e aonde e pq, etc e finalmentediscutir um pouco da novela contextualizada no cotidiano da pessoa...hm...
P166 EXREMELY IMPORTANT REMARK: THE USE OF THE TERM
VERBAL ADOPTED FROM TODOROV, PERHAPS PROBLEMATIC...QUE TAL AESTHETIC? NO? Semiotic?
LTIMA PGINA DO GRIPSRUD EM CANETA MARKER: METHODS OFSURVEYING!
*** Thought: On the transcripts: The author shares these feelings, theauthor is a viewer, grew up in such a reality, is just an expert in the fieldtherefore aware of all that.
The other thing is the fact that style of Globo being much more didaticthat, say, the BBC for instance, even though they bear a lot in common inthe sens that they unite a whole country with their programming, theirnarratives, dramas, newstories, etc.
P177 Genre & repetition
P179 Genre, recognition vs inovation + quotable assertions!
OBSSS: Notes on music: It has been suggested and in fact there is awhole field of studies from neurosciences to... emotion, etc... + semioticthrough social practices + sensations...... calming... irritating... commonknowledge or instinct..? E.g. The Cognitive Neuroscience of music - byIsabelle Peretz (Editor), Robert J. Zatorre (Editor)
182 Limiting Polissemia
183 THE QUESTION
186 MUSIC + VIDEO + VERBAL, levels of importance of meaning,emohasis, contradiction, multimodality!!!!
Examples of the role of music for your paper: Straight Storyexperience with audience ok, it is cinema, audiovisual workingtogehter, melodrama in Brazil and others (Mexico etc) examples,examples, examples, subtitles, etc...), Blackadder final...
189: Example ofvisual description
194: Analisar aberturas tb! (visuals, meanings, signs, language...)
195,196,197>>> on musical theory, major, minor etc...! (moree.g.: Hitchcocks rope initial scene...)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/279-8984541-6756856?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Isabelle%20Peretzhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/279-8984541-6756856?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Robert%20J.%20Zatorrehttp://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/279-8984541-6756856?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Isabelle%20Peretzhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/279-8984541-6756856?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Robert%20J.%20Zatorre7/30/2019 Soaps Nov 2008
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2
Obs.: Using Prime Time Telenovela in Brazil to Promote Multimodal
Literacy at school and teacher training level.: bringing whats outside theclassroom into the classroom..?
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