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Soap Opera Studies

It is my aim here to comment on the main aspects taken into account by

some prominent works on what is perhaps the most popular form of

fictional consumption in the contemporary world (Gledhill, 1997: 340).

The actual phrase soap opera is the starting point for this review, for all

the meanings the term has acquired since it was coined in the United

States back in the late 1930s. According to Robert Allen,

The soap in soap opera derives from the sponsorship of daytime

serials by manufacturers of household cleaning products []. Opera

acquires meaning only through its ironic, double inappropriateness. Linkedwith the adjective soap, opera, the most elite of all narrative art forms,

becomes a vehicle for selling the most humble of commodities.

(Allen, 1985:8)

Most people in contact with the medium of television will say that they

know what a soap opera is. However, when it comes to giving a clear

definition, the picture is not so clear. In fact, discussion about this

narrative genre takes place directly or indirectly amongst a wide range of

different groups with different interests at heart: producers and

broadcasters, advertisers, viewers, critics, and of course, academics. How

can it be so difficult to agree upon a definition of something most people

believe to be able to define? Different points of view would be the obvious

answer. Certain texts which seem to be different from each other for

some, whether in terms of their content or in terms of their form, are all

considered to be soap operas by others, and vice-versa. This becomes

considerably complex when one realises that the question of soap opera

as a genre is in fact a socio-semiotic/linguistic-pragmatic issue. In Social

Semiotics, Hodge and Kress define genres of texts as typical forms of

texts which link kinds of producer, consumer, topic, medium, manner and

occasion (1988: 7) and point out that genres of text control the

behaviour of producers of such texts, and the expectations of potential

consumers (1988: 7). Altman, emphasising the dynamicity of such

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process, adds that each genre is simultaneously defined by multiple

codes, corresponding to the multiple groups who, by helping to define the

genre, may be said to speak the genre (1999: 208). Altman does not

mention Hodge and Kress and appears to be more concerned withdemonstrating the shortcomings of the view of genre from the perspective

of reception studies such as Hall (1980) and De Certeau (1984) due to the

fact that they do not address the broader problems covered by

pragmatic analysis (1999: 211). Nevertheless, it seems to me that both

Altman (1999) and Hodge and Kress (1988) share similar views when

Altman indirectly acknowledges the necessary, and in fact pragmatic,

control that Hodge and Kress refer to above:

If every meaning depends on an indeterminate number of conflicting

users, then no stable communication can take place; so society artificially

restricts the range of acceptable uses, thus controlling the potential

dispersion and infinite regression of the meaning-making series. If every

meaning had to be deferred, then communication would literally be

impossible; society far prefers to restrict communication (which is thus

always slight miscommunication) rather than risk full freedom, which

might destroy communication altogether.

(Altman, 1999: 210)

Genre, as Allen asserts describes not so much a group of texts or textual

features as it does a dynamic relationship between texts and

interpretative communities (1989: 45). On this basis, he suggests that

soap opera as a text is appropriated within several discursive systems

and that these will also vary from one culture to another and,furthermore, the term soap opera, or its translation is also applied to

distinct ranges of texts across different countries/cultures. In order to

elucidate this idea he metaphorises:

It is a bit like ornithologists, taxidermists, and bird watchers from a dozen

different countries all talking about birds, but in one country there are only

eagles; in another pigeons and chickens, but no eagles; in another

macaws and pigeons, but no eagles or chickens; and so on.

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(Allen, 1989: 45)

In the light of what Allen terms contemporary criticism, that is, a family

of critical approaches growing out of, being strongly influenced by, or

developed in reaction to the insights into language and culture providedby structuralist linguistics and semiotics (1992:5), the following

commentators not only have defined, discussed and analysed soap operas

in their own particular ways, but have also unintentionally demonstrated

that it is within this pragmatic gap of indeterminacy that lies the

disagreement upon the definitions of soap opera.

A US perspective with a theoretical and methodological lens

Robert Allen has published work of his own and others on soap operas

from all continents (1985, 1992, 1995, 2004). As Hobson puts it, his work

has traced the global nature of the genre and discussed its importance in

many academic disciplines (). He has studied the form and traced it as a

genre through its narrative development and relationship with audiences

(2003: 24). For Allen, what makes a soap opera a soap opera is its

distinctive narrational structure: its segmentation interrupts the readingprocess (1995: 1), that is, the narrative is segmented into various

episodes sequentially broadcast a number of times per week for a certain

period of time, which depending on the case lasts from months to years or

even decades, while its story goes on. It could be said that, for Allen,

what defines the genre is its syntax and not its semantics, for the latter

varies considerably more than the former from one culture to another. In

Speaking of Soap Operas (1985), Allen discusses US daytime radio and TVsoaps, mainly criticising the way they have been studied, arguing that the

meaning of soap opera across discourses, and within academic discourse

particularly, have been conditioned by the supervisory discourses of

criticism (aesthetic discourse) and sociological research. By examining

historically the manner by which the US daytime soap opera was taken up

by these discourses, without forgetting to acknowledge the importance of

the discourse of commercial broadcasting, he successfully exposes someof the layers of encrusted meaning that we confront today whenever we

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approach the soap opera as an object of inquiry (1985: 10). Although

Allen acknowledges the body of research generated by empiricist mass

communication researchers and the importance of the issues addressed,

he points out that it would be shortsighted, however, to acceptunquestioningly the results of these studies as knowledge of the

phenomena they claim to explain (1985: 43). Thus he calls for a

reconceptualisation of soap opera as an object of study which accepts

rather than combats its complexity and which acknowledges the

limitations in grasping such complexity (1985: 44). In other words, what

Allen is trying to say is that there is a lot more to be taken into account if

one wants to thoroughly investigate soaps. To begin with, he states:

If the elaboration of the soap opera as textual system is to be more than a

mere formalist exercise or rhetorical counter to the antitextualism of

empiricism, however, it must be tempered by a concern for both the

functions the soap opera is designed to serve by the institution that

produces it and the manner by which it is engaged by its readers.

(Allen, 1985:62)

Attempting to achieve such balance, Allen provides the reader with a rich

account of the institutional history of soap operas in the United States,

demonstrating that the primary generative mechanisms responsible for

the soap opera form () can be located in the institutional requirements

of American commercial broadcasting (1985: 128), and that indeed the

idea of presenting continuing stories focusing upon domestic concerns on

daytime radio was the result of the conjunction of corporate desire to

reach a particular audience () and broadcasters need to fill daytime

hours with revenue generating programming (1985: 129), and concluding

that

The adversarial relationship we traditionally assume to exist between

artistic and economic interests under capitalism simply does not obtain in

the case of soap operas (nor, I would venture, in many other cases of

contemporary cultural production).

(Allen, 1985: 129)

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As for the manner by which a soap opera is engaged by its readers, it

could be said that Allen is one of the first names in the United States to

foreground the active role of the viewer in making meanings. What Allen

proposes in Speaking of Soap Operas is, above all, an understanding ofthe history of soap opera reception which would entail

1. grounding of the overall inquiry in the functions served by soap

operas within the institutions that have produced them;

2. consideration of the strategies employed within the textual system

of the soap opera that mark out a position for the reader and of

changes in the strategies over time;

3. analysis of the social positions of soap opera audiences () and

changes in them over time;

4. () a reconstruction of the interpretative horizons against which

soap operas have been read; and

5. examination of the articulated responses to soap operas,

particularly within supervisory discourses that have conditioned the

terms by which readers are likely to have engaged them.

(Allen, 1985: 133)

He admits, however, the enormous proportions of such undertaking, as

well as its theoretical and logistical difficulties (1985: 133). In order to

illustrate the complexity of this task he briefly discusses some

shortcomings he sees in a couple of major empirical reception studies,

namely Morley (1980), and Radway (1984), nevertheless acknowledgingtheir importance. It is interesting to note, however, that in Speaking of

Soap Operas Allen appears to be completely unaware of Dorothy Hobsons

study of British the soap opera Crosswords. As a matter of fact, Allen

attempts to justify that in the introduction of his anthology To be

continued Soap Operas Around the World, acknowledging the

importance of Hobsons work and arguing that because the soap opera

was not shown in the United States her book was not widely distributed

(Allen, 1995: 9).

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A British perspective with an ethnographic lens

Dorothy Hobsons Crossroads, the drama of a soap opera (1982), together

with the BFI monograph on Coronation Street(1981) mark the inclusion of

soap operas as an object of study in the field of cultural studies (Allen,

1995: 8). Even though Hobsons book carries the name of the soap opera,

it is in fact a book about issues concerning the production, broadcast and

viewing of such television text, as its subtitle hints. Moreover, as Hobson

herself puts it, it is as much about the television audience as it is about

the programme makers and it reveals the important contribution which

the viewers make to any television programme which they watch (1982:

12). Hobson organises her account around the announcement that one ofthe main characters of the programme is to be dispensed. Due to the

characters popularity, the decision becomes a controversial issue in the

popular press prompting a big public reaction in the form of thousands of

disapproving letters.

Because Hobson was one of the first academics in Britain who were

seriously considering the form of soap opera as a legitimate subject of

academic study, her book was greeted with surprise and great interest by

the media, as she recounts in Soap Opera: The genre had been largely

overlooked as though it was not worthy of the effort of academic

analysis (Hobson, 2003: 23). More important than pioneering the field of

soap opera academic writing, however, was Hobsons approach, not just

discussing the actual text, but mainly dissecting its several layers from

both the viewpoint of people involved in its design, production and

distribution, as well as people who watched it and had their own particular

views on the programme, which often differed from the expectations of

the former. Hobson (1982) is, to some extent, precisely what Allen (1985)

was calling for. As he later puts it:

Methodologically, what distinguishes Hobsons study is what might be

called its ethnographic orientation. Hobson is not concerned with

Crossroads as a text but how as a production challenge, enacted script,

subject of public discourse, or viewing experience it takes on meaning

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for the various groups that encounter it in any of its varied manifestations.

Her role, then, is not so much critic as observer and commentator on the

observations of those whom she interviews about Crossroads. Hobsons

account of the audience for Crossroads replaces the American

functionalist model of viewer/text interaction with one that foregrounds

the production of meanings and pleasures. Furthermore, she argues that

those meanings and pleasures cannot be read off the text in isolation but

rather are deeply embedded in the social contexts of its viewing. Thus,

they vary from viewer to viewer: Crossroads is a different experience for

the young mother who feeds her child while she watches than for the

widowed grandmother who views alone. Hobsons finding of the diversity

of meanings and pleasures connected with watching Crossroads also

suggests that they may be quite different than those assumed by its

producers, writers, actors, or sponsors.

(Allen, 1995: 9)

In terms of defining the genre, it is worth pointing out that whilst Allen

favours a syntactic generic definition, Hobson, on the other hand, gives

much more importance to the semantic features of the genre. This is

probably due to the fact that Hobson is specifically dealing with British

soaps. In fact, what Hobson (1982) terms as her definition of soap opera,

besides rather lengthy, appears to be a semantic description of the genre

instead:

Soap opera has a specific location and a core set of characters around

whose lives the main stories are woven. There are additional characters

who may come and go and whose lives in some way touch those of the

main characters. Each episode has a number of themes or stories running

through it and there is a cliff-hanger at the end of the episode to hold the

audience in suspense until the next episode, and to encourage them to

watch again.

These serials have traditionally offered a range of strong female

characters and this has proved a popular feature of the genre for its

audience. They show women of different ages, class and personality types,

and offer characters with whom many members of their female audience

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can empathise. They also include male characters often for romantic

interest, sometimes as comic characters or bad characters, but in the

main the men do not have the leading roles within the serials. There are

few children in soap operas, which does tend to detract from their

representation of real life, but this is caused by the difficulties in

sustaining babies and children in a long-running serial.

(Hobson, 1982: 33)

In her latest book Soap Opera (2003), Hobson, nevertheless,

acknowledges what is perhaps the main syntactic feature (at least in the

cases of the US and British varieties of) soaps, that is, their endless

closure procrastination:

The main differences which determine whether drama series are soap

operas are connected with the number of episodes and, thus, the

production process and the regularity of transmission.

(Hobson, 2003: 32)

Soap Opera is a more comprehensive book than Crossroads in the sense

that it takes into account not only the numerous aspects comprising themultifaceted chain within which a soap opera as a text is located in the

British context, but also a great deal of internal aspects of such texts

regarding both their semantic, as well as syntactic features.

Hobson starts by providing the reader with a brief historical account of the

growth of television studies as an academic discipline, summarising the

main ideas of her own works (1982, 1989) and commenting on the major

reader-oriented studies of soap operas, such as Ang (1985), Allen (1985,

1992, 1995), Seiter et al. (1989), Buckingham (1987), Liebes and Katz

(1989), Livingstone (1990), Geraghty (1991), and Gillespie (1995), to

make the point that while soap opera is studied in relation to television

theory and theories of audience, it is, in fact, to literature and literary

theory that she wants to look for the closest relationships. She points out

that when the nineteenth-century realists wrote about their own works,

they could be writing in defence of the soap opera (2003: 28), arguing

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that while it is not seen as a pure literary form, soap opera can be seen

as developing directly from the novel (2003: 29). Even though the book

spends a great deal of its initial pages on The Soap Business (which

could perhaps be described as a more up to date, less theoretical andarguably anecdotal British version of the third chapter of Allen (1985)

Soap Opera as a Commodity), and a great deal of its final pages on The

Soap Opera and its Audiences (a summary of her previous studies with

added comments based on her experiences as an independent media

consultant), the actual core of Hobsons Soap Opera, The Content of

Soap Operas, consists of a comprehensive discussion of British soap

operas as texts in the Barthian sense of the word, as opposed to work.

Attempting to draw comparisons between soaps and novels, she performs

the work of a thorough reader scrutinising the role of the actors and

actresses as characters, stars and icons, the thematic of domestic drama,

and the so called big issues, inferring and discussing numerous potential

meanings in this continuous and much more dynamic process (than in the

case of a novel) of viewers reading producers and producers reading

viewers, so to speak.

As for defining the genre, her attempt to update her 1982 definition of

soap opera in order to provide the reader with a definition of soap opera

in its purest sense (Hobson, 2003: 35) is, as a matter of fact, an updated

overall description of specific syntactic aspects of the current British

soaps, combined with some of their semantic features:

Soap opera is a radio or television drama in series form, which has a core

set of characters and locations. It is transmitted at least three times a

week, for fifty-two weeks a year. The drama creates the illusion that life

continues in the fictional world even when viewers are not watching. The

narrative progresses in a linear form through peaks and troughs of action

and emotions. It is a continuous form with recurring catastasis as its

dominant narrative structure. It is based on fictional realism and explores

and celebrates the domestic, personal and everyday in all its guises. It

works because the audience has intimate familiarity with the characters

and their lives. Through its characters the soap opera must connect with

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the experience of its audience, and its content must be stories of the

ordinary.

(Hobson, 2003: 35)

Feminist soap studies

Because soap operas were initially produced to cater for female

audiences, there are quite a few soap opera studies, whose primordial

intentions are to discuss gender, that is, the ways which men are

represented in a society as opposed to women, the notions of masculinity

and femininity and so forth.

Charlotte Brunsdon has looked at soap operas, as well as other television

series and films, from a metafeminist perspective so to speak. By

foregrounding the ambivalent relation between feminism and femininity,

not only has she challenged the traditional, masculinist constructions of

meanings, but also questioned and criticised nave aspects of early

feminist studies such as the repudiation of the conventional

accoutrements of femininity (Brunsdon, 1997: 4).

Screen Tastes (1997) is a compilation of essays on the critical studies she

developed in the two previous decades, chronologically organised and

historically contextualised. Four of the essays in this collection deal with

soap operas as their object of study and are therefore worth commenting:

Brunsdon (1981, 1984, 1987 and 1995). The first of these essays

discusses the issue of the gendering of the spectator, both textually and

contextually. By looking at syntactic and semantic aspects of Crossroads,

Brunsdon argues that

Just as a Goddard film requires the possession of certain forms of cultural

capital on the part of its audience to make sense an extra-textual

familiarity with certain artistic, linguistic, political and cinematic discourses

so too does Crossroads and soap opera.

(Brunsdon, 1997: 17)

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She divides such competences into three categories, namely generic

knowledge, serial-specific knowledge and cultural knowledge, and argues

that in Crossroads a feminine viewer is implied, and moreover, a feminine

viewer competent within the ideological and moral frameworks, the rules,of romance, marriage and family life to make sense of it (1997: 18). She

does not, however, make any comments in the sense that such contextual

knowledge may vary considerably depending on important variables such

as the ones Hobson (1982) takes into account.

Brunsdon (1984) looks at British soaps in general as works, in the Barthian

sense of the word, that is, as an object of consumption, particularly to the

viewers. Differently from Allen (1985) or Hobson (2003) who look at soapsas commodities in the sense that broadcasters buy them from producers,

or sell timeslots to advertisers, Brunson pays particular attention to the

commodities generated and consumed outside the world of soap operas:

Newspaper articles, novels, souvenir programmes, TV Times promotions,

even cookery books, function to support the simultaneous co-existence of

them and us. It is possible to wear the same clothes, use the same dcor,

follow the same recipes and even pore over the same holiday snaps as the

people in the Street, the Close and the Motel.

(Brunson, 1997: 19)

By exploring the relation between the fictional world of the stories and the

real world of the viewers, she attempts to demonstrate the verisimilitude

of British realist soap operas as a combination of realist conventions which

make the characters problems recognisable, with cultural, generic andspecific knowledge of the viewers. Such knowledge is indeed acquired by

the practice of watching soaps, and reinforced by the consumption of all

sorts of products directly or indirectly related to the programmes.

Brunsdon (1987) is a short metafeminist essay touching upon the issues

of plausibility of realism and relativity of the concept of reality. She argues

that

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Soaps are dependent on already existing discourses in the papers, on

the news, about laws and order, about young people to represent the

real world to us. But the representations they produce also contribute to

our understanding of what that world is.

(Brunson, 1997: 27)

Thus, for Brunsdon

Feminists are quarrelling not just with soap opera, but fundamentally, with

the Real World there represented. Arguing for more realistic images is

always an argument for the representation of your version of reality.

Realistic to a feminist will often seem propagandistic and thin to a

political opponent.

(Brunson, 1997: 28)

The role of soap opera in the development of feminist television

criticism was first published in Allens anthology (1995). As its title

suggests, here Brunsdon explores the reasons why feminist critics have

been so interested in soap opera. She does that by providing a historical

account of when, from where and how feminist studies came about, andcomes up with four reasons: (1) Because soap opera is a womans

genre, for women have been targeted by makers of soap opera, for

women have been investigated as the viewers of soap opera, and for the

genre is widely and popularly believed to be feminine, despite stubborn

evidence that it is not only women who watch (1997: 38). (2) Because

the personal is political, that is, while traditional leftist critique of the

media was drawn to the reporting of the public world, for instance, toindustrial disputes, to the interactions of state and broadcasting

institutions, to international patterns of ownership and control, emerging

feminist scholarship had quite another focus. The theoretical impulse of

feminism pushed scholars not to the exceptional but to the everyday

(1997: 39). (3) Because soap opera has a metaphoric meaning, in the

sense that there are at least four different types of programmes which are

referred to as soap operas: South American telenovelas, US daytimeserials, British social realist serials and US prime-time shows. The

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metaphoric meaning, for Brunsdon, would be the idea of the feminine as

contemptible, as banal, as beneath serious critical attention. As she puts

it:

Thus the unity of these different programmes the reason why, in acertain sense, it was correct to call them all soap in a particular

period lies in their shared place at the bottom of the aesthetic

hierarchy.

(Brunson, 1997: 40)

(4) Because they shouldnt be: feminist ambivalence, that is, the

aforementioned relation between feminism and femininity: while early

feminists would repudiate the genre, all other women non-feminists

watched and enjoyed soaps, which would offer a political rationale for an

engagement with the genre. For many feminists, she argues,

Writing about soap opera, comparable genres and media such as romance

fiction and womens magazines entailed an investigation of femininities

from which they felt, or were made to feel, a very contradictory distance.

(Brunson 1997: 40)

In other words, Brunsdon is simultaneously acknowledging the importance

of soap operas for feminists to engage with debating crucial matters of

representation whilst she claims that the current status of soaps as major

objects of investigation in the field of media studies is due to the

pioneering interest of feminist scholars:

On the one hand, there is a perceived incompatibility between feminismand soap opera, but, on the other, it is arguably feminist interest that has

transformed soap opera into a very fashionable field for academic inquiry.

(Brunsdon, 1997: 30)

Geraghtys Women and Soap Opera obviously deals with the role of

women, more specifically in prime time soap operas, and the pleasures

and values which are offered to them as the implied audience for these

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programmes (1991: 6). She is also interested in looking at the way in

which prime time soaps have stretched the boundaries of the genre, by

introducing stories which are different from the traditional soap format

(1991: 6). The remarkable thing of Geraghtys study is the way she looksat the role of women in soap operas by examining the programmes

narrative organisation and aesthetic characteristics, acknowledging the

dynamicity of the practice of defining genres, taking into account

textual, as well as audience perspectives. That is to say, she is not only

concerned with gender representations just in semantic terms, as it is

generally done (cf. Hobson 1982, 2003; Brunsdon 1997), but also in

syntactic terms. Geraghtys point of departure is a brief syntactic

discussion in terms of how time and space are represented in soap

operas, as opposed to serials and series. She claims that there is a

pattern, despite differences in the degree to which such variables are

represented, and moreover, that it is not necessary for each soap to

display to the same degree all the characteristics which they share

(1991: 12). A semantic generic discussion is then provided with the

intention to demonstrate that just as the syntactic generic aspects, the

semantic ones also serve simultaneously to engage and distance the soap

audience, working to draw the viewer into the programme and to permit

her to stand back and comment on the effects. Geraghtys argument is

that

Soaps are not dominated by one aesthetic tradition but offer a range of

experiences based on the different and sometimes competing values of

light entertainment, melodrama and realism.

(Geraghty, 1991: 25)

By problematising each of these aesthetic traditions and subsequently

their interplay, she attempts to demonstrate the importance of analysing

this shifting in order to understand particular aspects of the aesthetic

experience of watching soaps. According to her,

Acting in soaps is required to register in three different ways which arealmost inevitably at odds with each other.

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(Geraghty, 1991: 36)

As she attempts to exemplify her suggestion, however, she

unintentionally demonstrates the opposite. Geraghty fails to identify the

three aspects in one single subgenre of soap as she proposes, thuscontradicting her argument despite her initial disclaimer that such

elements occur to varying degrees. The discussion is nevertheless

relevant for the purposes of clearly outlining different aesthetic aspects

which can be found in different types of soaps.

Attempting to study both US and British prime time soaps together is

undoubtedly a rather difficult undertaking, for despite several similarities,

particularly in syntactic terms, when it comes to the semantics of these

subgenres, they appear to be very different from each other, even though

perhaps not so much in terms of the ways which women are generally

represented, which is in fact the main concern ofWomen and Soap Opera.

A European overview with a comparative lens

In 1999, Hugh ODonnell published Good Times, Bad Times: soap operas

and society in Western Europe. As he puts it, his neo-Gramscian approach

treats the soaps he investigates not merely as texts in themselves, but

rather, as sites of a complex ongoing process of negotiation between

producers and consumers, itself taking place within a much larger

framework (1999: 10). Indeed, he does take into account numerous

important aspects of such process when outlining the comprehensiveanalytical model he proposes to follow as he discusses the soaps

produced and broadcast in each of the chosen countries (Belgium,

Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway,

Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom). As he further details

each of the elements comprising his framework, however, it becomes

clear that most of them will in fact not be receiving as much attention as

they should, for reasons of time or space. As a matter of fact, it issomewhat frustrating to learn that ODonnell overtly chooses not to

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discuss the viewers perspective, not only for a question of logistics and

feasibility, but also because he believes that the current methodologies

for this are rather problematic, for the outcomes of interviews, focus

groups, discussion groups and the like are themselves texts, and ananalytical model of some considerable complexity is required to establish

exactly what range of meanings might reasonably be extracted from

them (ODonnell, 1999: 25).

Even though ODonnell acknowledges the importance of reception

studies such as Morley (1980) and Fiske (1987), he justifies his opting not

to develop work in the same fashion due to the fact that they appear to

pay little attention to the production side of the equation (ODonnell,1999: 25). From my own perspective, Morley (1980) and Fiske (1987) do

pay little attention to the design, production and distribution of television

texts. ODonnell, however, ends up doing the same thing in the sense that

he also underrates one of the sides of the equation in his analyses. His

argument is that it makes more sense to simply attempt to derive the

model reader from the text itself, for it is both feasible and more fruitful

since if the real readers do not coincide closely enough with the modelreader in sufficient numbers, the serial will either fail () or it will attempt

to alter its model reader in order to achieve a greater degree of fit with

the actual ones (1999: 26). If that is the case, then it would have made

more sense, to attempt to derive the implied reader directly from the

other side of the equation, namely the producers, as Hobson does to

some extent, particularly when the case in point is an open text which is

constructed according to a wide range of variables on both sides of theequation. Nevertheless, it is no wonder that so much had to be left out,

for writing about almost every single domestic soap broadcast in the

1990s in twelve different countries is a rather ambitious undertaking.

Allen (1995), for instance, is a collaboration of twenty-two specialists from

twenty-two particular contexts. All in all, Good Times, Bad Times is an

informative collection of well fundamented textual analyses offering

interesting views on some sociolinguistic, pragmatic and cultural aspectsof these contexts.

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A European Perspective with a theoretical and methodological

lens

Jostein Gripsruds The Dynasty Years: Hollywood Television and CriticalMedia Studies (1995) investigates a specific prime time American soapopera, namely Dynasty, and its reception in Norway.

(Gripsrud appears to have the most balanced perspective of all for the

simple fact that he. when discussing the text he chooses to focus on

Dynasty.)

His approach is informed by

There is a text, obviously. Centrality. Textual analysis WITH reception and

contextual and production AND etc!

One cannot move through a text to reach its foundational codes and

processes without reading it and thus implicitly performing some kind of

interpretation p15.

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P18/19(quote) importante: receita!!! Anlise de imprensa, editora

globo, marketing of the serial (IMPORTANT OBS SUA p20!!!

P22 seeks to integrate empirical analysis of public debate and printed

media coverage!!! Bela ideia a ser seguida simples e facil de

implementar

P48/49 P/ Formulao de perguntas para PRODUTORES!

P51 MODELO!!!]

P104 Contatinhos

(UN)REALISTIC p116 Globo website, a favorita, 25/08/08 Florase veste de enfermeira e mata Maira- Drama, som,

impresses, etc, e na mesma pgina Juliana Paes diz adeus a

Mara a gente sempre sente quando deixa um bom trabalho

(porcentagem mnima de leitores do site, porm na tv, a

dinmica complementada do mesmo modo com

programassobre os programas da Globo e seu elenco, e.g

Fausto, Video Show...

SOBRE SUPORTE ATRAVS DE MDIAS diretamente ouindiretamente controladas por produtores (pg 142/143): Muitoembora no Brasa haja nao s analfabetismo, como tb falta dinheiro p/ acompra de revistas, jornais, etc, e o uso da internet... Ver quem, onde,quando e QUANTO utiliza esses ditos TEXTOS SECUNDRIOSSSS......nEstruturacao de vinhetas narradas pela pr opria grobo e a VOZ donarrador de miliano..... (p144). Se bem que na GROBO os esteretipos sao

REDUNDANTES, repetidos, reinforcados a cada novela...(Schroeder 1988:53) Quoted in (GRIPSRUD 1995:151) continuousjigsaw puzzle, weekly reconstruction of confidence, comptetence, etc... olance de tentar adivinhar oq vai acontecer assistindo junto p e tal... =AGOSTIM, antecipacao e memria (em Narrative). Tcnicas narrativas,audiencias sempre melhor informadas doq os presonagens...

EMOTIONAL REALISM (Ang 1985: 41-7)...

MAIS, MUITO MAIS sobre a PESQUISA em si: 154!!!!! Mto interessante,

entrevistas sobre outros assuntos e a novela inseridadespercebidamente........ Tipo falar da vida e atividades do tempo

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ocioso ate chegar na tv e oq e como e qdo e aonde e pq, etc e finalmentediscutir um pouco da novela contextualizada no cotidiano da pessoa...hm...

P166 EXREMELY IMPORTANT REMARK: THE USE OF THE TERM

VERBAL ADOPTED FROM TODOROV, PERHAPS PROBLEMATIC...QUE TAL AESTHETIC? NO? Semiotic?

LTIMA PGINA DO GRIPSRUD EM CANETA MARKER: METHODS OFSURVEYING!

*** Thought: On the transcripts: The author shares these feelings, theauthor is a viewer, grew up in such a reality, is just an expert in the fieldtherefore aware of all that.

The other thing is the fact that style of Globo being much more didaticthat, say, the BBC for instance, even though they bear a lot in common inthe sens that they unite a whole country with their programming, theirnarratives, dramas, newstories, etc.

P177 Genre & repetition

P179 Genre, recognition vs inovation + quotable assertions!

OBSSS: Notes on music: It has been suggested and in fact there is awhole field of studies from neurosciences to... emotion, etc... + semioticthrough social practices + sensations...... calming... irritating... commonknowledge or instinct..? E.g. The Cognitive Neuroscience of music - byIsabelle Peretz (Editor), Robert J. Zatorre (Editor)

182 Limiting Polissemia

183 THE QUESTION

186 MUSIC + VIDEO + VERBAL, levels of importance of meaning,emohasis, contradiction, multimodality!!!!

Examples of the role of music for your paper: Straight Storyexperience with audience ok, it is cinema, audiovisual workingtogehter, melodrama in Brazil and others (Mexico etc) examples,examples, examples, subtitles, etc...), Blackadder final...

189: Example ofvisual description

194: Analisar aberturas tb! (visuals, meanings, signs, language...)

195,196,197>>> on musical theory, major, minor etc...! (moree.g.: Hitchcocks rope initial scene...)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/279-8984541-6756856?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Isabelle%20Peretzhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/279-8984541-6756856?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Robert%20J.%20Zatorrehttp://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/279-8984541-6756856?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Isabelle%20Peretzhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/279-8984541-6756856?_encoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Robert%20J.%20Zatorre

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2

Obs.: Using Prime Time Telenovela in Brazil to Promote Multimodal

Literacy at school and teacher training level.: bringing whats outside theclassroom into the classroom..?

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