Description
Book SynopsisMany contemporary television series from Modern Family to How to Get Away with Murder open an episode or season with a conflict and then go back in time to show how that conflict came to be. In Figures of Time Toni Pape examines these narratives, showing how these leaps in time create aesthetic experiences of time that attune their audiences to the political doctrine of preemption—a logic that justifies preemptive action to nullify a perceived future threat. Examining questions of temporality in Life on Mars, the political ramifications of living under the auspices of a catastrophic future in FlashForward, and how Damages disrupts the logic of preemption, Pape shows how television helps shift political culture away from a model of rational deliberation and representation toward a politics of preemption and conformity. Exposing the mechanisms through which television supports a fear-based politics, Pape contends, will allow for the re
Trade Review
"Graduate students, scholars, and professions interested in media, time, and politics might find this book useful to help better understand the use of time in storytelling and its effects on politics and relatability." -- Morgan Danker * Communication Booknotes Quarterly *
Table of Contents
Introduction. Preemptive Narratives and Televisual Futures 1
1. The Serial Machine: Toward Figures of Time 38
2. Three Representations and a Figural: Bergsonian Variations on Metric Time, the Virtual, and Creative Becoming 73
3. Loop into Line: The Moral Command of Preemption 109
4. Damages as Procedural Television 142
Afterword. Anarchival Television 176
Acknowledgments 183
Notes 185
Works Cited 203
Index 215
