Instructor: Dr. Christopher Martin
Office: East Gym
Office Hours: 3:30-4:30 M; 11:30-1:30 T, Th
Tel: 273-2788
Mailbox: 106 East Gym
E-mail: martinc@uni.edu
World Wide Web: http://www.uni.edu/~martin

Course Objectives
This is an advanced course designed for students who are interested in exploring new ways of thinking about the meanings and pleasures of American commercial television. Featuring a number of difficult reading and writing assignments meant to challenge students to become actively engaged in the critical enterprise, the course is organized around investigating television in four interlocking social and cultural contexts: 1) modern consumer culture; 2) the nuclear family ideal; 3) contemporary gender relations; 4) contemporary race relations.

Required Texts:

• Robert C. Allen, ed. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992. (COD)
  
• David Marc and Robert J. Thompson, Prime Time, Prime Movers. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995. (M&T)
  
• Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992. (Coontz)
  
• Alex McNeil, Total Television: The Comprehensive Guide to Programming from 1948 to the Present, 4th ed. New York: Penguin, 1996.