When Stanley Cavell’s “The Fact of Television” was published in 1982, television was still very much an “out-of-school” topic. Since the 1980s, television studies have entered the academic mainstream and has been the subject of a number of philosophical investigations. There is a corpus of good television, but also a need for deeper analysis.
Television fiction has been profoundly transformed by digital media, networks, and platforms. This new reality of television includes television series and the hold they have on contemporary viewers. Around the same time, Cavell defined the ontology of film as “the question of what becomes of particular people and particular places, subjects and motifs” - adding that the “source of data for his answer” is “those objects and people that are actually to be found in the sequence of films or passages of films that matter to us.”
*Event set-up will begin at 4pm, lecture will begin at 5pm.*