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Television and culture have an intricate relationship that is often depicted in transnational literature, yet one generally ignored by scholars. While one must acknowledge the saturation of media in this technological age, and that writing about human experience cannot realistically be done without acknowledging the myriad media with which people come into contact, television references should be seen as an important literary device in literature that features transnational social groups, consciousness, aesthetics, and themes. Utilizing a cultural studies framework and theories from intermedial, television, transnational and postcolonial studies, in Literarily TV I focus on questions of identity and the representation of people and television media in literature. By examining Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, Olga Martynova’s Sogar Papageien überleben uns and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen, I show several variations for the use of television references in novels that feature the sites of contestations between culture, identity, and media. These texts expand upon our conceptions of collective memory, trauma, and belonging, and encourage shifts in power that reconfigure our understandings of identity, authenticity, and ambivalence. In my analyses, I focus on references to popular television, sports broadcast, and news reporting within the various functions of television as entertainment, informant, and educator. This work reveals specific realities surrounding the situation of migrants and/or transnational people, people who have migrant backgrounds, are part of a minority ethnic group, and/or are marginalized in different ways. These uses include but are not limited: to mapping out contact zones between different cultures; encouraging intercultural interaction or belonging; and revealing the interconnected relationship between representation and television. In addition, I explore how television reflects codes of history, engages collective memory, and mediates epistemology. ; Das ...
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