Realignment and Televisual Intellect: From 'The Wire' through 'Occupy' to 'Hemlock Grove'

What can the 'golden age' of American television tell us about the transformation of social relations in this age of austerity? I argue that recent television is both a transistor for the American middle-class's emerging realignment with the working-class, as a result of its crisis of social reproduction, and a form of collective social studies thought. Contemporary television has itself analyzed theoretical models of subjectivity and advanced a model of counter-hegemony to replace the semiotics of identification that arose as atopic of scholarly fascination alongside the rise of neoliberalism.

Editor of the collection The Wire: Race, Class, and Genre (University of Michigan Press), Stephen Shapiro teaches in the Department of English & Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. A recent project is a co-translation of The Productive Body (François Guéry and Didier Deleule, 1972), forthcoming in 2014 from Zero Press.

Drinks from 5.00pm.