Tag Archives: Publications

May 2011

Soap Operas and Telenovelas in the Digital Age: Global Industries and New Audiences by Diana Isabel Arredondo Ríos and Mari Castañeda

Soap operas and telenovelas are watched by millions of people around the world every day. As cultural, social, and economic phenomena,soap operas and telenovelas examining them will further our understanding of the role of global media content in the digital age. Moreover, as these programs continue to be exported and transformed at regional levels, and through digitalization, it is more important than ever to analyze where the genre has been, where it is now, and where it is going.

About the authors: Diana I. Rios is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and directs the Institute of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Her research and teaching includes examinations of content such as news and entertainment, and the audience’s functional use of media. She studies race/ethnicity, culture, gender and sexuality in media, and intercultural communication processes.
Mari Casta eda is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research includes political economy of global communication, and Latina/o media studies.

October 2015

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Global Melodrama: Nation, Body, and History in Contemporary Film by Carla Marcantonio

Global Melodrama is the first booklength work to investigate melodrama in a specifically

twenty-first century setting across regional and national boundaries, analyzing film texts from a variety of national contexts in the wake of globalization.

About the author: Carla Marcantonio is an Associate Professor at Loyola Marymount University, USA.  Her articles and essays have been published in such journals as Social Text, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Cineaste, as well as multiple edited books. She received her PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and her MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder

 

August 2015

Living Screens: Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television by Monique Rooney

Through original analysis of three contemporary, auteur-directed melodramas (Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce), Living Screens reconceives and renovates the terms in which melodrama has been understood. Returning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s foundational,

“Living Screens” by Monique Rooney – August 28, 2015

Enlightenment-era melodrama Pygmalion with its revival of an old story about sculpted objects that spring to life, it contends that this early production prefigures the structure of contemporary melodramas and serves as a model for the way we interact with media today. Melodrama is conceptualized as a “plastic” form with the capacity to mould and be moulded and that speaks to fundamental processes of mediation.

Living Screens evokes the thrills, anxieties, and uncertainties accompanying our attachment to technologies that are close-at-hand yet have far-reaching effects. In doing so, it explores the plasticity of our current situation, in which we live with screens that melodramatically touch our lives.

July 2014

“Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television debates the ways in which melodrama expresses and gives meaning to: trauma and pathos; memory and historical re-visioning; home and borders; gendered and queer relations; the family and psychic identities; the national and emerging public cultures; and morality and ethics.”

Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television

Published by Palgrave Macmillan

Editor: M Stewart

 

 

 

 

Pragmatic Passions : Melodrama and Latin American Social Narrative

Author: Matthew Bush

From the era of the wars for independence onward, the emotionally heightened and ethically charged theatrics of melodrama have played a substanPragmatic Passionstial role in the framing of Latin American fictional narrative. Over that same time period, melodramatic reasoning has influenced the critical models through which the countries of the region conceive their respective histories and political landscapes. Pragmatic Passions: Melodrama and Latin American Social Narrative demonstrates how melodrama is deployed as a convincing means of affectively narrating socio-political messages, yet how it also unwittingly undermines the narrative structure of paradigmatic works by Rómulo Gallegos, César Vallejo, Roberto Arlt, Jorge Amado, and Carlos Fuentes.

 

 

Matinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial

Author: Scott Higgins
Published: February 2016

Description

Long before Batman, Flash Gordon, or the Lone Ranger were the stars of their own TV shows, they had dedicated audiences watching their adventures each week. The difference was that this action took place on the big screen, in short adventure Printserials whose exciting cliffhangers compelled the young audience to return to the theater every seven days.

Matinee Melodrama is the first book about the adventure serial as a distinct artform, one that uniquely encouraged audience participation and imaginative play. Media scholar Scott Higgins proposes that the serial’s incoherent plotting and reliance on formula, far from being faults, should be understood as some of its most appealing attributes, helping to spawn an active fan culture. Further, he suggests these serials laid the groundwork not only for modern-day cinematic blockbusters like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but also for all kinds of interactive media that combine spectacle, storytelling, and play.

As it identifies key elements of the serial form—from stock characters to cliffhangers—Matinee Melodrama delves deeply into questions about the nature of suspense, the aesthetics of action, and the potentials of formulaic narrative. Yet it also provides readers with a loving look at everything from Zorro’s Fighting Legion to Daredevils of the Red Circle, conveying exactly why these films continue to thrill and enthrall their fans.

About the Author:

SCOTT HIGGINS is a professor and chair of the College of Film and the Moving Image at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. He is the author of Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s and Arnheim for Film and Media Studies.