“Don’t Know Much About History”:
What Counts as Historical Work in Television Studies
by: Aniko Bodroghkozy / University of Virginia
What counts as television history? This was a question that animated the roundtable I proposed at the first Flow conference this past October and it's a question that continues to gnaw at me. Television studies in general, and Flow in particular, tend to be rather preoccupied with the contemporary. When's the last time you read an article in Flow that engaged historically with some aspect of television in the past? It's not surprising, I suppose, considering the present-mindedness of the medium we study. The roundtable topic I submitted was the only one that explored questions of history and I frankly did not expect a large turnout. However, our room was packed solid with conferees, so I'm starting to believe that the historical study of television isn't as much the unfashionable niche area within the field as I was beginning to think it was.
Some of the debate and discussion got me thinking about how I would want to define what rigorous academic study of this medium, its audiences, its industries, and its contexts in the past should encompass. Perhaps one shouldn't even attempt to define (and thereby perhaps proscribe) what counts as studies in television history. But I'm willing to weigh in because I think it's important if we want our scholarship to be taken seriously outside our growing, but still young, field. I think it's important that more traditionally credentialed historians (you know: those tweedy folks who populate history departments) accept that what we do does, in fact, conform to the craft of history. I'd at least like to get recognition from cultural and social historians. To me, this suggests the primacy of archival research. I raise this issue because there was some stimulating discussion during the roundtable about whether one needs to engage in archival research in order to do historical work. Well, I'm willing to go out on a limb and stake my vast reputation in the field on the assertion that, yes, ladies and gentlemen, some form of rigorous mucking in the archives (or at least in libraries with holdings of primary documents such as archived newspapers and journals) is a prerequisite for historical research. Symptomatic readings of televisual texts and close readings are all well and good and often necessary to any historical inquiry, but, as panelist Elena Levine pointed out during the discussion, one needs to account for historical context. How does an historian reconstruct context? Archival research. Why not limit oneself to studies of television texts from the past? Well, one can do that, certainly. Just don't call it historical work. It's textual analysis and can be an entirely worthy form of television criticism. I doubt our colleagues in history departments would recognize such work, though.
So who cares whether historians (who tend to be rather conservative, traditional, and suspicious of popular culture) recognize the importance of studying television historically? Why can't we as television scholars just blaze new scholarly trails, deconstruct and redefine traditional paradigms, and in general do what makes sense to us for our objects of study? My answer may have something to do with the fact that I teach at an institution that fetishizes its traditions and isn't known for being on the scholarly cutting edge. As with the Ivy League (to which my institution aspires), the most prestigious universities in this country don't tend to embrace newer areas of scholarship easily or quickly. Only recently has film studies managed to establish any form of beachhead in some of the Ivies. Television studies has a much longer way to go. And maybe we shouldn't care whether television studies is accepted by the Harvards, Princetons, and Yales. However, the Ivies and the wannabee Ivies are the institutions that bestow legitimacy to emergent fields. One of the reasons I managed to get hired and tenured at a wannabee (public) Ivy is because my scholarship was seen as acceptable historical work by historians who sat on my hiring and tenuring committees. The institution may have been a tad worried about the television studies part (film studies raises far fewer anxieties here) but because faculty and deans could confidently assert that, yes indeed, she is an historian and Mr. Jefferson, Our Founder, would recognize that as a legitimate field of study at his University, things went well for me.
I raise this bit of autobiography only to suggest that we do need to be thinking institutionally when we consider how we define not only our field but also what counts as rigorous scholarly work. I'll leave it to others to explore what that would mean for narrative, aesthetic, industry, audience ethnography, and other modes of analysis of television and media. But I'm pretty confident about what counts as rigorous television history. If I go to the endnotes and works cited sections and don't see evidence that the author has examined collected papers, newspapers and journals, or other primary documents of whatever era of the past is under examination, it's not history.
Image Credits:
www.att.com/history/
www.britannica.com
Please feel free to comment.
Historical evidence comes in many forms
While I agree with Aniko’s argument that gaining legitimacy within traditional fields is essential for the health & growth of TV studies, we should remember that there are many relevant fields beyond History which might grant such approval, even for projects that are oriented toward understanding the past. Literary scholars, art historians, and theatre scholars (among others) all study cultural works from the past with a different relationship to primary archival research than historians. As an interdisciplinary field, TV studies shouldn’t feel beholden to meet the requirements of traditional historians if the guiding research question of a project can’t be effectively answered via archival documents. For instance, I am interested in the historical evolution of storytelling devices like the “two-parter” and the pre-show recap (“Previously on…”) – while I would love to find a smoking gun corporate memo discussing the strategies of such innovations, I doubt such a document has been archived (if it ever existed). But if such evidence doesn’t exist, well-established research methods analyzing surviving texts can be used to do history.
The bottom line is that we shouldn’t limit our conception of historical research to what happens within a History department, as even pseudo-Ivies have many researchers using different historical methods. Take advantage of TV Studies’ interdisciplinarity rather than trying to be a History professor studying television.
The importance of alternative methods in doing TV history
The importance of alternative methods in doing TV historyThanks again Aniko for organizing the one historical panel on Flow. It was most invigorating (if sometimes frustrating – which can be helpful in the long run) I hope it did demonstrate a lot of us from the graduate level and on, are very much interested in the history of the medium (and not only in the U.S). In response to your comments here, I do want to return to the point made by panelist Charles Ramirez-Berg, who emphasized the importance of oral history. Don’t get me wrong – I love archival history and if I am able to get my hands on a relevant document pertaining to my historical research I won’t shut up about it for a year or two. Having said that, I do have to take issues with the fetishization of the archive as the only source of legitimacy. I am specifically puzzled by the binary juxtaposition of the archive vs. textual analysis – is that all there is methodologically? What about oral history for example? Interviews with people who were involved in past TV production have been most valuable for my work. This is especially due to the fact that archives for Israeli TV either do not exist or are highly inaccessible for many reasons (mainly ignorance and luck of regard for the medium social and cultural importance).True, the historiographical concerns involved in such work must be addressed by the researcher. I find work on private and collective/cultural memory, historiography and oral history, autobiographical narratives, and so on extremely valuable in that regard. Also the period must be contextualized by rigorous exploration of the socio-historical factors shaping the era, etc. But shouldn’t these interviews count as legitimate historical endeavors? And if “the tweedy folks” are not on board with that – shouldn’t we make sure they know better rather then succumbed to their long over due authority?As for trade press etc. – I am afraid here again a privileged Western perspective is applied where it oughtn’t to be. I don’t know for sure what the situation is in other Post-colonial nations, but even Israel, that has a strong Western orientation (or pretence) simply did not have, in the early stages of broadcast, any trade press one can speak of. When TV is a new medium (and considered by many a bad object corrupting the youth and what not – read Tasha Oren’s work:), it is rarely reviewed in the press. For example – for my work on the first Israeli sitcom, Krovim Krovim (1983-86) which was also the first domestically produced series in Israel, I was able to find about ten (!) newspaper articles devoted to the show over the four years of its broadcast. As one of my interviewees, Yitzhak Shauly, the director of the show, explains “people didn’t know jack about TV back then, and those who wrote about it in the press, mostly theatre critics, knew less then the average fan.”(my translation from the original interview in Hebrew) Now – if anyone happens to know where the fan letters for that show are – please let me know. One thing is certain; they were not archived by the Israeli Educational Television that produced “my” sitcom!