Sitting prominently at the hearth of our homes, television serves as a voice of our modern time. Given our media-saturated society and television's prominent voice and place in the home, it is likely we learn about our society and selves through these stories. These narratives are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that shape and reflect the world and our role in it. Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation brings together a diverse group of scholars to investigate the role television plays in shaping our understanding of self and family. This edited collection's rich and diverse research demonstrates how television plays an important role in negotiating self, and goes far beyond the treacly "very special" episodes found in family sit-coms in the 1980s. Instead, the authors show how television reflects our reality and helps us to sort out what it means to be a twenty-first-century man or woman.

American Ideal: How American Idol Constructs Celebrity, Collective Identity, and American Discourses by Amanda Scheiner McClain provides an insightful analysis of the popular television show American Idol and explores contemporary notions of celebrity, American collective identity, and other American themes. American Idol depicts how a new star is constructed, supports American ideals such as individualism and archetypes, and reinforces an idealized American identity through verbal and visual discourse. The monstrous popularity of American Idol demands study of the program and the ideals contained within. This book consists of discourse analyses of the first seven seasons of the program, contextual press coverage, and of the official message boards. By amalgamating this research, it becomes clear that American Idol presents an idealistic vision of American life, where everyone is equal, democracy chooses the right winner, power is shared, and celebrity and success can be attained simply by "being yourself." In American Idol's rendering of America, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexism do not exist. This idealized America consists of perfected extant ideological systems and apparatus. Through American Idol's American themes, representations of celebrity, and facilitation of collective identities, the show provides an idealized version of American culture. These idealized versions of America, national identity, and celebrity support contemporary economic and cultural norms: capitalistic ideology and concomitant materialism, beauty, race, gender, and sexuality standards, and ostensible equality epitomized by possibility for success. This book is an indispensable reference for not only scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, but anyone with an interest in American Idol and popular culture.

Sitting prominently at the hearth of our homes, television serves as a voice of our modern time. Given our media-saturated society and television's prominent voice and place in the home, it is likely we learn about our society and selves through these stories. These narratives are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that shape and reflect the world and our role in it. Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation brings together a diverse group of scholars to investigate the role television plays in shaping our understanding of self and family. This edited collection's rich and diverse research demonstrates how television plays an important role in negotiating self, and goes far beyond the treacly "very special" episodes found in family sit-coms in the 1980s. Instead, the authors show how television reflects our reality and helps us to sort out what it means to be a twenty-first-century man or woman.