A Theoretical and Historical Account of Media Viewership

FAIN: FT-62129-14

Scott Charles Richmond
Wayne State University (Detroit, MI 48201-1347)

Identifications: On Encountering Others in Media will be a book-length work of film and media theory that offers a new account of viewers' identification with others on a variety of screens, including the cinema, television, and video games. Identifications develops this account by drawing on recent work in media theory, while revisiting the history of film theory. Film theory's influential theoretical account of identification in the 1970s and 1980s has largely been superseded by historicist approaches to viewers' encounters with film. Identifications argues for a specifically theoretical approach, proposing that identification is best understood as an embodied process organized and modulated by media technologies.