Correction to previous post.
It is of course Amanda Wrigley. Apologies.
Doctor Who’s 50th Anniversary as an Unfolding Media Event: Rethinking Narratives of Hype and Their Paratextual Arrays.
Matt Hills, Aberystwyth University
Transports of Imagination: BBC Radio, 1930s-50s.
Amanda Wrigley, Research Fellow, University of Westminster
List members may be interested in this free event taking place at the Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research at Birmingham City University.
Date: 04 March 2015
Time: 16-18.00pm
Venue: Room 441, Parkside Campus, Millennium Point, Birmingham, B4
This month we welcome Matt Hills, Aberystwyth University, and Amanda Wrigley, Research Fellow, University of Westminster
Matt will be presenting: Doctor Who’s 50th Anniversary as an Unfolding Media Event: Rethinking Narratives of Hype and Their Paratextual Arrays.
Influential work on media “paratexts” (Gray 2010) – bits of promotion, hype and publicity surrounding a media text – has led to a range of scholars being dubbed the “paratextual cohert” (Doherty 2014). Using Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary as a case study, I’m interested in rethinking and developing paratextual analysis.
Whilst a number of writers have challenged the paratext/text distinction (e.g. Gascoigne 2011: 25; Brereton 2012: 204), others have argued that paratexts should be considered in their own right rather than in relation to ‘anchoring’ texts and franchises (Gillan 2015; Grainge and Johnson 2015). Here, I will suggest that much leading paratextual analysis has been insufficiently
“phenomenological” (Gray 2010: 41; Gray and Lotz 2012: 134), tending to assume that paratexts have fixed meanings, or that they seek to frame textual interpretations. By contrast, and considering Doctor Who’s anniversary examples, I will suggest that paratexts often relate to, or co-ordinate, other paratexts, meaning that we might need a more significantly inter- or even meta-
paratextual stance (Bredehoft 2014: 143—144). Furthermore, arrays of paratexts can contribute to positioning, valorizing and narrating a “media event” (Dayan and Katz 1992:7; Gray 2013: 103) such as a TV anniversary, also implying that we need an event-oriented rather than a text-focused approach in order to theorise brand anniversaries and their (re)commodifications (Hills 2013). Paratextual fragments can be hermeneutically prefigured, configured and refigured – especially by completist fan audiences (Hills 2002; Ricoeur 1984, 1985, 1988) – as narrative events taking in production information and textual
history as well as industrial status/exceptionalism (contra Lash and Lury 2007: 31; see also Sandifer 2014: 271). Such narrative events unfold pre- and post-textually rather than within TV texts per se (Tulloch and Alvarado 1983).
Amanda will present: Transports of Imagination: BBC Radio, 1930s-50s.
This paper explores two interrelated aspects of radio broadcasting during the medium’s so-called golden age, from the 1930s when the BBC started systematically studying its audience to the 1950s when television overtook radio in popularity. First, it considers programme genres which used narrative and dramatic forms and techniques to realize ‘other worlds’ (both real and fictional) in the listener’s imagination. Drawing examples from literary programmes, the discussion will consider the BBC’s internal Listener Research Reports which, alongside letters from listeners, suggest the range of ways in which individuals
engaged with programmes -- or, we might say, how they felt they had been informed, educated and entertained (also, bored, frustrated and annoyed). The evidence vividly relates how listener engagement was neither predictable nor passive; rather, listeners brought their own understanding and experience of the world into creative dialogue with radio’s ‘other worlds’. This evidence therefore brings a rich, if complex, dimension into radio broadcasting history, one that -- alongside studies of creative, production and institutional contexts -- is vital for a full understanding of radio’s contribution to the public imagination in mid-20th- century Britain.
Full abstracts, details and free registration at Eventbrite:
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/040315-screen-cultures-tickets-15894179920
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