scholarly journals MTV’s The Hills:  A Leading American Docusoap

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Anna Currie
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Reality Tv ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Fictional Narrative ◽  
Generic Position ◽  
Mixed Genre ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Institutional Positioning

<p>This thesis explores the relatively uncharted academic territory of the American docusoap, and case studies The Hills as a pertinent example of this burgeoning television genre. Docusoap is a ‘mixed-genre’ that enhances factual material with the story-telling techniques of fictional drama. Whilst many academics have studied the origins of British docusoap and have registered the influence upon it of ‘public service’ objectives in programming, less attention has been paid to the emergence of the docusoap in the commercially-driven American television context. It is in this context that the docusoap has entailed a more overt blending of the attributes of ‘documentary’ and ‘soap opera’ for purely entertainment purposes. Testifying to the need to reconcile risk with conservatism in a commercially-driven schedule context, the generic mix within The Hills draws from the genres of soap opera and ‘reality’ TV, both of which bring the advantages and assurances of a well-demonstrated audience popularity. Having recently completed its sixth and final season, The Hills exemplifies current developments within the American docusoap form. This docusoap details the lives of a group of attractive, affluent young people in their early twenties who work and socialise within the entertainment and fashion industries of Los Angeles. Significantly, The Hills maintains the voyeuristic allure of a ‘reality’ TV premise and enhances this by adapting the melodramatic aesthetics and distinctive narrative strategies of soap opera to a degree that is more overt than other docusoaps, aside, of course, from that which characterised its forerunner, Laguna Beach. This thesis undertakes a close examination of the generic and institutional positioning of The Hills in four distinct chapters. Chapter One examines the generic position of docusoap as a ‘mixed-genre’ and the institutional role The Hills performs for the youth-oriented MTV network. Chapter Two analyses the specific fictional narrative techniques The Hills uses to enhance its documented footage whilst Chapter Three addresses the controversies that have emerged due to this docusoap’s blending of the fictional and the factual. Finally, Chapter Four details how the docusoap’s ability to appeal to lucrative young viewers positions The Hills as a powerful promotional tool for MTV’s consumerist messages.</p>

scholarly journals MTV’s The Hills:  A Leading American Docusoap

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Anna Currie
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Reality Tv ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Fictional Narrative ◽  
Generic Position ◽  
Mixed Genre ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Institutional Positioning

<p>This thesis explores the relatively uncharted academic territory of the American docusoap, and case studies The Hills as a pertinent example of this burgeoning television genre. Docusoap is a ‘mixed-genre’ that enhances factual material with the story-telling techniques of fictional drama. Whilst many academics have studied the origins of British docusoap and have registered the influence upon it of ‘public service’ objectives in programming, less attention has been paid to the emergence of the docusoap in the commercially-driven American television context. It is in this context that the docusoap has entailed a more overt blending of the attributes of ‘documentary’ and ‘soap opera’ for purely entertainment purposes. Testifying to the need to reconcile risk with conservatism in a commercially-driven schedule context, the generic mix within The Hills draws from the genres of soap opera and ‘reality’ TV, both of which bring the advantages and assurances of a well-demonstrated audience popularity. Having recently completed its sixth and final season, The Hills exemplifies current developments within the American docusoap form. This docusoap details the lives of a group of attractive, affluent young people in their early twenties who work and socialise within the entertainment and fashion industries of Los Angeles. Significantly, The Hills maintains the voyeuristic allure of a ‘reality’ TV premise and enhances this by adapting the melodramatic aesthetics and distinctive narrative strategies of soap opera to a degree that is more overt than other docusoaps, aside, of course, from that which characterised its forerunner, Laguna Beach. This thesis undertakes a close examination of the generic and institutional positioning of The Hills in four distinct chapters. Chapter One examines the generic position of docusoap as a ‘mixed-genre’ and the institutional role The Hills performs for the youth-oriented MTV network. Chapter Two analyses the specific fictional narrative techniques The Hills uses to enhance its documented footage whilst Chapter Three addresses the controversies that have emerged due to this docusoap’s blending of the fictional and the factual. Finally, Chapter Four details how the docusoap’s ability to appeal to lucrative young viewers positions The Hills as a powerful promotional tool for MTV’s consumerist messages.</p>

Blackness as Riot Control: Managing Civic Unrest Through Black Appeal Programming and Black Celebrity

2020 ◽  
pp. 152747642098582
Author(s):  
Philip Scepanski
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Cosby Show ◽  
Riot Control

During the uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, black hip-hop artist Killer Mike appeared on television to ask that people remain nonviolent and in their homes. Similar events took place years earlier. James Brown performed a live concert on WGBH to keep Boston peaceful following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. During the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, both The Cosby Show and The Arsenio Hall Show were used to similar ends. These examples demonstrate the ways in which television has activated black identity to quell certain forms of civil rights protest and implicate televisual discourses of liveness, domesticity, and public service.

A Soap of Our Own: New Zealand's Shortland Street

2003 ◽  
Vol 106 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trish Dunleavy
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Prime Time ◽  
Export Markets ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Genre Conventions ◽  
Television Market

Shortland Street is a prime-time soap opera that launched on New Zealand television in 1992 and was created to meet a combination of commercial and ‘public service’ objectives. Shortland Street is institutionally and culturally significant as New Zealand's first attempt at daily drama production and one of the first major productions to follow New Zealand television's 1989 deregulation. Placing Shortland Street in the context of national television culture and within the genre of locally produced TV drama, this paper explores several key facets of the program, including: its creation as a co-production between public and private broadcasting institutions; its domestic role in a small television market; its relationships with New Zealand ‘identity and culture’; its application of genre conventions and foreign influences; and its progress — as a production that was co-developed by Grundy Television — in a range of export markets.

scholarly journals Cultural innovation and narrative synergy in R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet

2012 ◽  
pp. 64-75
Author(s):  
Ioana Literat
Keyword(s):  
Soap Opera ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Cultural Innovation ◽  
Promotional Strategy ◽  
Original Product ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Media Channels ◽  
Narrative Conventions ◽  
Strategy I

This article analyses the narrative conventions of R. Kelly’s serial “hip-hopera” Trapped in the Closet, exploring the manner in which the artist’s chosen narrative strategies have shaped the generic reading of the series. Specifically, I discuss how Trapped in the Closet re-appropriates the conventions of the soap opera and the music video, to create a wholly original product that both evokes these schematas and simultaneously challenges their traditional narrative norms. Looking at R. Kelly’s chosen promotional strategy, I argue that the convergence of genres and narrative influences, as evident in the series’ content and style, parallels the convergence of media channels—radio, television, internet—that characterised its release and distribution, highlighting the increasing importance of a transmedial approach in the conceptualisation and dissemination of cultural texts.

scholarly journals Poetics of Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novel “A Pale View of Hills”

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-64
Author(s):  
Yaryna Oprisnyk
Keyword(s):  
Current Paper ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Verbal Expression ◽  
Verbal Language ◽  
Japanese Aesthetics ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The current paper explores the narrative strategies and poetics of intermediality in Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel “A Pale View of Hills” (1982). Particular attention is paid to the notions of narrative unreliability and subjectivity exemplified by the ambiguous first-person narrative in the novel. The researcher focuses on the narrative techniques, as well as on the numerous lexical and other literary means that emphasize the unreliability of the narrator, who is also the protagonist. It allows revealing the hidden emotions and tendency to self-deceit. In addition, the paper traces the features of Japanese aesthetics and literature in the novel. The most peculiar among them are concise verbal expression, lack of emotion, and audiovisuality, which is primary concentration of the narrative on the visual and auditory images, rather than on the characters’ internal psychological processes. A range of narrative strategies and special literary effects in “A Pale View of Hills”, being characteristic for the art of cinematography, make the novel a vivid example of the cinematographic (cinematic) literature, which requires a different, more image-oriented perception of the reader. Among such techniques, the most notable are the enhanced symbolism of sensual images; revealing the characters’ actual feelings and thoughts through their non-verbal language and dialogues; fragmented and elliptic nature of the narrative that resembles the technique of montage; and the plasticity of chronotope, which is represented by the active use of flashbacks in the novel.

scholarly journals THE “CYROPAEDIA” OF XENOPHON AND THE “HISTORY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE” OF HERODIAN: STRUCTURAL SIMILARITIES THROUGH CENTURIES OF ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIOGRAPHY (A REVIEW OF THE RECEPTIONS IN MODERN CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY)

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-52
Author(s):  
Fedir Dovbyshchenko
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Classical Philology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Greek Historiography ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The present article is an attempt to analyze the narrative strategies and scope of Xenophon’s “Cyropaedia” and Herodian’s “History of the Roman Empire” as viewed within the modern reception in classical philology. This paper presumes that the narrative techniques of writing historiographical biographies in antiquity might be the same across the whole period which separates the two works in question. The distance in time did not result in radical changes of the narrative structure in historiography, as the example of Xenophon’s “Cyropaedia” and Herodian’s “History” shows. The analysis of the ancient histories, as this article argues, can be conducted not only to understand the level of their factual reliability, but also to describe their possible impact on contemporary readers or listeners. It is also shown in the present article that the narrative structure of the two histories is far from being that of the non-fictional prose, and that modern classicists tend to consider them as fictional texts. Moreover, the whole ancient historiography, unlike the modern one, has to be treated as fiction, for the strategies of creating it were similar to the narrative strategies of other genres.

scholarly journals Ireland and the Balkans Conflict in Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-123
Author(s):  
Orsolya Szűcs
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Fictional Narrative ◽  
Landscape Functions ◽  
Critical Exploration ◽  
Contemporary Reality

Abstract History has always been a major critical exploration point in Edna O’Brien’s works. Notable for its realistic Irish specificity, her fiction interrogates problems of history, memory, and society with an audacious awareness. In her 2015 novel, The Little Red Chairs, O’Brien goes beyond the familiar Irish cultural context and creates a propitious alternative life-story for Radovan Karadžić, a Serbian war criminal from the Balkans conflict of the 1990s. Attending closely to the novel’s factual-fictional narrative strategies and its visceral language, this essay explores how O’Brien combines stereotypical elements from the Irish contemporary reality with Eastern European sagas as well as history to then create a compelling humanitarian plotline. The novel has a particular rendering of natural elements that act as a mnemonic witness device. The essay also looks at how the landscape functions as a reflective tool, often acting as a separate “character” of the narrative.

The Gentrifier's Dilemma: Narrative Strategies and Self–Justifications of Incoming Residents in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 374-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Donnelly
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Neighborhood Change ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Real Estate Developers ◽  
The Government ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Depth Interviews

This paper examines how gentrifiers negotiate tensions between the narratives of liberal progressivism they espouse and their role in neighborhood change. Through in–depth interviews with recent residents in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn, this paper identifies patterns in rhetorical strategies and narrative techniques employed by interviewees to manage points of conflict. It finds that gentrifiers express ambivalence and feelings of guilt surrounding their presence in the neighborhood and that they manage this ambivalence through three main strategies: (1) reframing the outcomes of gentrification in positive terms, (2) distinguishing their behaviors and attitudes from the stereotypical “bad” gentrifier, and (3) displacing their responsibility for the process of gentrification onto another group of actors, such as the government or real estate developers. These results provide a framework for understanding how individuals justify their complicity in other processes which they see as morally questionable, such as unethical consumerism.

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