The Wire : Urban Decay and American Television.
Title:
The Wire : Urban Decay and American Television.
Author:
Potter, Tiffany.
ISBN:
9781441182685
Personal Author:
Edition:
1st ed.
Physical Description:
1 online resource (263 pages)
Contents:
Contents -- Acknowledgements -- "I am the American Dream": Modern Urban Tragedy and the Borders of Fiction -- Baltimore before The Wire -- I. Baltimore and Its Institutions -- 1. Yesterday's Tomorrow Today: Baltimore and the Promise of Reform -- 2. "We ain't got no yard": Crime, Development, and Urban Environment -- 3. Heroism, Institutions, and the Police Procedural -- 4. The Narrative Production of "Real Police" -- 5. "I Got the Shotgun, You Got the Briefcase": Lawyering and Ethics -- 6. Posing Problems and Picking Fights: Critical Pedagogy and the Corner Boys -- II. On the Corner -- 7. Corner-Boy Masculinity: Intersections of Inner-City Manhood -- 8. Stringer Bell's Lament: Violence and Legitimacy in Contemporary Capitalism -- 9. Networks of Affiliation: Familialism and Anticorporatism in Black and White -- 10. Barksdale Women: Crime, Empire, and the Production of Gender -- 11. After the Towers Fell: Bodie Broadus and the Space of Memory -- III. Twenty-first-Century Television -- 12. "The Dickensian Aspect": Melodrama, Viewer Engagement, and the Socially Conscious Text -- 13. It's All Connected: Televisual Narrative Complexity -- 14. Dislocating America: Agnieszka Holland Directs "Moral Midgetry" -- 15. "Gots to Get Got": Social Justice and Audience Response to Omar Little -- Works Cited -- Episode List -- Notes on Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.
Abstract:
The first collection of critical essays on HBO's The Wire - the most brilliant and socially relevant television series in years T he Wire is about survival, about the strategies adopted by those living and working in the inner cities of America. It presents a world where for many even hope isn't an option, where life operates as day-to-day existence without education, without job security, and without social structures. This is a world that is only grey, an exacting autopsy of a side of American life that has never seen the inside of a Starbucks. Over its five season, sixty-episode run (2002-2008), The Wire presented severall overlapping narrative threads, all set in the city of Baltimore. The series consistently deconstructed the conventional narratives of law, order, and disorder, offering a view of America that has never before been admitted to the public discourse of the televisual. It was bleak and at times excruciating. Even when the show made metatextual reference to its own world as Dickensian, it was too gentle by half. By focusing on four main topics (Crime, Law Enforcement, America, and Television), The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television examines the series' place within popular culture and its representation of the realities of inner city life, social institutions, and politics in contemporary American society. This is a brilliant collection of essays on a show that has taken the art of television drama to new heights.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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