Overview

In On Living with Television, Amy Holdsworth examines the characteristics of intimacy, familiarity, repetition, and duration that have come to exemplify the medium of television. Drawing on feminist television studies, queer theory, and disability studies as well as autobiographical life-writing practices, Holdsworth shows how television shapes everyday activities, from eating and sleeping to driving and homemaking. Recounting her own life with television, she offers a sense of the joys and pleasures Disney videos brought to her disabled sister, traces how bedtime television becomes part of a daily routine between child and caregiver, explores her own relationship to binge-eating and binge-viewing, and considers the idea of home through the BBC family drama Last Tango in Halifax. By foregrounding the ways in which television structures our relationships, daily routines, and sense of time, Holdsworth demonstrates how television emerges as a potent vehicle for writing about life.

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9781478013839

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Reviews

This book is a stunning achievement. In prose that is as graceful as it is compassionate, Amy Holdsworth gives voice to the unseen scenarios of care and relationality that television enters every day. How we watch television, she shows us, is how we anchor ourselves to places and people, and how we learn to be alone. Television creates space for holding our struggles and restores our capacities in ways that go beyond simply coping. This once-in-a-decade book reinvents the methods and language of television studies. -- Anna McCarthy, author of * The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America *

This book is a stunning achievement. In prose that is as graceful as it is compassionate, Amy Holdsworth gives voice to the unseen scenarios of care and relationality that television enters every day. How we watch television, she shows us, is how we anchor ourselves to places and people, and how we learn to be alone. Television creates space for holding our struggles and restores our capacities in ways that go beyond simply coping. This once-in-a-decade book reinvents the methods and language of television studies. -- Anna McCarthy, author of * The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America * In this wonderfully innovative book, Amy Holdsworth explores television as a lifelong companion that intersects with ordinary habits, affects, and caretaking in the home. Combining her personal experience with a brilliant pursuit of questions that cross interdisciplinary fields, Holdsworth shows how television relates to embodied practices of everyday time and resonates in memories across the life cycle. Beautifully written with passion, this is feminist television scholarship at its best! -- Lynn Spigel, author of * TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life *

"“This book is a stunning achievement. In prose that is as graceful as it is compassionate, Amy Holdsworth gives voice to the unseen scenarios of care and relationality that television enters every day. How we watch television, she shows us, is how we anchor ourselves to places and people, and how we learn to be alone. Television creates space for holding our struggles and restores our capacities in ways that go beyond simply coping. This once-in-a-decade book reinvents the methods and language of television studies.” -- Anna McCarthy, author of * The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America * “In this wonderfully innovative book, Amy Holdsworth explores television as a lifelong companion that intersects with ordinary habits, affects, and caretaking in the home. Combining her personal experience with a brilliant pursuit of questions that cross interdisciplinary fields, Holdsworth shows how television relates to embodied practices of everyday time and resonates in memories across the life cycle. Beautifully written with passion, this is feminist television scholarship at its best!” -- Lynn Spigel, author of * TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life * ""An emotionally moving page–turner, this book had this reviewer finishing it in a single sitting–a claim one does not generally apply to academic texts. . . . With sharp textual analysis and even sharper autobiographical writing, the author draws on theoretical work from film and television studies, disability studies, feminist studies, queer studies, autoethnography, and life writing. Scholars across all these areas of study will find much to absorb in this text, which deserves a place alongside the classics of television studies. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals."" -- S. Pepper * Choice *"

Author Information

Amy Holdsworth is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, author of Television, Memory, and Nostalgia, and coeditor of Discourses of Care: Media Practices and Cultures.

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