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Television History and Aesthetics

The aim of this module is to introduce students to key debates in Television Studies around history and aesthetics, at the same time encouraging the development of interrogation and critique of scholarship in the field. This module will, then, operate simultaneously at introductory and advanced levels and will thus be taught through a combination of introductory presentations, screenings, discussion and small group work. This will enable you to further refine and practise the skills in textual analysis acquired and developed on the core module taken in the Autumn term, and the module has been designed to work alongside Screen Cultures and Methods. Our focus will be predominantly on US and UK television with key examples drawn from other national television systems. Our viewing will range across historical and contemporary programming, in order to prompt consideration of development across time and to historicise the study of contemporary television. We will look at programming across a range of genres, from reality television, drama and children's programming,
to music and lifestyle genres. By the end of this module, students will have a firm grasp of some key debates in Television Studies, and will be able to interrogate critical and theoretical scholarship in the field, using their further defined skills of textual analysis to test existing arguments and propose new ones. Many of our foci of study will be areas prompted by the module tutor's own research interests, and in which little research exists to date. Accordingly, the module aims to encourage students to undertake original research on television topics.

Module Leaders

Dr Rachel Moseley

Dr. Rachel Moseley