Book:
- Jackie Byars, All That Hollywood Allows: Re-reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and London: Routledge, 1991)
Articles and Book Chapters:
- Jackie Byars and Eileen R. Meehan, "Telefeminism: The Lifetime Cable Channel," Journal of Television and New Media (Vol. 1, No. 1, March 2000); reprinted in Robert C. Allen & Annette Hill, Routledge TV Studies Reader, 2003; also reprinted in Toby Miller, ed., Television: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. 5 vols. London: Routledge, 2003 (Volume 3, pages 48-65).
- Jackie Byars and Eileen R. Meehan, "Once in a Lifetime" Constructing 'The Working Woman' Through Cable Narrowcasting" (lead article, special issue on Lifetime), Camera Obscura, fall 1995), 12-41; reprinted in Horace Newcomb, Television: The Critical View, Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Jackie Byars, "The Prime of Ms. Kim Novak: Struggling Over the Feminine in the Star Image," in Joel Foreman, ed., The Other 50s: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997)
- Jackie Byars, "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Female-Oriented Melodramas of the 1950s," in Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, and Janice Welsch, eds., Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Theory and Criticism (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
- Jackie Byars and Chad Dell, "Reading Difference: The Characters at Frank's Place," in Lana Rakow, ed., Women Making Meaning: The New Feminist Scholarship in Communication (New York & London: Routledge, 1992)
- Jackie Byars, "Gazes/Voices/Power: Expanding Psychoanalysis for Feminist Film and Television Theory," in E. Deidre Pribram, ed., Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television (London and New York: Verso, 1988)
- Jackie Byars, "Reading Feminine Discourse: Prime-Time Television in the U.S.," Communication, 9:3/4 (Spring 1987)
A few other publications:
- Review of Annette Kuhn, ed., "Queen of the B's: Ida Lupino Behind the Camera," Film Quarterly. Vol. 51, No. 4 (Summer 1997)Review of Mary Ellen Brown, ed., Television and Women's Culture, Journal of Communication, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Autumn 1991)
- Reply to Questionnaire, Special Issue on "The Spectatrix," Camera Obscura 20-21 (May-September 1989)
- Translation of Michel Colin, "A 'Generative Semiology' of Film: To What End?," Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound, No. 9 (Spring 1989)
Courses taught recently:
COM 2010 - Introduction to Film introduces students to the techniques and methods of sophisticated film criticism. The course examines how filmmakers deploy such techniques as lighting, dramatic staging, musical scores, and motifs, and painterly compositional effects. The course introduces students to major films from a broad-based spectrum of styles, genres, historical periods, and national cultures. A primary methodology of the course involves breaking films down into their component features (narrative, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound), analyzing the operation of each of these constituent parts in detail, and then returning each of the parts to the whole. The course also examines issues of genre, authorship, and ideology, as it trains students in the specific techniques and critical methods necessary to describe, analyze, and appreciate the artistic texts.
COM 5020 - Women in Filmmaking focuses on women who have had formative roles in filmmaking (as directors, scriptwriters, actresses, technicians, etc.) since the earliest days of the cinema. The course examines narrative filmmaking by women in various national cinemas, as well as the work of women who have worked in alternative cinematic modes, making documentaries and experimental films and videos. Attention is also given to the work of women of various ethnicities and races. Class time is devoted to screening documentaries about women filmmakers, to screening of films made by women, to discussions of those films, and to discussion of readings on women in filmmaking.
COM 5020 - The Films of Robert Altman -- a survey of many of Altman's theatrically released films and some of his work for television. The course addresses theoretical questions concerning film authorship, genre, adaptation, and the influence of social, cultural, and historical contexts on Altman's Films.
COM 7590 - Seminar in Television Criticism, a graduate seminar, focuses on the major humanities-based approaches to the analysis of media texts, focusing primarily on scholarly television criticism that draws on anthropology, semiotics, literary theory, film theory, psychoanalysis, theories of ideology, etc. The course aims to call into question the notion that television texts are simple, transparent, and obvious; to examine the relationship between representational texts and social practice, specifically the ways media texts have reinforced and justified inequities based on difference in gender, race, class, national origin, sexual orientation, and other categories of difference; and to hone students' critical interpretive and writing skills.
COM 7610 - Feminist Media Criticism and Theory examines the participation of mass media - primarily film and television, two of the most powerful and central cultural forms of the twentieth century - in the ongoing process of the social construction of gender(s) through the representation of the feminine/female/woman and the masculine/male/man in filmic texts. The course surveys the brief but rich history of feminist media theory and criticism since the early 1970s, exploring the major questions raised by media critics concerned with gender construction, the approaches these critics have used to address their questions, and the theoretical bases of these approaches. The primary focus of the course is on the advantages and limitations of various methods for textual analysis (and the theories which inform them) that have been used by feminist film critics; a secondary focus is on recent scholarship on the production and consumption of media texts and on its influence on textual analysis. Attention is given to early sociological analysis, as well as the currently more influential methodologies based in semiotics, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies.
COM 5020 - Ideology and Hollywood Films of the 1950s includes attention to theories of ideology and the role of representational texts such as film in the ideological process; the social, cultural, economic, and political contexts within which Hollywood films were produced and consumed during the fifties; and films from a variety of genres produced and distributed during this period. Graduate students will do more reading than undergraduates and will write longer and more ambitious papers.
PhD students, former:
Christina Mugno, Dissertation: The Cinema of Mabel Normand, WSU, 1998
Li-Mei Chang, Dissertation: Postcolonial Blues: Hong Kong Cinema and Cultural Identity, WSU 2000
Mike Meadows: Reimagining Masculinity in the Nineties: Hollywood Movies and Genres, 2000
Kaitlin Hanger, The Woman Sawed in Half: Doubling and Duality in Postmodern Psychodramas, 2001
David Brown, Dissertation, It’s About Time: The Denial of Coevalness in Ethnographic Films Circa 1920s, WSU, 2001
Karen McDevitt, Dissertation, Beyond Feminism: Sex and Gender in My Hometown - An Investigation of America Online Communities, WSU, 2002
Pete Porter, Dissertation, From Menippus to the Movies: A Theory of Menippeanism in Motion Pictures, WSU, 2003 (http://www.ewu.edu/x4970.xml)
Emily Anzicek, Dissertation, I've Got the Good Kid: Teen Sex and the WB Network, WSU, 2007
PhD students currently writing dissertations:
Chris Gullen, the corporeal-modification musical
Tom Hopkins - topic: films of the Coen Brothers
Lara Hrycaj, music in the films of Wes Anderson
Seongwook Lee - topic: the representation of reunification in Korean cinema
Nick Schlegel, Spanish horror films in the post-Franco era
Debbie James Smith, An institutional analysis of UNESCO’s influence on the development of independent documentary content and production practice
MA students, former:
Renee Tambeau, Essay, Representation and Reception of Abortion in Film, 1963—1999, WSU 2003
Glenn Morgan, Essay: Masculinity in Spike Lee's Get On the Bus, WSU 1999
Lytreshia Green-Bell, Essay: Spike Lee's School Daze, WSU,1998
Mary Anglin, Thesis, Internet Theater, WSU, 1997
E. J. Hamacher, Essay, Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Film in Cuba, WSU, 1997
Joel Silvers, Essay, Don't Fence Me In: Space and Landscape in an Evolving Film Genre, WSU, 1997
Ingrid Kelly, Essay, Rap Journalism, WSU, 1997
John Scollon, Thesis, Insider and Outsider Representations of Ireland on Film, WSU 1996
Geri Spease, Essay, "Killer Women" Films, WSU, 1996
Emily Blake, Essay, A Textual Analysis of Representations and Aesthetics in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, WSU, 1995
Gaal Karp, Essay, The Creator of a Television Show: A Case Study of the Executive Producers of the NBC science-fiction melodrama Earth 2, WSU, 1995
K. Michelle Moran, Essay, Selling the Drama: Music Marketing Via Mass Media in the Rock Era, from Radio to Rock Video Monthly, WSU, 1995
Gloria Maier, Essay, Screen Literacy Education, WSU, 1995
Juliette Storr, Essay, Broadcasting in the Bahamas, WSU, 1995
Francis Lieder, Essay, Buddies and Philadelphia: AIDS, Medicalization and the De-Othering of Diseased Individuals, WSU, 1995
Kristine Pawlak, Essay, Mutants Need Not Apply, WSU, 1994
Carin Krishnan, Essay, Women, Subjectivity and Cinematic Discourse: Commercial Women Directors in America in the 1990s, WSU, 1994
Kathleen Wambley, Essay, Dirty Dancing and "Hungry Eyes" - Feminism vs. Patriarchy, WSU, 1994
Lingyan Kong, Thesis, Images of Women in Chinese Films of the1980s: An Analysis of Chinese Ideology, TexasChristianUniversity, 1992
