Rosemary Huisman

Narrative and media

What was this about? Orientation Who? When? What? Where? Complication Then what happened?

Narrative and Media: The genres of television

Each medium develops its own ways of telling stories. These different ways of telling stories encompass the devices of the plot, the technical aspects of the medium, and the codes and conventions of types of stories. Another way of putting this, which employs terms you will have encountered in earlier chapters, is that different media allow different possibilities of diegesis (telling the story) and mimesis (performance) and the relation between the two. Whether as readers (audiences) of texts or as producers of them, we recognise these combinations and categorise them, in order to advise or predict what kind of story this is going to be. These categories of story may be identified as genres (the French word for types or kinds). On the one hand, genres can be seen as offering an important way of framing texts that assists comprehension. Genre knowledge orientates competent readers towards appropriate attitudes, assumptions and expectations about a text, which are useful in making sense of it. On the other hand, genres may be seen ideologically, as constraining interpretation, as limiting the available meanings of the text. What is a genre? Texts concerned with the study of television, such as Williams (1990), Tulloch (2000) or Creeber (2001), offer genres (or forms, as Williams calls them) of television program, such as news, drama, ‘variety’, sport, advertising, ‘cop series’, soap opera, documentary, cartoons, situation comedy, childrens television and ‘popular entertainment’. Some of these are broken down still further by Creeber (2001).

Exemption and exegesis: Judicial interpretation of exemption clauses in England, Australia, and India

Abstract A feature of the modern consumer economy is the so-called “standard form contract,” printed in advance to establish the terms on which a corporate supplier deals with its customers. Typically these terms include an “exemption clause,” seeking to limit the supplier’s liability for loss or damage, and often to exclude legal liability altogether. Sometimes such clauses are given effect according to their apparent intention, but in other cases judges may endeavor to avoid that result – either by denying the clause any legal effect whatsoever, or by reading it so as not to apply to the precise kind of liability that has in fact arisen. We illustrate these varied responses by reference to judicial decisions in England, Australia, and India. The analysis suggests different expectations within these different judicial discourse communities: in England, from 1980 onwards, the renewed ideological emphasis on freedom of contract led judges to retreat from the creative solutions of earlier decades, returning to an emphasis on the actual words of such clauses; in Australia, in contrast, judges declined to take part in such a retreat; in India, a prevailing insistence on the need to interpret contracts strictly according to their literal terms has failed to prevent occasional attempts at ingenious interpretive solutions.

Narrative and Media: Frontmatter

What was this about? Orientation Who? When? What? Where? Complication Then what happened?

Narrative and Media: Television: narratives and ideology

What was this about? Orientation Who? When? What? Where? Complication Then what happened?