More Academic Work on Soaps T-Z
sam...@mit.edu
work on soap operas still being done and because there are a variety
of pieces I had not yet had the chance to read when I wrote this, or
whole anthologies that I mention here as one piece, when they are in
reality the combination of a lot of great research projects...But I
hope this gives others a good start for their reading lists!
Timberg, Bernard. “The Rhetoric of the Camera in Television Soap
Opera.” Television: The
Critical View, Second Ed. Ed. Horace Newcomb. New York: Oxford UP,
1979, 164-178. Originally published in Journal of American Culture
6.3 (1983): 76-81.
Bernard Timberg finds that his feeling of direct involvement in soap
opera storylines stems from the way soaps are shot, “making (viewers)
feel somehow complicit in the ebb and flow of relationships and
emotions.” Taking an approach to understanding soaps through the
artistic mode of expression, in this case the camera shot in
particular, Timberg’s study is important in establish another way to
approach soap operas and the first attempt to actually tackle soaps
from a more aesthetic viewpoint. Timberg hypothesizes that most
critics do not understand the genre because it is full of nonverbal
and nonliterary forms of communication, “a rhetoric based on specific
camera and sound conventions that structure the viewer’s experience.”
Timberg examines one particular scene from All My Children and one
particular scene from General Hospital to show how this use of camera
techniques and sound function in the language of the genre.
Tulloch, John. “The Implied Audience in Soap Opera Production.”
Rethinking the Media
Audience: The New Agenda. Ed. Pertti Alasuutari. London: Sage, 1999,
151-178.
Although focused on an ethnography of the production of an Australian
soap opera, John Tulloch’s piece has an effect on American soap opera
because it is one of the few academic pieces clearly focused on
understanding soap opera production from a scholarly perspective. His
essay includes examinations of the soap opera from the director’s role
and perspective and the strategies employed by actors, including the
development of an intratextual memory of a character within a show
when the actor may be playing the character for a number of years, and
the importance of personal memory in being able to inform
productions. Many of the observations made here are valuable when
translated and examined in American soaps, although some of the
particulars are different for the American soaps market.
Tulloch, John. “Talking About Television Soap Opera.” Watching
Television Audiences:
Cultural Theories and Methods. London: Arnold, 2000, 56-82.
John Tulloch further develops the discussion of talk and gossip in
soap opera with an essay focused completely on this aspect of fandom
that scholars such as Mary Ellen Brown have written about as well.
Tulloch finds that soap producers interact and expect this discussion
aspect of soap fandom and even provide gossip and gossip characters
within the show as well, indicating that fan communities may help
inspire writers as well. The texts are used to help understand and
talk about important health-related issues and social issues in which
viewers can watch the characters going through issues that they may
confront in their lives as well. He also writes about the importance
of intersecting these societal issues and risks with characters that
audiences have long-term identifications with.
Williams, Carol T. “Soap Opera Men in the 90s: Signs of the Fearful
Times.” Journal of
Popular Film & Television 22.3 (Autumn 1994), 126-132.
Carol T. Williams’ approach to understanding gender relationships at
soap differs from most previous research in that she wants to examine
the role of male characters on soaps and how they are displayed with
an assumed audience that is primarily female. Much as feminist
criticism has come to focus on depictions of masculinity more and more
in the past decade, this approach attempts to look at gender
constructs from the opposite side yet finding that men are presented
in soaps as parts of a female world. Williams finds some ambivalence
in the ways in which men are constructed, both as untamable creatures
with their own agendas—leading to an extreme of several rapist
characters in the 1980s—to the domesticated man almost completely
under the power of his woman—often some of these very same rapist
characters “redeemed” in the 1990s. Williams concludes that soap men
change in the way they are depicted and focused on in soaps, since
females are generally supposed to be the primary characters, and that
following the ways in which men are represented throughout time on
soaps reflects changes in gender roles in society and contemporary
societal concerns related to gender.
Wittebols, James H. The Soap Opera Paradigm: Television Programming
and Corporate
Priorities. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
Wittebol’s work focuses not as much on soap opera but on extending the
study of soap opera as a metaphor for understanding various other
texts and the elements of soap opera present in these other genres.
In the second chapter of the book, Wittebols defines the history of
soaps and identifies the characteristics of the genre he feels
distinguish “soap opera”—seriality, real-time oorientation, seeming
intimacy/play orientation, story exposition, and particular themes and
conflicts that have become associated with the genre. However, his
understanding of soap operas as providing clear good guy and bad guy
characters is directly at odds with my viewing and understanding of
soaps, which I see as participating much more in moral relativism—
characters are “good” in some situations and “bad” in others while
hardly ever changing dramatically. Wittebols examines pro wrestling,
news, primetime shows, reality television, and sports in terms of soap
elements.