Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Introduction (To Emotional Expressionism), E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

The primary purpose of Emotional Expressionism: Television Serialization, The Melodramatic Mode, and Socioemotionality is to explore the forms, functions, and nuances of emotions in popular, mediated narratives. Clearly, emotions constitute a key means by which audiences experience and make sense of narrative media, in that mediated stories make compelling arguments or take up resonant positions through their emotional methods and meanings. The value of developing an emotional template for screen media lies in generating new analytical and interpretative approaches to narrative aesthetics, especially in terms of their pains and pleasures. As this study seeks to demonstrate, emotional analysis opens up …

Evaluating Universities Twitter Web Pages Responding To The Black Lives Matter Movement, Hind Albadi, Thomas Kenny

Faculty Publications: Communication

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in May 2020, many colleges and universities responded by making statements on their website and social media channels condemning racism. Higher education institutions began initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for faculty, staff, administrators, and students on campus. Three years later, this study investigates whether universities are still offering and promoting workshops, classes, events, and activities related to DEI to campus communities. To do so, the researchers conducted a content analysis on Twitter categorizing tweets over a one-month period, then they classified the Tweets using the top 10 colleges …

Victims, Heroes, And Villains: Imaginary Beings In Contemporary Television Serials, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

This chapter traces melodrama’s historical triumvirate of characters – victims, heroes, and villains – to examine how they are applied in contemporary television serial dramas. Looking in particular at the examples of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, the author argues that the characterological trio now often exists within singular protagonists who follow a narrative trajectory from victim through hero to arrive, ultimately, at villainy. Collapsing the characterological triad into single protagonists marks a late modern version of melodrama in which the possibilities for heroism are circumscribed, leaving characters able to opt only for victimization or villainy.

Ensemble Storytelling: Dramatic Television Seriality, The Melodramatic Mode, And Emotions, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

This chapter considers seriality in contemporary television dramas in light of arguments that most popular culture falls within melodrama as modality (to include legal shows, police and detective programs, westerns, and medical series), instead of narrow genres, such as soap operas. The recent success of fully serialized dramas is a noteworthy development, producing highly popular and highly regarded programming. The traditions of melodrama, including its deep commitment to the uses of emotionality, address story worlds and audiences in terms of social relations, in contrast to psychological realism’s more individualized and inward turning tendencies. “Ensemble Storytelling” explores three specific strategies available …

Strategic Pleasure: Gendered Anger As Collective Emotion In Wanted, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

Much current television analysis focuses on the impending demise of the medium,[1] in which audiences are conjectured to splinter into ever more fragmented, minute bundles of viewers, in the aftermath of a proliferating multi-channel environment and as we move further into the digital era with its ever-enhanced viewing options. However, one of the advantages of digitalisation, in the current environment that forces program providers to compete for proportionately harder-to-come-by content to offer consumers, is the increasing availability of international series. Audiences are no longer necessarily – albeit, in the US still dominantly – confined to national fare, but can seek …

Storied Feelings: Emotions, Culture, Media, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

Mass mediated emotional experiences are central to late modern subjectivity. Narrative storytelling creates public sites where audiences encounter and negotiate shared sociocultural circumstances rendered in aesthetic terms. Popular narratives move us by providing access, through felt recognition, to aspects of our emotional existence that would otherwise remain inexpressible. Using examples from film, this chapter explores how emotions as public events, constituted as part of collectively experienced social, cultural, and historical conditions, are enacted or realized through narrative media.

Melodrama And The Aesthetics Of Emotion, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

Melodrama has long been associated with emotion, frequently in a pejorative sense due to its apparent emotional excesses. Conversely, scholars have argued that the melodramatic mode expresses “forces, desires, fears which... operate in human life," for which we have “no other language” (Gledhill tool, 31,37). In this chapter I explore how emotionality serves melodrama as an alrernarive “language" precisely to express forces, desires, and fears that operate beyond cognitive or ideological explanation.

Van Gogh: Changing Perceptions Of Mental Illness And Art, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

This chapter explores interconnections among conceptualizations of mental illness, artistic genius, and emotional suffering. It does so through the extended example of Vincent Van Gogh from 1890, the year of his death, to the 1990s, a period of record-breaking sales of his work. My intention is to assess, first, how popular culture in contrast to modernist high art circles regard the place of emotionality in aesthetic activity. Second, I examine the role of emotions and emotional disorders in public perceptions of mental illness when applied to twentieth century art. Emotional disorders, as I use the term, encompass mood, anxiety, and …

How 9/11 Changed The Movies: The Tony Scott Barometer, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

In an essay written some years ago on the 1945 film, Mildred Pierce, Linda Williams raises the intriguing question, why does the narrative frequently allude to but refrains from ever specifically mentioning World War II (22)? Williams’ assessment is that certain films are capable of addressing the most significant political events of the era in ways they could not have had they chosen to use direct depictions (24). Released in October 1945, following the end of U.S. involvement in the war, Mildred Pierce coincided with a period of demobilization and the economic and social reintegration of the returning American, largely …

Circulating Emotion: Race, Gender, And Genre In Crash, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

Crash (Paul Haggis, 2005) follows a range of diverse but intersecting characters who, in their entirety, are meant to represent a social landscape: modern American urban existence. Through an ensemble cast and a multi-story structure, the film depicts a circuitous society in which one part affects other parts that, in turn, affect all parts.

The film is structured by means of three entangled, sometimes complementary, sometimes competing, cultural discourses. The first discourse is race. In a deeply troubling way, race is most overtly what the film is “about.” In the world of the film, virtually every character is at some …

Order And Disorder: Rational Acumen And Emotional Incompetence In The Television Detective Story, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

‘Order and Disorder’ examines the relationship between emotional disorders and the exquisite rationality of contemporary televisions detectives as portrayed in such series as Monk (USA), House (Fox), and Cracker (ITV). Television heroes who combine both emotionality and rationality would seem a more integrated form of human characterization. However, the permitted configuration of emotion and reason is highly constrained. Theirs is an ongoing struggle between thinking and feeling, in which rationality is their gift and emotionality, depicted as illness, is the constant curse that both threatens and enables their gift. These characters’ conflicts become a barometer for contemporary attitudes about emotional …

An Individual Of Feeling: Emotion, Gender, And Subjectivity In Historical Perspectives On Sensibility, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

This chapter explores the intricacies of analyzing emotions as historical and cultural phenomena. Focusing on gendered assumptions that conflate emotions with women and the private, the chapter examines the contradictions between scholarly views of a wide-spread, public sensibility movement (in politics, economics, philosophy, aesthetics) and a more specific cult of sensibility associated with novels, a female readership and a separate domestic sphere. It argues that sensibility was pivotal to the development of Enlightenment emotional as well as rational subjectivity. Approaching emotions as complex cultural and historical formations clarifies how an individual of feeling was central to the emergence of the …

Mr. Monk And The Emotion-Reason Dilemma, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub) belongs to a tradition of brilliant but personally flawed detectives. Like others in this tradition, including his television colleague, Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), Monk’s genius resides in his exceptional, even excessive, rationality. Both Monk and House embody near-perfect detection or diagnostic skills. And, in both cases, the cause of their damaged personalities is excessive emotionality, represented by their respective emotional disorders. In their internal dynamics, emotion is almost always the ‘problem,’ and both shows suggest that troubled emotionality is the price Monk and House must pay for their intense brilliance.

Female Spectators (14.1), E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

This introduction to Female Spectators gives a concise account of the major feminist debates in film studies and argues for more work to be done in incorporating filmmaking practice, spectatorship and textual analysis. All the contributors to this book share a concern to emphasis women’s presence in, rather than absence from, the “cinematic experience”

Seduction, Control, & The Search For Authenticity: Madonna's Truth Or Dare, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

Maddonnas' 1991 film Truth or Dare, based on her 1990 “Blond Ambition” tour—itself a combination of pop music and performance art— defies easy categorization. It is a “docudrama” of sorts: part documentary, part concert film, part dramatic enactment. By combining various filmic styles and traditions. Truth or Dare recreates certain long-standing cultural dichotomies between, for instance, onstage and offstage, public and private, reality and appearance, or truth and artifice. The film replicates such oppositions only to then question their continuing validity. Binary distinctions in Truth or Dare prove more apparent than real, more fleeting than differentiating. Ultimately, I believe, …