Deny All Knowledge: Reading the X-Files (Television and Popular Culture) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0815627173 ISBN 13: 9780815627173

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, 1996

Synopsis

The "X Files" is as complex and controversial a phenomenon as the television series "Twin Peaks" was in the early 1990s. Mysterious and macabre episodes, led by fictional FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, captivate devotees week after week. Contributors to this volume examine the same intricate storylines that challenge viewers. Theoretically sophisticated, however, this book provides a forum for the creative process and a discussion of the state of popular culture as a whole. Part police drama, part horror story, and part science fiction, the show has dared to suggest with great seriousness the incredible charge that the United States government is involved in a vast conspiracy with former Nazi and Japanese scientists to assist alien beings in peforming experiments - including genetic hybridisation - on American citizens. Why does a hit series happen when it does? Is there a connection between the coming and going of "Twin Peaks" and the Bush presidency? It the "X Files" a Clinton-era phenomenon, a product of historical, cultural and psychological factors operative in the mid 1990s? Armed with an arsenal of critical methodology, contributors deal with these and many more topics, among them: folklore and myth; the development of cult TV; the show as a manifestation of a major sea of change in the nature of mass communication; cultural dialogue about law and order, freedom and safety, truth and lies; various feminist interpretations; and finally, drawing on sources as diverse as Foucault, Sartre, and Lacan, the essays examine the show from adaptations of body invasion and vampirism and modern horror films to psychoanalysis and semiotic structuralism.

About this title

About the Author

David Lavery is the author of more than one hundred published essays, chapters, and reviews. He is also coeditor of Screwball Television: Critical Perspectives on Gilmore Girls and Reading Joss Whedon.

Angela Hague is professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University.

Marla Cartwright is the director for the Center of Teaching and Learning at Purdue University Global.

Edition details

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0815627173
• ISBN 13: 9780815627173
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 233
• Editor: Lavery David, Hague Angela, Cartwright Marla