Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television

By Aspa Kotsopoulos

Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television, the first anthology dedicated to analyses of Canadian television content, is a collection of original, interdisciplinary articles, combining textual analysis and political economy of communications. It explores the television that has thrived in the Canadian regulatory and cultural context: namely, programs that straddle the border between reality and fiction or even blur it. The conceptual basis of this collection is the hybrid nature of television fare: the widely theorized notion that all mediations of reality involve fiction in the form of narrative or symbolic shaping. Each of the contributions here is a reminder, too, of the significant relationship of television to nation building in Canada-to the imaginative work involved in thinking through the relations that constitute nations, citizens, and communities. The collection focuses on English-language Canadian television because the imperatives guiding its texts are markedly different from those pertaining to their French-lanugage counterparts. The collection, therefore, develops a nuance of perspective on the cultural and political economic specificities that inform the imaginative work of television production for English Canada.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1554580102
• ISBN13: 9781554580101
• Release Date: August 2008
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Length: 354 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 8.9"