Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2009 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book AwardThe Midwest of popular imagination is a "Heartland" characterized by traditional cultural values and mass market dispositions. Whether cast positively —; as authentic, pastoral, populist, hardworking, and all-American—or negatively—as backward, narrow-minded, unsophisticated, conservative, and out-of-touch—the myth of the Heartland endures.
Heartland TV examines the centrality of this myth to television's promotion and development, programming and marketing appeals, and public debates over the medium's and its audience's cultural worth. Victoria E. Johnson investigates how the "square" image of the heartland has been ritually recuperated on prime time television, from The Lawrence Welk Show in the 1950s, to documentary specials in the 1960s, to The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s, to Ellen in the 1990s. She also examines news specials on the Oklahoma City bombing to reveal how that city has been inscribed as the epitome of a timeless, pastoral heartland, and concludes with an analysis of network branding practices and appeals to an imagined "red state" audience.
Johnson argues that non-white, queer, and urban culture is consistently erased from depictions of the Midwest in order to reinforce its "reassuring" image as white and straight. Through analyses of policy, industry discourse, and case studies of specific shows, Heartland TV exposes the cultural function of the Midwest as a site of national transference and disavowal with regard to race, sexuality, and citizenship ideals.
Review
“A groundbreaking book, highly original in concept and persuasive in its execution. Johnson elegantly rewrites the history of American television with an eye to its geographical imaginary.”
&%8220;Network chieftains, advertising executives, and primetime performers generally fly over the heartland with barely a glance, but it's never far from their thoughts, or ours. In this remarkable analysis of American television, Victoria Johnson cogently explains why Middle America matters: on the screen, in the home, and in public life.”
"Johnson shows how the opposition of "heartland" and various urbane, coastal foils went through a series of permutations, alternately deprecating and valorizing middle America through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s."
Synopsis
This set presents the most important articles in the psychology of attention, divided into the following areas:
Early Data and Early (and Late) Selection Theories Automated Input Recognition The Breakthrough of the Unattended and Two-Channel Processing Multi-Task Performance: Attention as a Mental Resource Attention, Consciousness and Subliminal Attention, Visual Space and the Direction of Gaze
Articles in these volumes have been drawn from various books and from the following journals: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Psychological Review, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Information Processing and Cognition: The Loyola Symposium, Acta Psychologica, Perception and Psychophysics, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Memory and Cognition, Cognition, Canadian Journal of Psychology, British Journal of Psychology, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, Aspects of Consciousness, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences
About the Author
Victoria E. Johnson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.