More Academic Work on Soaps N-S
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Art. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974, 161-182.
After examining forms of nighttime television throughout his book,
Horace Newcomb reaches soap opera. As opposed to the historical
approach of the previous year’s The Soaps, Newcomb’s goal is to
introduce the soap opera into the scope of television studies. He
also sets out to identify the most important factors in defining a
soap. He begins with recounting, in detail, a stereotypical soap
opera storyline and then demonstrating how completely it breaks with
the conventions of nighttime episodic television. Newcomb supposes
that his audience will already be predisposed to dismiss soap operas
and says that, despite having stereotypical and stock storylines and
characterizations, the soap opera medium is the closest to realizing
the true potential of television, with stories that develop slowly and
emotional connections that develop over time. The sets are cheaply
built abstractions, and the stories make the upper-middle class the
norm, with stereotypical characters representing anyone above or below
that professional class. He concludes that the power of soap opera is
not in action but in reaction and introspection, in juggling multiple
plots simultaneously, in connecting much more deeply with its audience
through long-term character development, and in showing everyday
people who are able to survive anything life throws at them. This is,
in fact, the earliest critical examination of the soap genre as a
whole that I have found.
Nochimson, Martha P. “Amnesia ‘R’ Us: The Retold Melodrama, Soap
Operas, and the
Representation of Reality.” Film Quarterly 50.3 (Spring 1997), 27-38.
Martha Nochimson returns for another focus on soap operas, again
bringing her unique perspective after having worked in the industry.
Nochimson focuses on the collisions between reality and melodrama in
relation to a particular storyline involving Viki on One Life to Live,
drawing parallels to Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Vertigo. This is one
of many amnesia storylines that have such a rich history in the soap
genre and one of the soap storylines that is often most criticized by
culture at large. However, Nochimson sees important meaning conveyed
through the amnesia storyline and the split personality and examines
the amnesiac “Return” in detail through OLTL. The piece is a good
example of what close reading of a particular storyline in a soap can
illuminate about the genre as a whole, about its conventions, about
its viewers, and about the art inherent in soaps that most critics do
not fully comprehend. It also suggests valuable ways for future
scholarship to focus on analyzing soaps.
Nochimson, Martha. No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject.
Berkeley, CA: U of
California P, 1992.
Nochimson comes on the scene with a project in 1992 akin to what
Amanda Finkelberg is proposing to do for her thesis project in CMS.
Nochimson first identifies herself as a feminist critic in the
tradition of so many others who write about marginalized topics while
refusing to marginalize them. However, Nochimson makes the boldest
claims of all. Contrary to a lot of scholarship that examines the
progressive possibilities in the soap opera genre, Nochimson’s goal is
to prove that soap opera programming is much more progressive and
challenging than anyone gives it credit for but few people can
understand and articulate that because few of the scholars who write
on soaps have actually truly understood the genre. She later reveals
her own qualifications as not only a scholar with a Ph.D. but also as
a writer and editor for various soap operas over an extended period of
time. Her opinion is that soap operas have been so marginalized that
they are not focused on for anything other than derision by mainstream
society and that soap producers have had a hard time entering the
discourse of television analysis because there is not a sufficient
vocabulary to express much of what soaps do or intend to do. She sees
her work as providing this fundamental link to help facilitate future
discussions of soaps.
Poll, Julie. The As the World Turns Scrapbook: Special 40th
Anniversary Edition. Los Angeles: General Publishing, 1996.
To be able to study soap opera texts as an “expert,” to use the
terminology that Mumford displays, I will be focusing my thesis on the
show As the World Turns because I have grown up as a viewer of it.
However, ATWT has a 50-year history, most of which I have not been
around for. In addition to several Internet sites that include month-
by-month recaps of soap storylines, Julie Poll’s book, released ten
years ago at the point of the show’s 40th anniversary, is an important
text in helping me understand the deep relationships between the older
characters on the show and the complete histories of younger
characters. Soap storylines and backstories are so complex that they
need a good guide, and Poll—who has worked actively within the soap
industry for years—provides just such a text with this book. While
aimed at a general audience and particularly ATWT enthusiasts, the
book is very historically accurate and detailed, with a 167-page
synopsis of the storylines from 1956 to 1995. Considering my interest
in the show’s history, I have found few more valuable texts. Although
its analysis is slim, its production and style is heads above books
like Soap World.
Rapping, Elayne. “Daytime Utopias: If You Lived in Pine Valley, You’d
Be Home.” Hop on
Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. Ed. Henry Jenkins
III, Tara
McPherson, and Jane Shattuc. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002, 47-66.
Rapping begins this discussion of soap operas in the influential Hop
on Pop anthology by recounting a personal story of her and her
daughter’s own conversations about Guiding Light, a show they both
follow regularly. The conversation demonstrates the critic part of
the fan audience, participation and understanding of Internet soap fan
communities, and the importance of sharing opinions with one another
as central to enjoying the soap viewing experience. She examines how
spoilers affect the soap fan community and picks up on the argument of
splitting soap opera from melodrama by finding that, while soaps share
some of the same elements of the domestic realm and the feminine with
melodrama, soaps make women important influencers on all aspects of
public life as well, including business storylines and professional
issues. Rapping finds that, despite all of the negative events in
people’s lives, soaps offer somewhat of a utopia and finds that the
sense of community is what makes soaps most compelling, rather than
the particular storylines. However, she identifies the “Procter and
Gamble problem”—ultimately a view of the world in which human nature
is by and large good and which can present this communal utopia while
not interfering with the business practices that make this commercial
entertainment possible. Rapping does this by examining the P&G soap
Guiding Light, which has a long history of scholarship, as well as
examples from All My Children.
Rosen, Ruth. “Search for Yesterday.” Watching Television: A Pantheon
Guide to Popular
Culture. Ed. Todd Gitlin. New York: Pantheon, 1986, 42-67.
Ruth Rosen follows in the growing tradition of using content analysis
of a particular show to understand the phenomenon of soap opera.
Rosen follows General Hospital and reaction to the show in fan
magazines to find possible motivations viewers have to watch and
become addicted to soaps. She addresses the shame many people feel in
viewing a denigrated genre but also the emerging chic-ness of watching
soaps, from Andy Warhol’s admitting being a fan of As the World Turns
and myriad guest appearances from distinguished film entertainers to
the widening of the soap audience in the move from 30-minute to one-
hour episodes in the late 1970s-early 1980s and the changes to viewing
caused by the VCR. Rosen concludes that it is hope, more than
anything else, that brings viewers back to the soap opera each day—
hope that wrongs will be righted and that there will always be some
sort of stability to life.
Scodari, Christine. “‘No Politics Here’: Age and Gender in Soap Opera
‘Cyberfandom.’”
Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text Reader Second Edition. Ed.
Gail Dines and
Jean M. Humez. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003, 497-506. Originally
published in
Women’s Studies in Communication 21.2 (Fall 1998), 168-187.
The examination of Internet discussion groups continues with this
essay by Christine Scodari as to the political implications of online
discussion groups centered around soaps such as Another World and Days
of Our Lives. Scodari finds the research by Baym celebrates these
spaces as empowering the fan community, while Scodari concludes that
these spots do not really provide a space free from criticism. She
examines soap magazines, shows, and discussion groups and finds that
minority characters are underrepresented and older characters are not
featured enough to reflect the tastes of segments of the audience that
fall outside of the key demographic range but finds that the soap
magazines and most of the posters are as eager to support this company
line and are even hostile to criticisms, complaining that any post
criticizing soaps for partaking in age or race discrimination as too
political, as if politics and soap opera were mutually exclusive.
Although I find myself much more in agreement with Baym’s arguments,
Scodari provides important counterpoints and is also a key scholar for
my continued work on soap fan communities.
Scodari, Christine. Serial Monogamy: Soap Opera, Lifespan, and The
Gendered Politics of
Fantasy. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2004.
Christine Scodari defines her work as lying at the intersection of
political economy, British cultural studies, and U.S. cultural studies
approaches of popular texts. The book breaks its study of soap opera
up into a study of production, a study of content, and a study of
consumption and the meanings involved in each of these approaches when
it comes to understanding soap opera texts. Throughout all three of
these approaches, Scodari examines issues of gender, age, romance,
fantasy, and power. In her earlier work, Scodari has established her
interest in studying political implications of both the production of
soap operas, the analysis of soap operas in magazines, and the
discussion of soaps in fandom. She continues looking at the use of
virtual ethnography as well, so this book’s methods are of particular
interests to me, even if I don’t find some of her particular questions
as appropriate to my study as Baym’s. I am interested in this
conception of the field as divided in these three ways, however.
Seiter, Ellen. “Promise and Contradiction: The Daytime Television
Serial.” Special Issue Film
Reader 5: Film and Cultural Studies, Feminist Film Criticism. Ed. Jae
Alexander, et al.
(1982): 150-163.
In the first paragraph of her essay, Seiter makes two important
observations—that soaps are proof that women can be the focus of
television programming and gain a massive audience and that nighttime
serial dramas like Dallas differ quite substantially from their
daytime counterparts. To further the body of research on soaps from
both a feminist perspective and a reception perspective, and also to
build on studying particular soap opera scenes as a literary critic
would, Seiter examines the ways in which soaps depict the struggles of
family life and the woman’s place in the family and how soap operas
might be used by female viewers. Seiter uses a particular example
from ABC’s General Hospital to introduce a narrative in great detail
and examine the social nuances and classist issues inherent in the
narrative. She then uses this situation to observe the conventions of
soap opera and the complex plot and character developments that take
place in one year’s time, when an American soap has aired the
equivalent of “over 100 feature films’” worth of material and thus
establishes the difficulty of textual analysis of soaps—that their
open-endedness and their volume of content makes it a difficult text
to analyze successfully. She then examines the contradictions of soap
opera involving the family, the depiction of male characters, the
balance between wish fulfillment and caution, and the struggle between
autonomous female characters and the search for a male companion.
Seiter, Ellen, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner, and Eva-Maria Warth,
Ed. Remote
Control: Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power. London: Routledge,
1989.
It comes as no surprise that the names of a few researchers pop up
repeatedly when writing about soap opera scholarship. Although the
body of sociological writing about soap opera and somewhat the body of
aesthetic or “style” pieces about the ways in which soaps are filmed,
edited, shot, and produced are somewhat disconnected, the majority of
writers in the humanistic tradition tend to have worked together and
shared a lot of common bonds in their work. Nowhere is this more
prevalent than in the book Remote Control. The book contains essays
by a who’s who of scholars who have written on soaps: Robert C, Allen,
John Fiske, Charlotte Brunsdon, Dorothy Hobson, John Tulloch, Ien Ang,
David Morley, and Ellen Seiter are among the names who contributed to
the book. And although the book focuses on female viewers in general,
the idea for such a collection sprang out of the studies of soap opera
that these scholars were involved in, and six of the 12 essays focus
on soaps. In the introduction, the editors explain in detail how this
project came about. Morley examines “changing paradigms in audience
studies,” while Allen writes about soaps and the limitations of the
term “soap opera,” which is appropriated by industrial communities,
critical communities, and viewer communities and often means much
different things. Brunsdon studies the relationship between
television text and audience and argues for the retaining of text as
an analytic category even while examining its relationship to
audiences. Hobson examines the group discussion of soap operas in the
workplace. Tulloch examines the relationship between television and
soaps in general and elderly viewers. Finally, the book ends with a
fresh look at soaps and soap fan communities by the editors which
calls for a movement toward an ethnography of soap opera viewers.
Again, a book in which I need to spend time with each individual essay
in its own right and an important piece in the history of humanistic
studies of soap opera.
Spence, Louise. Watching Daytime Soap Operas: The Power of Pleasure.
Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan UP, 2005.
Louise Spence provides one of the most recent studies of soap opera
and focuses particularly on understanding the viewer’s attraction to
the show on the basis of feeling pleasure. She concedes that people
are willing to endure their shame and some degree of social
degradation for being a soap fan because the entertainment value or
pleasure of viewing the show makes it worthwhile. In order to
understand this, Spence engages in ethnographic research of the fan
base, which she presents in a study with four parts. The first
section of the books focuses on the question, “Why study soaps?” The
second examines the history of scholarship on soaps and the
complications of analyzing the genre in, “How to Study Soaps.” Then,
in “How to Watch Soaps,” the narrative discourse of the soap opera
genre is examined. Finally, in “How to Enjoy Soaps,” Spence more
completely examines this idea of pleasure in the viewing audience.
Her approach provides a more nuanced account of earlier questions of
pleasure as existing in soaps.