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Overview
We all know about literacy and its recent upper-crust cousin cultural literacy. The time has come for TELELITERACY--a concept that defines, explores, and embraces what we know about, and have learned from, the mass medium of television. This clear-eyed and lively book shows that television, contrary to the opinion of many, is a medium that is opening the American mind. The knee-jerk reaction television often elicits from critics, literati, even well-intentioned parents and educators actually follows a pattern that has come down to us through history. In The Republic, for example, Plato attacked poetry and drama on the grounds that they were mere "imitations." His early denunciation of what we would today call the docudrama also implied a disdain for the popularity of all public performances. Closer to our own time, little respect was initially accorded radio and film, though both (significantly the latter) are now accepted as subjects for serious study. Grounding his argument in such historical fact, television critic David Bianculli goes on to present in Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously a spirited argument for television. "It's time to realize TV must be doing something right," Bianculli observes, "to reach and affect so many people." If one hasn't watched television in the recent past, one has missed I, Claudius; Holocaust; Shogun; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Brideshead Revisited; The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; Anne of Green Gables; The Singing Detective; the Gulf War; The Civil War; the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings; the collapse of the Soviet Union; Bill Moyers talking with Joseph Campbell; and much more. As Bianculli admits, "Because television is so widely and convincingly attacked, it isn't easy to come to its defense without being put on the defensive. It's as though, by taking TV seriously, you automatically prevent yourself from being taken seriously." But through interviews conducted expressly for this book, with PetThe first book to seriously defend TV, Teleliteracy asserts that television is actually opening the American mind. Insightful interviews with Peter Jennings, Bill Moyers, Bill Cosby, and others serve to illustrate television's educational and social value. "A ringing defense of TV as a forum for art, information, and education."--Kirkus Reviews.
Synopsis
Originally published by Continuum (1992), Bianculli, a TV critic for the New York Daily News and watcher of eleven televisions, simultaneously, argues that while most television is not very good, "the best of TV is very good indeed, and that the idea of indiscriminately ridiculing or avoiding the medium of television displays no more intelligence than denouncing all movies as fluff, or holding a 'Don't Open a Book Day.'" First, Bianculli presents a personal view of television showing that it is maligned because it is popular. He next writes a manifesto defending the medium as an art form. Finally he looks at TV in context from its role in the classroom to its presence on the battlefield. The book is replete with quotes from famous TV personages like Peter Jennings, Don Hewitt, and Bill Cosby. Suitable for anyone with a high school education, or for whomever watches television more than they read. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Publishers Weekly
This conversationally written, zesty but hollow manifesto extolling the benefits of television is only likely to persuade the switched-on. Bianculli, TV critic for the New York Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer , concedes that ``90% of television is . . . crap,'' but insists that ``the best of television is very good indeed.'' Far from being a corrupter of literacy, the tube, he speciously argues, can make viewers more literate through programs like Sesame Street and adaptations of Dickens or Trollope that send viewers back to the novels. Dismissing links between TV violence and street violence as impossible to prove, he urges that classrooms teach children what TV can offer and praises the medium's coverage of the Gulf War. Drawing on interviews with Linda Ellerbee, Bill Cosby, Peter Jennings, Kurt Vonnegut, Shelley Duvall and others, Bianculli presents a rosy image of television as a growing, maturing medium, better now than in its golden age. A gimmicky ``teleliteracy quiz'' is included. Photos. (June)