Christine Geraghty and David Lusted explain that ‘Television Studies has its roots in a mixture of disciplines’ (1998:3), encompassing ‘production and audience ethnography, policy advocacy, political economy, cultural history and textual analysis’ (Miller 2002:3, Mumford 1998:144). The latter, Casey et al argue, ‘has been at the core of television studies, particularly those of a semiological bent’ (2008:289). This semiological bent63 provides the apparatus for analysing ‘actual television programmes, particularly focusing on issues of form, content and representation’ (Creeber 2006a:6), that informs my readings in Chapters 1-3.
Textual analysis has its roots in structuralism. Glen Creeber writes that ‘[s]tructuralism implicitly questioned overtly subjective analysis by setting out a more rigorous and
63Jonathan Bignell explains that ‘[s]emiotics or semiology is a way of analysing meanings by looking at signs… which communicate meanings’ (2002:1). He adds that, ‘as language and sign systems [as culturally-constructed] shape our reality, they are also media in which to communicate about this reality’ (ibid:6).
scientific” approach to the text’ (2006b:27). He adds that, ‘structuralism argued all texts were composed of a complex system of “codes” and “conventions” that, if certain practices were followed closely, could be carefully “decoded”… by which the meaning of a text could be read as a complex systems of “signs”’ (ibid; Bordwell 1985:276).
However, Creeber explains that ‘structuralism itself came under increasing attack during the 1980s…. [as] it tended to over-emphasise the conclusive nature of the readings that it offered…
[that] were simply too rigid in their conclusion[s]’ (ibid:28). In comparison, ‘post-structuralism attempted to foreground the plurality of meaning found in a text, suggesting that a text was always ultimately a product of interpretation’ (ibid). Post-structuralist textual analysis64 lends itself to Kristeva’s abjection model since her location of cultural abjection allows for a plurality of abject objects and bodies informed by socio-cultural contexts. Moreover, I use abjection as an interpretive schema that fosters particular, rather than definitive, readings.
‘Meanings… are socially constructed’ (Casey et al 2008:248) in TV horror, both via diegetic place; ‘the way in which objective, buildings, people and landscapes are related to one another in space and time’ (Lury 2005:148), and via the characters that occupy such places (Booth 2012a:310). Likewise, ‘qualities in non-representational signs - colour, texture, movement, rhythm, melody, camerawork’ (Dyer 2002:20) elicit meaning (Bignell 2002:191). Textual analysis ‘can illuminate the underlying subtextual meanings of… [a] series, to show how it might resonate with current concerns and problems which might be recognised by its audience’
(Bignell 2013:75). Through reading TV’s aesthetics, ‘conceptual[, political,] and philosophical questions can arise from attention to specific television texts’ (Cardwell 2006:72; Gray 2008:135, 141-6). Moreover, characters, objects, and spaces, not only foster semiotic meaning via their representations (Brunsdon 1998:108), but also create meaning through their relationships with one another (Creeber 2006c:44-6, Berger 2014:5).
Furthermore, since analysis unpacks ideological subtexts located within wider socio-historical contexts (Davis 2006:267, Nama 2008:139-40), textual analysis explores semiotic readings of twenty-first century TV horror’s engagement with ‘contemporary sources of fear, anxiety, and political strife’ (Frost 2011:16; Muntean 2011:82, Sconce 2014:99, Dyson 2014:145). Those studying horror ‘have often become preoccupied… with what might be termed horror’s inner workings, its themes and underlying structures as well as its social function… Here notions of
64 Textual analysis offers various foci such as semantic, semiotic, narrative, rhetorical, and discourse analysis (Ifversen 2003:61, Hartley 2002:32-3).
repression and the monstrous have become very important’ (Hutchings 2004:6). Indeed, Part I’s textual analysis works to deconstruct the case studies’ monstrous Other(s) (Levina and Bui 2013:4). Yet, whilst Kristeva’s model has been pertinent for textually analysing the abject Other in horror films (Creed 1986, Mendik 1998, Davis 2000, Trencansky 2001, Chanter 2008, Sibielski 2013, Kee 2015), viewing ‘the monster as either a symptom of or a metaphor for something bigger and more significant than the ostensible reality of the monster itself’
(Hutchings 2004:37), there is a tendency to neglect the cultural and symbolic construction of heroes and other characters threatened by abjection (Jowett 2017:9-11,37-9). Therefore, I also analyse other characters in my TV texts and how they engage with the abject monstrous (Bordwell 2007:90-1).
Creeber adds that ‘[t]extual analysis on its own is rarely enough but when it combines with the wider contextual or “extra-textual” nature of the subject, it can offer insight’ (2006d:84).
Aesthetic elements can be ‘a way of entering into policy debates about why television matters in a culture’ (Geraghty 2003:36), considering how quality is claimed, negotiated, and/or valued (Wheatley 2004:327, Farr 2016:154). The Literature Review has argued that the rise of twenty-first century graphic TV horror can be ascribed to wider discourses of ‘quality’ television.
Concurrently, technological developments have diminished the visual hierarchy between film and television (Lotz 2014b:54,88, Biesen:2016:133, Newman 2014:73); a distinction that often linked the former to higher cultural value than the latter (Ellis 1992:127-8). Indeed, analysing TV from a Film Studies perspective has proven useful in textual deconstruction (Hills 2007b:44, Thompson 2003:28, McLoone 1996) whilst highlighting TV’s own textuality (Jacobs and Peacock 2013:6-8, Davis 2006, Ellis 1996, Geraghty 2003:26, Cardwell 2006:76).
Furthermore, textual analysis is important when looking at a range of media texts and/or platforms, prevalent in convergence culture, considering how TV narratives and storyworlds display transmediality. This is salient to Chapter 2’s analysis of abjection in TWD’s TV, comic, literary, and video game formats. While this is not to refute the importance of audiences’
readings, textual analysis can offer analyses not yet evidenced by, or alternative to, viewers (McKee 2003:68-9; Kennedy 2002, Fürsich 2002, 2009). Likewise, with audiences becoming more elusive, fragmentary, and dispersed (Jermyn and Holmes 2006:50-1, Pink et al 2016:64-5), textual analysis can illustrate a range of potential readings65 (e.g. Jenkins 2010a). For
65 Likewise since the TV auteur-/showrunner-/producer-as-author (McCabe 2013:189-90, Bignell et al 2000:35-6), is problematised by more collaborative television (Geraghty 2003:36, Tulloch 2000:175-7), the post-structuralist paradigm put
instance, Chapter 3’s readings of ‘Imprint’ and ‘Dream Cruise’ use abjection theory to deconstruct the Japanese female monster, interpreting her as empowered and as a socio-political conduit that offers feminist (re)readings of both episodes. However, (anti-)fans’
readings in Chapters 4-6 focus largely on these episodes as vehicles authored by Japanese film directors, i.e. as genre texts that are discursively clustered and thus evaluated against existing Asia Extreme/J-horror films, given the transnational political economies at stake in these instances of US/Japanese TV horror (Hills 2005a:90).
Yet textual analysis has received a number of methodological criticisms, e.g. that it neglects
‘who or what produced the text and in what social, historical and political circumstances’
(Casey et al 2008:289). Moreover, if post-structuralism allows for multiple readings ‘critics have… argued that textual analysis… offer[s] little more than wholly personalised and unfounded interpretations’ (Creeber 2006b:33). The tendency of textual analysis to speak for audiences, create universal/monolithic readings, not account for multiple interpretations, and/or lack self-reflexivity (see Barker 2000:7, Creeber 2006d:82-3, Lewis and Jhally 1998:111, Hartley 2002:32, Philo 2007:185, Geraghty 2003:41) has led some academics ‘to embrace audience analysis… and ethnographic research as a whole’ (Creeber 2006b:34).
Martin Barker, for instance, has rejected ‘psychoanalytic accounts because their findings resolutely refuse any kind of empirical verification’ (2000:13; Bignell 2002:4). Resultantly, audience studies and ethnographies have often been used in opposition to textual analysis (Geraghty 1998:141, Hills 2006a:93, Storey 2003:81) as bids to enrich ‘our understanding of the role of ethnic, racial or national identities may play in audience response[s]’ (Mumford 1998:124).
Similar arguments take aim at Horror Studies. Hills notes that ‘horror audiences have been poorly served by theories of the genre aiming to resolve the “paradox” (why do people enjoy seeing images that they should find repulsive?)’ (2014a:90). Consequently, audiences are spoken for through academic textual analysis. Importantly, ‘audiences can… produce their own mediated framings of textual meaning, for example blogs and reviews’ (ibid:91). Textual interpretation is used by audiences to test their ‘own embrace of [the text]’ (Jenkins 2010b).
Thus, when reading texts’ meanings, ‘[a]ny attempt to fit together textual and contextual themes needs to negotiate not just the semiotic multiplicity of textual codes, but also the
forth by Barthes (1977:142) means not only ‘the death of the author’ but the death of authors, further subverting single meanings.
possible openness of contextual meanings’ (Hills 2011b:109, see also Hartley 1999:22, McKee 2003:19; Ford 2011b). Likewise, the reflexivity of scholarly readings is just one discursive way of ‘halting [the slipperiness] of semiotics’ (Hills 2011b:111). Thus, what is at stake is semiotics’ claim that ‘culture can be theorised in relation to signification and textuality’
(Pollock 2003:134) versus arguments that ‘[t]he very “lived” condition of culture, of different cultures and the differences within any given culture, a culture’s difference from itself…
repeatedly becomes simplified in any academic transformation of culture into an area of study [such as textual analysis]’ (Wolfreys 2003:162).
My own stance on textual analysis aligns itself with Creeber’s argument that ‘contemporary textual analysis tends to explore the playfulness and open-ended textures of textual meaning’
(2006b:34). Despite being criticised (Barker and Brooks 1998:111-8), discourse analysis deters
‘single meaning of a text’ (Creeber 2006b:35). Discourse analysis ‘is interested in the various means by which different socio-cultural discourses (gendered, sexual, national, racial, artistic, institutional and so on) compete for meaning’ (ibid). Since cultural abjection is contextual, each case study examines different discourses through which abject monsters are coded: in Chapter 1, my analysis of ITF centres on sexual, class and regional discourses within the UK (Chambers and Elizabeth 2017:195-6); in Chapter 2, readings of TWD focus on discourses of white masculinity in post-9/11 North America (Bennett 2015); and Chapter 3’s focus on transnational co-production means that transcultural discourses intersect with discourses of national female monstrosity (Wee 2014:43-5). Such arguments are ‘supported and developed around… wider contextual or extratextual framework[s]’ (Creeber 2006b:35). Considering the limitations of textual analysis, I am aware I offer ‘only one interpretation of a text’ (ibid:36) informed by abjection. As such, my textual analysis of the case studies examines ‘the generation of meaning that occurs when the structures of the text meet with the socially located meaning systems or discourses of the reader’ (Fiske and O’Sullivan 1994:240). I employ abjection as the device ‘which “guide[s]” the reader as to… [the text’s] preferred reading and direction’ (Hartley 2011:23), utilising the post-structuralist qualities of abjection to present a threefold overall argument to my research: 1) abject imagery is used within different industry contexts as a marker of textual and brand quality in these TV horror texts; 2) abjection offers a framework that culturally contextualises the monstrous Others within these texts; 3) abjection therefore becomes a key reading strategy for these texts. However, I acknowledge that whilst
‘[t]he text can prefer one reading… the reader always has the resources of his or her meaning systems to produce his or her “own” reading’ (Fiske and O’Sullivan 1994:240). Thus, I avoid
making assertions on the part of the audience (Creeber 2006:37), positioning my research instead within the realm of Fan Studies’ ‘active audiences’ (Hartley 2011:113), and developing my abject spectrum model and use of Bhabha’s third space to underpin the audience research of this thesis in Chapters 4-6. I will now consider the case studies used in my thesis (Burn and Parker 2003:83).