Cultures on the Screens: Family, Identity, Gender, and Language in Television Series

Even though the study of television fiction emerged as a relevant field of study in the 1970s, it is especially in the last three decades that attention has increasingly focused on TV series as a sophisticated form of expression and a fertile ground for research into the cultural dynamics that govern the representation of cultural identity, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and the use of language. The present collection originates from a research project, financed by the Department of Humanities of the University of Trieste, whose findings were first shared and debated with scholars from other Italian academic institutions, as well as students and the general public, in the course of a twoday conference held at the “Stazione Rogers” in Trieste, on 15-16 October, 2021. It presents, in amply revised and expanded form, papers which were first presented in that venue and which are representative of a variety of approaches to the study of TV series. The book discusses such acclaimed TV series as The Americans, The Affair, Modern Family, Dragnet, and When They See Us.

Leonardo Buonomo is Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the University of Trieste. He has written widely on nineteenth-century Americanliterature, Italian American literature, and American popular culture. In hispublished writings on television, he has examined such popular series asBewitched, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Six Feet Under, and the TV movieThat Certain Summer. He is currently serving as President of the ItalianAssociation for North American Studies.

Piergiorgio Trevisan is Associate Professor of English Linguistics and Translation at the University of Trieste. His research interests include Stylistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics with a special focus on experimental stimulus design. His latest publications include “Character’s Mental Functioning during a ‘Neuro-Transition’: Pragmatic Failures in ‘Flowers for Algernon’” (2022), “Pedagogical Stylistics through Corpora” (2021), and the monograph Characterisation through Language (2019).