Document Type
Article
Abstract
The task of narrating our memories is a difficult and virtually impossible undertaking, especially since it is often those moments we cannot recall that, in the end, may prove be the most formative. In this paper, I look at what it means to narrativize reminiscences of the televisual viewing experience, as banal encounters that nevertheless shed light on the fragmented nature of our relations in the social world. Despite the ubiquitous presence of television in our everyday lives, its worth is rarely interrogated at the level of the writer/researcher’s subject and of memory. This piece looks not at the substance of television’s programmes, but instead, at how television functions as a site and a screen through which our identities are figured in the presence of (sometimes absent) others. In these narrations, I think of this nomadic dialogue with the self as an act of risky reading, where reading the world of which memories form a part—despite their disposition as inarticulate scramblings—allows us to reconsider the value of our social and psychic relations as dialogic moments of co-construction and ambiguity.
Repository Citation
Lewkowich, David. "Irresolute Intermediaries: Television, Memory, and Weird Frontiers." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 10, no. 4, 2010, pp. 1–14. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol10/iss4/17