Beyond Representational Correctness

Edward Schiappa is Professor of Communication Studies and Paul W. Frenzel Chair of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. He is the editor of Warranting Assent: Case Studies in Argument Evaluation, also published by SUNY Press, and the author of Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning.

• AcknowledgmentsPART I. Provocations 1. The Impossible Dream of Representational Correctness2. The Argumentative Burdens of Audience Conjectures3. The Phenomenal Text of Will & Grace: Revisiting the Text/Audience DividePART II. Interventions 4. Learning from Television: The Parasocial Contact Hypothesis5. Context Matters: Antifeminism in Michael Crichton’s Disclosure6. Quitting "Man": Masculinity, Film Criticism, and PedagogyPART III. Conclusions 7. Beyond Representational Correctness: Five SuggestionsNotesReferencesIndex

"Whether or not you agree with Edward Schiappa's central argument that media studies should move toward multimethodological approaches that incorporate social science measures into audience analysis to broaden its scope, it is difficult to deny that conventional textual analysis has sometimes been limited by problems related to representational correctness. Schiappa raises important questions for critical media studies and offers provocative answers." — Mary M. Dalton, coeditor of The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed