American Icons: The Genesis of a National Visual Language (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies)

Despite the work that has been done on the power of visual communication in general, and about the social influence of television in particular, television’s relationship with reality is still something of a black box. Even today, the convention that the screen functions as a window on reality structures much of the production and reception of televisual narratives. But as reality ought to become history at one point, what are we to do with such windows on the past? Developing and applying a highly innovative approach to the modern picture, American Icons sets out to expose the historicity of icons, to reframe the history of the screen and to dissect the visual core of a medium that is still so poorly understood. Dismantling the aura of apparently timeless icons and past spectacles with their seductive power to attract the eye, this book offers new ways of seeing the mechanisms at work in our modern pictorial culture. Book Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 Acknowledgments......Page 8 Introduction......Page 10 Part A: Icons in the Museum......Page 16 1 Collecting Pictures......Page 18 2 Collecting Language......Page 27 Part B: Kaleidoscopic Spectacles......Page 32 3 Pictorial Historiography......Page 34 4 The Insignia of the Spectacle......Page 42 5 Pictorial Genres......Page 50 6 The Narrative of the News Spectacle......Page 66 7 Iconic Lecterns......Page 84 8 The Historicity of the Documentary's Imagery......Page 105 Part C: Hyperrealism......Page 110 9 Pictorial Supremacy......Page 112 10 The Icon of Joe Friday: The Moral in the Dragnet......Page 126 11 The Icon of Lucy: Queen of Television Comedy......Page 139 12 The Icon of Edward R. Murrow: Master of “the Control Room of Studio 41”......Page 152 13 Walter Cronkite: Court Reporter of the Spectacle......Page 165 14 Muhammad Ali: Champion of the Screen......Page 178 15 Premodernism......Page 190 Appendix......Page 196 16 Four Codes of Visual Language......Page 198 17 Notes on the Syntactic Function of the Four Codes......Page 225 18 Notes on the Pragmatics of Visual Language......Page 230 19 Glossary: Four Codes of Visual Language......Page 241 Notes......Page 248 Film and Television Sources......Page 272 Bibliography......Page 278 Index......Page 288 Despite the work that has been done on the power of visual communication in general, and about the social influence of television in particular, television's relationship with reality is still something of a black box. Even today, the convention that the screen functions as a window on reality structures much of the production and reception of televisual narratives. But as reality ought to become history at one point, what are we to do with such windows on the past? Developing and applying a highly innovative approach to the modern picture, this monograph sets out to expose the historicity of icons, to reframe the history of the screen and to dissect the visual core of a medium that is still so poorly understood. Dismantling the aura of apparently timeless icons and past spectacles with their seductive power to attract the eye, this book offers new ways of seeing the mechanisms at work in our modern pictorial culture Shedding light on the historicity of icons to reframe the history of the screen and dissect the visual core of a medium that is still poorly understood, this book presents new ways of seeing the mechanisms at work in our modern pictorial culture Benedikt Feldges. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [239]-278) And Index.