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. Linked with 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

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 with demonstrating 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.

(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 provided by 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 reading process (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 TV soaps, 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 some of the layers of encrusted meaning that we confront today whenever we

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 accept unquestioningly 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)

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 of the 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 acknowledging their 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).

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 of the 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

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

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 the multifaceted 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

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 and arguably 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

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)

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 soaps as 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 and specific 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

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, and comes 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, to industrial 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 daytime serials, British social realist serials and US prime-time shows. The

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 a certain 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 feminism and 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

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 looks at 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 are almost inevitably at odds with each other.

(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, thus contradicting 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 of Women 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 comprehensive analytical 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 is somewhat frustrating to learn that ODonnell overtly chooses not to

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 an analytical 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 model reader 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 the equation. 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 aspects of these contexts.

A European Perspective with a theoretical and methodological lens Jostein Gripsruds The Dynasty Years: Hollywood Television and Critical Media Studies (1995) investigates a specific prime time American soap opera, 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.

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 Flora se veste de enfermeira e mata MairaDrama, 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 ou indiretamente controladas por produtores (pg 142/143): Muito embora no Brasa haja nao s analfabetismo, como tb falta dinheiro p/ a compra 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 do narrador 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) continuous jigsaw puzzle, weekly reconstruction of confidence, comptetence, etc... o lance 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 inserida despercebidamente........ Tipo falar da vida e atividades do tempo

ocioso ate chegar na tv e oq e como e qdo e aonde e pq, etc e finalmente discutir 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 OF SURVEYING! *** Thought: On the transcripts: The author shares these feelings, the author is a viewer, grew up in such a reality, is just an expert in the field therefore aware of all that. The other thing is the fact that style of Globo being much more didatic that, say, the BBC for instance, even though they bear a lot in common in the sens that they unite a whole country with their programming, their narratives, 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 a whole field of studies from neurosciences to... emotion, etc... + semiotic through social practices + sensations...... calming... irritating... common knowledge or instinct..? E.g. The Cognitive Neuroscience of music - by Isabelle 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 Story experience with audience ok, it is cinema, audiovisual working togehter, melodrama in Brazil and others (Mexico etc) examples, examples, examples, subtitles, etc...), Blackadder final... 189: Example of visual description 194: Analisar aberturas tb! (visuals, meanings, signs, language...) 195,196,197>>> on musical theory, major, minor etc...! (more e.g.: Hitchcocks rope initial scene...)

Obs.: Using Prime Time Telenovela in Brazil to Promote Multimodal Literacy at school and teacher training level.: bringing whats outside the classroom into the classroom..?

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