Description
This is the first anthology that examines the TV sitcom in terms of its treatment of gender, family, class, race, and ethnic issues. The selections range from early shows such as I Remember Mama (George Lipsitz’s “Why Remember Mama? The Changing Face of a Woman’s Narrative”) to the more recent Roseanne (Kathleen Rowe Karlyn’s “Roseanne: Unruly Woman as a Domestic Goddess”). The volume also looks unflinchingly at major controversies; for example, the NAACP boycott of the stereotypical yet wildly popular Amos ‘n’ Andy and the queer reading of Laverne and Shirley.
These diverse essays constitute a veritable history of postwar American mores. Some are classic, some forgotten, but all indicate the importance of considering text and subtext (social, historic, industrial) in the critical study of television. A final chapter by Joanne Morreale bids sitcoms adieu with the “cultural spectacle of Seinfeld’s last episode.”
Table of Contents
Contributors
Introduction: On the Sitcom
Part One: Television in the 1940s and 1950s
I. Why Remember Mama? The Changing Face of a Woman's Narrative
2. Amos 'n' Andy and the Debate over American Racial Integration
3. Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy
4. Returning from the Moon: Jackie Gleason and the Carnivalesque
5. Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker
Part Two: Television in the 1960s
6. The Unworthy Discourse: Situation Comedy in Television
7. From Gauguin to Gilligan's Island
8. "Is This What You Mean by Color TV?" Race, Gender, and Contested Meanings in Julia
Part Three: Television in the 1970s
9. The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Women at Home and at Work
10. I Love Laverne and Shirley: Lesbian Narratives, Queer Pleasures, and Television Sitcoms
Part Four: Television in the 1980s
11. Where Everybody Knows Your Name: Cheers and the Mediation of Cultures
12. Structuralist Analysis 1: Bill Cosby and Recoding Ethnicity
Part Five: Television in the 1990s and Beyond
13. Roseanne: Unruly Woman as Domestic Goddess
14. The Triumph of Popular Culture: Situation Comedy, Postmodernism, and The Simpsons
15. Sitcoms Say Good-bye: The Cultural Spectacle of Seinfeld's Last Episode
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Joanne Morreale is associate professor in the Communications Studies Department at Northeastern University. She is the author of The Presidential Campaign Film: A Critical History and A New Beginning: A Textual Frame Analysis of the Political Campaign Film.
December 2002