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Class Divisions
in Serial Television
Edited by
Sieglinde Lemke and
Wibke Schniedermann
Class Divisions in Serial Television
Sieglinde Lemke • Wibke Schniedermann
Editors
Class Divisions in
Serial Television
Editors
Sieglinde Lemke Wibke Schniedermann
University of Freiburg Gießen University
Freiburg, Germany Gießen, Germany
ISBN 978-1-137-59448-8 ISBN 978-1-137-59449-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59449-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958107
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
Cover illustration: © Science Photo Library - MEHAU KULYK. / Getty Images
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
Contents
Introduction: Class Di_visions and the Cultural

Politics of Serial TV 1
Sieglinde Lemke and Wibke Schniedermann
Part I (Di)Vision: “Lower” Class Televisibility 19
Framing Class, Vicarious Living,

and Conspicuous Consumption 21
Diana Kendall
“Hillbillies,” “Welfare Queens,” and “Teen Moms”:

American Media’s Class Distinctions 47
Diana Owen
The Paradoxical Class Politics in Here Comes

Honey Boo Boo 65
Evangelia Kindinger
Reality TV and Its Audiences Reconsidered:

Class and Poverty in Undercover Boss (CBS) 89
Tanja Aho
v
vi Contents
Part II Di*Visions: Screening Exploitation, Neoliberal Lies,

and Class Realignment 119
Lifestyle Precarity and Creative Class Affirmation in Girls 121

Eric C. Erbacher
House of Lies and the Management of Emotions 143

Stefanie Mueller
The Financialization of Domestic Space in Arrested

Development and Breaking Bad 159
Julia Leyda
Realignment and Televisual Intellect: The Telepraxis

of Class Alliances in Contemporary Subscription
Television Drama177
Stephen Shapiro
Index207
List of Figures
Figure 4.1 Honey Boo Boo, series 1, 2012. The city of McIntyre,

introduced by shots of decay 71
Figure 4.2 Honey Boo Boo, series 1, 2012. The Thompson house,
next to the railroad tracks 72
Figure 4.3 Honey Boo Boo, series 1, 2012. The Thompson family
bringing the narrative frame to its collapse 76
Figure 9.1 LaDonna within a Semiotic Totality of Whiteness (Treme) 189
Figure 9.2 Slantwise Gazes in Justified 192
Figure 9.3 Christina’s Lycanthropic Choice (Hemlock Grove) 200
vii
Introduction: Class Di_visions
and the Cultural Politics of Serial TV
Sieglinde Lemke and Wibke Schniedermann
This volume investigates the way depictions of class matters on television

have increased in visibility and complexity since the advent of Reality TV
in the final decade of the twentieth century and Quality TV in the first
two decades of the twenty-first century. Our book argues that the Quality
TV format in particular, with its sophisticated narrative and formal tech-
niques, coincides with equally complex ways of exposing class divisions in
contemporary US life, especially with social, political, and cultural trans-
formations precipitated by the financial crisis. Television—perhaps the
most middle-class of all US media—has begun to turn away from class
denialism and to engage with a broad range of socio-economic issues. The
stereotypical ways in which television programs once framed class—the
lower class in particular—are now supplemented by those dedicated to
exposing the economic and socio-psychological burdens borne by present
day (lower-) middle-class families and individuals. The guiding questions
underlying the analyses in this volume are thus: “how does it [the specific
TV production and class representation] mean?” and how do TV shows
construct class matters? (Mittell p. 339). Jason Mittel’s Complex TV: The
Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling taught the contributors to
S. Lemke (*) • W. Schniedermann

University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
e-mail: sieglinde.lemke@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de
© The Author(s) 2016 1

S. Lemke, W. Schniedermann (eds.), Class Divisions in
Serial Television, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59449-5_1
2 S. LEMKE AND W. SCHNIEDERMANN
this volume to turn to the “operation aesthetics” of these shows. This

leads many contributors to employ close readings of specific episodes in
order to reveal how they function aesthetically. However, the second guid-
ing question targets the class politics these shows articulate: how are class
divisions and relations represented and how do they matter? Hence, we
upend the critical tradition in TV and cultural studies that renders class
matters invisible. With a keen eye on the aesthetic and formal devises the
contributors to Class Divisions in Serial Television zoom in on the cultural
politics of class. We analyze how the different socio-economic classes, their
(lack of) cultural capital, and more generally classism is dealt with and we
also investigate how the excesses of neoliberal capitalism are made visible
in this new form of mass entertainment.
With these general ideas in mind we divided our volume into two parts.
The first part investigates the phenomenon of class visibility particularly
with a focus on the lower end of the class spectrum. The second part tack-
les those incidences when class exploitation and deceit, interpellated by
the neoliberal imperative of success, becomes the subject of TV entertain-
ment. These moments of social critique carry the potential, we believe, to
disrupt or dismantle received forms of class division and class alignment.
We tried to signify graphically the potential to offset the way class is com-
monly understood by choosing “di*visions” as the title for the second part
of this volume. The “di”—albeit not rhyming with re:—and the * suggest
the wildcard nature of viewers’ responses to the televisibility of class and its
potential to dismantle or disrupt received understandings of class matters.
The bracketing of (di) in “visions”—the title for the first part—indicates
that we examine representations of all social classes thereby registering
class divisions and upending the general and academic tradition of class
denialism.
(Di)visions is thus a double articulation; it signifies both the classifi-
cation and the visibility of class in such popular media formats as serial
television.1 Departing from the typical triumphalist and a historical con-
ception of contemporary television as a “golden age,” (Di)visions instead
argues that what we are witnessing is a “new wave” of US television that
brings the complexity of class to the national and global screen. Recent
shows have addressed such class-inflected issues as political corruption
(Scandal, West Wing, Homeland, House of Cards, The Good Wife), cor-
porate greed (House of Lies, Suits, Arrested Development), police brutality
(True Detective), the cruelty of the drug trade (Narcos), and the undemo-
cratic conditions in US prisons (Orange is the New Black). Our volume
INTRODUCTION: CLASS DI_VISIONS AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS... 3
zooms in on visual critiques of class that take the form of satirizing neolib-
eral governance and emotional capitalism (Mueller), or reveal the personal
costs that the neoliberal financialization of daily lives affords (Leyda), or
mock the self-chosen labor exploitation of the creative class (Erbacher).
These televisual critiques have the potential to move viewers beyond the
hegemonic middleclass perspective. Moreover, they can communicate a
character’s aware-ness of his or her position within the larger capitalist
socio-political structure through cinematographic choices with camera
position and angle serving as signifiers of class (Shapiro).
When we think of class and prime time television, we tend to think
of stereotypical representations of working-class families. Consider
Archie Bunker, the working-class hero (or anti-hero) of All in the Family
(1971–1979). A critic of both the women’s movement and people of color,
Archie is represented as culturally conservative and ignorant, a blue-collar
buffoon to whom the show’s middle-class audience could feel superior. In
contrast to the openly classist shows there was also the lesser-known sit-
com Laverne and Shirley (1981–1983) showcasing two financially strug-
gling factory workers who were, according to media scholar Robert Sklar,
“aware of [their] class and of how it functions in their lives” (p. 16). This
might explain why the show ran only for two years. The most popular
sitcom on primetime US television featuring working-class life, however,
was Roseanne (1988–1997). Roseanne and Dan Conner, whose family
home is cluttered and tacky (at least to middle-class taste) and who self-
mockingly talk about their restricted financial means were represented in
a way that was neither objectifying nor dehumanizing. Roseanne displayed
class pride, but certainly not class awareness.
Generally speaking, however, working-class life was rarely televised
on prime time.2 Among the most popular family series running on
prime-time television were Father Knows Best (1954–1960) and The
Cosby Show (1984–1992), which portrayed families who lived comfort-
ably, meaning they had both cultural and economic capital, but only
family quarrels to attend to. Both shows then implicitly advocated the
“American Dream” myth that suggested that anybody, even a black fam-
ily, could make it in the USA if only they tried hard enough. As a form
of mass entertainment financed by selling commercials to middle-class
consumers, it seems logical that the predominant mode of represent-
ing class presupposes middle-class normativity, flattering those viewers
for their material and cultural capital, which presumably grants them a
sense of superiority.
TV in the twenty-first century departs slightly, but noticeably, from

these classist formats. In the first and second decades of the twenty-first
century, a number of serial TV shows have not only increased the visibility
of non-middle-class characters, but have also done so in ways that tran-
scend the cliches of the past.
The Wire (2002–2008) is a prime example of this new trend.3 With
its exceptional setting in Baltimore’s no-go zones, it brings the “truly
disadvantaged” (to use the title of sociologist William Julius Wilson’s book
on class) to national attention. Compared to most TV shows before and
since, its exposure of the USA’s invisible class is both radical and intricate,
coupling narrative complexity with an equally complex cultural politics.
The Wire lacks a narrative center. Since “the action traces what happens
between characters and institutions as they spread outward,” Jason Mittell
suggests that it epitomizes “centrifugal complexity” (p. 222). The way it
portrays race- and class-based destitution, the way it exposes social inequal-
ity as well as institutional corruption (in the police force, the union, and
local politics), has been described as social realism (Mittell p. 221), natu-
ralism (Bieger p. 226), as well as hyperrealism (Havens p. 183). This aes-
thetic strategy enables the show to deviate from middle-class normativity
while maintaining a largely middle-class audience. The Wire’s representa-
tional politics of class disrupts the long-standing media tradition of sym-
bolically annihilating the USA’s precariat and undermines the binary logic
by which the precarious class had previously been portrayed on television.
Like The Wire, Breaking Bad (2008–2014) links narrative complexity
to the televisuality of class. In this case, the White family, a Euro-American
middle-class family, experiences financial volatility due to family patriarch
Walter’s cancer diagnosis and lack of proper health insurance. To save his
family from bankruptcy, Walter enters the drug business. Debuting in
2008, the year of the financial crisis, Breaking Bad brought the financial
vulnerability of the middle class to national attention (just as The Wire had
done for the precarious class). White’s story struck a chord with those mil-
lions of US residents (of all racial backgrounds) who lost their job or home
during the recession.4 It might not be coincidental that a show featuring
a middle-class protagonist falling on hard times received ratings that went
through the roof. What accounts for its tremendous popularity relates
to, in part, the cultural climate but more specifically to the discourse on
inequality and poverty that was prevalent at the time Breaking Bad was
on the air.5 Walter had to take on two jobs to make ends meet; neither his
intelligence nor his work ethic could prevent his impending downward
mobility. Before Walter turned into the bad guy, the veritable recession-
ary rogue, he was a victim of an economy in which hard work and a good
education no longer guaranteed middle-class security. Among the many
who drew attention to this fact was President Obama who commented on
the “dangerous and growing inequality and [the] lack of upward mobil-
ity that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain—that if you
work hard, you have a chance to get ahead” (2013).6 Walter chooses a
criminal route to get ahead and to become upwardly mobile, and his fam-
ily home—once the bulwark and haven of middle-class suburbia—ends up
in the crossfires of the international drug trade. Breaking Bad’s bold way
of representing class matters then corresponds with larger socio-cultural
transformations precipitated by the recession as well as with the president’s
and public’s anxiety over the plight middle-class US-Americans faced in
the years Breaking Bad was broadcasted.
The academy was quick to take an interest in these new developments
within serial television. The period (2008–2013) also saw the emergence
of Quality TV Studies. Within less than a decade, what was once frowned
upon as a “low” form of entertainment had grown into an acclaimed
genre whose denotation “quality” elevated television as an artistic form of
narration that became a valid subject of critique in media, cultural, televi-
sion, and American studies.7
But apart from close readings of The Wire, scholarship has yet to con-
sider what is at stake when “class” enters the picture with Quality TV.8 In
Reality TV studies, however, Helen Wood and Beverley Skeggs’s Reality
Television and Class (2011) show the way this might be done. Among
the many insightful analyses of class matters on Reality TV offered in that
volume, Couldry’s discussion of makeover shows is particularly notewor-
thy as it illustrates the nexus between class matters and neoliberalism. To
Couldry, this reality TV format still invites viewers’ denigration of work-
ing-class life but plays into forms of neoliberal self-governance as it teaches
viewers how “some groups [should] be judged ‘better’ than others: for
example [on account of their] language skills, obesity, levels of education”
(38–39).9 Reality television then allows viewers to embrace new moral
economies, forms of judgment and aspirations, which are stimulated by
the neoliberal imperatives of self-transformation.
In Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, Audience and Value
(2012), Skeggs and Wood further explore the televisual mediation of self-
performance and the symbolic violence some shows exert to examine the
impact reality television has in the social world. With an eye on the class
politics that British reality television enacts, they distinguish the following
narrative formats: Pygmalion, class conflict, class passing, and deserving
poor narratives.10 This helpful typology of class narratives is one way of
approaching class on television. Yet, it does not apply to the shows we
examine in this volume, which cover a wide range of different formats:
fictional and factual television, serial television including genres such as
comedy, drama, Reality TV, sitcom, and satire.
Our volume is less concerned with the impact these shows have
on society than with modi of signification and visual representation.
Its goal is to determine the signifying practices of class televisibility
by drawing attention to both the reception and the production side
of serial television. Some of our contributors devote considerable
attention to how audiences decode televised class matters. Stephen
Shapiro, for instance, differentiates among three modes of teleintel-
lect and telepraxis that define the three major waves in twenty-first-
century fictional TV. And in contrast to Skeggs and Wood, our volume
concentrates on US serial TV, in which American Dream formats and
personal success stories abound. In the few incidences of class conflict
narratives (Skeggs and Wood name Wife Swap as their example) they
are ameliorated by a melodramatic and reconciliatory articulation of
class conflicts as Tanja Aho argues in her discussion of the Reality show
Undercover Boss.
Starting with the basic assumption that any binary account of class
representations on contemporary serial TV (merely contrasting nega-
tive with positive stereotypes) falls short of registering the nuances of
recent depictions of upper-, middle- and working-class life, we organize
our chapters not around stereotypes, tropes, or narrative formats but
according to the way in which class has been approached by most soci-
ologists of the twentieth century: along a stratification model. Our case
studies are presented along the common hierarchical order proceeding
in reverse from the bottom up. We start with analyses of TV shows that
are set in the lower class (Here Comes Honey Boo Boo), move on to the
middle-class (Breaking Bad), and then to so-called upper class settings
and narratives (House of Lies).
The classist stereotypes through which some television programs frame
social classes and particularly the lower class are of course still in place but
they are also supplemented by (reality and quality) television shows that
expose the injuries of class as well as the socio-psychological burden the
current stage of capitalism puts on (lower and middle-class) families and
individuals. In other words, we are concerned with the visibility of class

injuries and how this disrupts our received understanding of class matters.
Middle-class viewers watch these shows not only because they are
persuaded by advertising campaigns, critical hype, or word-of-mouth
recommendations, but also because they take a vicarious interest in the
precarious lives of others. With intricate narrative arcs, in-depth charac-
ter development, and an unflinching way of addressing subjects that used
to be taboo in US television, these shows confront their audiences with
unresolved socio-political issues that do not come cushioned with concil-
iatory solutions by the end of an episode or the season finale. The allure of
contemporary serial and subscription TV—with its multiple, interlocking
and twisted plotlines as well as an open-ended structure with suspense-
generating cliffhangers—provides the bait for viewers to enter landscapes
defined by social inequality. Class Divisions in Serial Television therefore
contributes to the field of serial TV studies as it turns attention to a trend
that manifests in the nexus of complex narrative TV and the complex cul-
tural politics of class.
Among the first scholars to publish a book-length study on media
representations and class in the USA was Diana Kendall. When Framing
Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America appeared
in 2005, Kendall was one of the first to examine the denial of poverty
and class matters in the media. In the cases where the US media por-
trays class it leads viewers to identify with people belonging to a superior
social group. This process is filtered through a set of frames that shape
our understanding of class divisions and economic inequality. These media
frames predispose how we view, and vicariously relate to, the wealthy, the
poor, and everyone else. Each of the five frames, specified in her book, is
organized through a set of stereotypes (for instance the greedy rich, the
lazy poor, the working-class hero) and metaphors (such as sour grapes,
bad apple, and white trash), which explicitly or implicitly prefigure our
understanding of class. The poor and the homeless for example are por-
trayed through the “fragile” frame presenting them either as statistics
(Kendall 2011, p. 100), sympathetic (p. 106), deviant (p. 112), or excep-
tional individuals (p. 121).
We start the volume with a reprint of Kendall’s foundational “Framing
Class, Vicarious Living, and Conspicuous Consumption” because it is
based on a model of class division that follows the sociological stratification
model (developed by Dennis Gilbert and Joseph Kahl) differentiat-
ing between five classes defined in relation to income and educational
background. Our second contribution, Diana Owen’s “American Media’s

Class Distinctions: ‘Hillbillies,’ ‘Welfare Queens,’ and ‘Teen Moms,’” also
based on a classification model, looks at the lower segments of society con-
centrating on negative representations of the poor, specifically in Reality
TV formats such as 16 and Pregnant as well as the controversial but popu-
lar show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Drawing on Maxwell McCombs,
Robert M. Entram, and Dietram A. Scheufele, Owen applies the concept
of framing and the social stratification model to turn our attention to the
depiction of single mothers on welfare.
Owen’s article traces the development of the welfare-queen stereotype
from the 1960s to demonstrate how this stigma has functioned to accuse
African-American women of illegitimately collecting welfare payment as
a political campaign strategy. Owen then builds on the framing approach
to explain how these highly constructed images inexorably impact the
social realities of the USA’s precariat. Structurally, media frames func-
tion to reduce complex social matters into comprehensible units, she
reminds us, but this reduction, while perhaps inevitable when social real-
ities are depicted by the mass media, tends to not only simplify those
realities but also endorse a general disregard towards welfare recipients
that reaffirms middle-class normativity. No wonder the vast majority of
US-Americans self-identify as middle class in spite of empirical evidence
to the contrary. These two essays, which tackle the representation of non-
affluent US-Americans in the media and in television, suggest that class
(di)visions—that is, the televisibility of the “lower” classes—and also class
divisions following the hierarchical logic of class stratification, are salient in
today’s mediascape. They thus call for critical scrutiny and obviously allow
for different interpretations.
Evangelia Kindinger’s “The Paradoxical Class Politics in Here Comes
Honey Boo Boo,” diverges from Owen’s assessment by foregrounding
the paradoxes that shape the class politics of this production. Set in the
poverty-stricken rural South in the small town of McIntyre, Georgia, it
brings visibility to a class and region usually excluded from televised images
as it introduces a middle-class audience to the ‘real’ lives of working-class
and working poor—some might say, white trash—US-Americans living in
the rural South.11 The series’ simple, funny format articulates an intrigu-
ing and contradictory cultural politics of class by purposefully utilizing the
classist slur “redneck” while at the same time affirming and advocating a
“redneck” lifestyle. Through this double strategy Here Comes Honey Boo
Boo deflects the mandate to entertain its middle-class audience through
degrading images of redneck life. Kindinger demonstrates that the pop-

ularity of this show enabled a resignification of the term through its
appropriation by the Thompson family demanding viewers to “better red-
neckognize.” This family is not only caring and charming, it is proud of its
lifestyle whose rituals (beauty pageants, mud rides, farting, couponing) are
usually dismissed as vulgar or petty by dominant (middle-class) cultural
standards. The Thompsons’ transgressive embrace of redneck identity
manifests in their linguistic practices (necessitating a redneck “dictionary”
marketed as part of the considerable franchise of the series), eating habits,
and leisure pastimes. It is also embodied, literally, by the matriarch Mama
June who takes on the role of the family finance manager propagating
her personal household hacks to save money and economize in order to
feed a family of seven whose breadwinner contributes little. The gendered
meaning of redneck connoting poor, white, male farmers is therefore also
rearticulated through a matriarchal twist.
The premise of Undercover Boss, one of the longest-running real-
ity shows on TV, is taken straight from fairytales like “The Prince and
the Pauper”: a CEO in disguise takes entry-level jobs in his own firm.
In “Reality TV and Its Audiences Reconsidered: Class and Poverty in
Undercover Boss,” Tanja Aho observes that the CBS show makes visible
the dire reality of class exploitation in a paternal format with the boss
coming across as the good guy instead of the benefactor of labor surplus.
Since this production eschews openly negative stereotypes and allows for
cultural diversity in its representation of the laboring class, Undercover
Boss might deserve praise for televising the laboring class thereby inviting
a symbolic alignment (as Shapiro would have it) but Aho also spells out
the neoliberal, pro-capitalist message that centers on the hard worker and
the paternal CEO eclipsing the fact that low-entry workers have barely
enough to pay their bills whereas their bosses often live in mansions. Due
to its intended reconciliatory message, sentimental format, and tendency
to personalize the systemic, Undercover Boss deflects criticism concerning
the exploitation of the underpaid and uninsured.
To reassess received television scholarships—surveyed in her over-
view of developments in television studies, audience response theory,
and convergence culture—Aho’s analyzes viewer comments posted on
the show’s Facebook page, where the viewers vehemently discuss labor
rights, workplace security, and social inequality.12 This salient example of
class encounters is about bridging and simultaneously downplaying class
divisions in the USA. This Reality TV show both reveals and disguises
the exploitation of labor, by which wealth is accumulated in a capital-

ist economy, since its sentimental format and happy-endings peak in the
highly-emotional release when the rich man (it is usually a he) praises and
compensates his employee, usually moving him or her to tears.
Class exploitation is also the subject of Lena Dunham’s serial comedy-
drama Girls. This fictional portrait of twenty-something, odd yet com-
pelling female urbanites confronted with college debt and the mounting
threat of economic volatility introduces viewers to the plight of the cre-
ative class. These girls, most of whom were raised in upper-middle class
homes and are therefore bestowed with a high degree of cultural capital
lack the material means that would put them into the upper-middle class
bracket that Eric C. Erbacher suggests (with reference to Richard Florida’s
concept of the creative class) in his contribution “Lifestyle Precarity and
Creative Class Affirmation in the TV Series Girls.” Their precarity, which
results from exploitative work relations and the expectation that creative
work should be offered (almost) free of charge, afflicts the creative class
on a personal level. The hidden injuries of the precarious creative class,
in other words, are pitched to the audience as a lifestyle choice. Erbacher
charges this HBO show with failing to criticize the harmful effects of a
neoliberal creative economy. To him, “the neoliberal dogmas of indi-
vidualism, independence, entrepreneurialism,” which promote the self-
exploitation of that class, are both shown and cancelled out due to its
obstruction of any sense of class awareness.
Erbacher’s reading also exposes the invisible anxiety that haunts a gen-
eration that lives economically, culturally, and psychologically precarious
lives. Featuring the precarious state of the USA’s young educated urban
creative class on primetime cable TV Girls offers more than light enter-
tainment with a postfeminist twist; to the critical beholder it registers the
psychic costs of an economy that is driven by the mandate of (self-)exploi-
tation. Girls then both dramatizes and downplays the effects of a neolib-
eral economy. On a theoretical level, we might add, it also rearticulates
the conventional class stratification model by disrupting a divisionary logic
that would conventionally separate the (low-income) class of the Girls
from the (comfortable) class of their parents.
The psychic injuries of class as well as the shifting terrain of class divi-
sions is also at stake in Julia Leyda’s analysis of Breaking Bad whose main
character Walter White, initially a member of the lower-middle class, even-
tually secures his precarious financial state through spectacular criminal
activities. Her chapter “The Financialization of Domestic Space in Arrested
Development and Breaking Bad,” takes us beyond the class representation

and framing approach to dismantle the capitalist logic that contaminates
the family home and its inhabitants (Breaking Bad). With the escalating
financialization of the home during the 2000s, Leyda reminds us, the
private home has been redefined as an investment that can yield equity;
consequently, whatever is associated with the private, domestic space is
permeated by a financial logic. Homeownership, once the staple of the
American Dream that promised material as well as affective stability, enters
a new, precarious state. Brought about in part by neoliberal ideologies of
self-optimization and profit maximization, the financialization of everyday
life and the home that TV series such as Breaking Bad expose, uses the
drug trade, one of the most lucrative of capitalist businesses, as a vehicle
of both narrative suspense and social critique.
The dehumanizing side of US neoliberalist capitalism is also televised in
Arrested Development, which mocks the lies and scams that produced the
housing bubble. The series’ most salient theme, deception, “operates in
tandem with its innovative form,” Leyda observes in keeping with our vol-
ume’s commitment to explore the nexus of content and form, serial aes-
thetics, and the cultural politics of class. Both shows criticize capitalism’s
greedy, ruthless practices gone awry in a deregulated market, which are
commonly agreed to have brought the USA’s economy to its brink. And
both shows provide allegories of the demise of “the economically pre-
carious white, middle-class, suburban American family.” The fluctuating
nature of class divisions and likelihood of downward mobility is salient in
both Arrested Development and Breaking Bad. While the former comically
portrays an upper-middle-class family in social decline after its patriarch
has been sentenced to prison for committing fraud, the latter’s protagonist
initially threatened by bankruptcy turns into a top dog and recessionary
villain (Sepinwall).
The heinous effects of deceit are further spelled out in Stefanie
Mueller’s “House of Lies and the Management of Emotions.” Set in the
upper class, it primarily features the world of chief executives working in
the financial sector but replaces the sentimental format (of for instance
Undercover Boss) with a more detached mode. As its title indicates, this
Showtime production mocks the way in which the corporate finance sec-
tor makes profit through—as its leitmotif has it—“relationship business.”
To Mueller, the fictional CEO (played by Don Cheadle) provides “an
aggressive masculinity as antidote” to the often-ridiculed feminization
of professional relationships. When African-American protagonist Marty
engages in what is the signature aesthetic feature of the show—the break-

ing of the fourth wall—his consulting lessons teach the audience what
it takes to succeed, but his lessons also satirize a corporate world run by
emotions, specifically by greed, deceit, and mendaciousness. Mueller infers
that this show “offers an emotional training site for its audience” to train
the emotional habitus necessary to succeed in the professional sphere. But
it also exposes its negative effects as it affects the private sphere eroding
vital social values as trust.
Mueller draws on Eva Illouz’s concept of emotional capitalism to dis-
cuss how the psychic costs of neoliberal governance are both revealed
and ridiculed in serial TV productions like House of Lies. The glamor and
allure of the upper class is deflected by the self-exposed lies and cruel
attitude of Marty and his like, thereby inviting the audience to disengage
or disaffect from the affluent class and thus possibly to engage in an act
of realignment. Mueller then implicitly supports Steven Shapiro’s thesis
that subscription television’s engagement with class offers a laboratory for
financially volatile viewers, under economic erasure in recession-era USA,
to practice new class alignments.
In “Realignment and Televisual Intellect: The Telepraxis of Class
Alliances in Contemporary Subscription Television Drama” Shapiro pro-
vides us with a valuable concept that captures the shifting of class di*visions
regarding the telepraxis of serial TV for it allows viewers to take an interest
in, without necessarily identifying with, classes that are considered inferior
to their own. Their own sense of financial insecurity makes viewers enter
a symbolic alliance with the precarious class while still holding on to their
self-proclaimed class affiliation. Not necessarily aware of class exploitation
or conflicts, viewers tune in to serial TV shows that portray the pain of
others or feature social critique in compelling ways thereby offering an
incentive for class realignment.
Moreover, Shapiro offers an overview of the new “Golden Age” of
television by distinguishing three “waves,” each of which combines tele-
visual intellect and telepraxis in its own distinct ways. The first wave is
predominantly defined by HBO productions such as David Simon’s The
Wire and Treme. The second wave includes dramas such as Justified whose
narrative structure and styles of camerawork differ from those employed
in the first wave (as his contrastive readings of three scenes taken from
The Wire, Treme, and Justified demonstrate). The second wave alters “the
visual optics of subjectivity” and thus diverges from semiotic paradigms,
namely the interpellatory model of subjectivity media scholars mostly use
to assess class alliances. Subscription television’s third-wave dramas such as

Hemlock Grove elicit middle-class alignment with the working class while
also shifting loyalties beyond the personal towards previously derided
social classes.
To conclude, the two parts of Class Divisions on Serial Television pro-
pose that reality and quality TV’s intricate politics of class entices view-
ers to grapple with previously invisible socio-economic realities and to
reconsider their class alignment. Again, it looks at the ways in which class
is decoded by viewers, how the scripted meanings diverge from actual
viewer’s responses, and how these shows offer socio-political critiques
and disrupt the hegemonic order of class.13 As such our volume also
invites a rethinking of the stratification model of class, which is shared
widely among sociologists of the twentieth century and today’s public but
has been modified by among others Pierre Bourdieu and intersectional
scholars.14 The contributors to this volume extricate the various, shift-
ing, sliding and complex ways in which class matters, divisions, and forms
of exploitation have been screened. The financial precarity of the USA’s
(lower-) middle-class has, among other factors, functioned as a driver for
the curiosity and concern with the televised “lower” classes. This, lesser-
noticed, account for the popularity of serial television in our time might
well be something worth exploring further.
Notes
1. For an industry whose revenues are estimated to amount to $145 billion,
the very presence of class matters is a remarkable phenomenon. On this
number, see Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 22:4,
2008. Given that this article was published in 2008 and that its prognosis
of the estimated revue of serial TV most likely exceeds that number, it is
perhaps indicative that no account of actual revenues can be found online.
2. In Media Messages: What Film, Television, and Popular Music Teach Us About
Race, Class, Gender, and Sexual Orientation (Routledge, 2015), Linda
Holtzmann and Leon Sharpe cite a quantitative study on class representa-
tions in family-based situation comedies broadcasted between 1946–1990,
which revealed that 11 percent of the 262 analyzed shows dealt with work-
ing-class families and 70 percent with middle-class families (p. 183), from
which they infer the “phenomenon of overrepresentation of the wealthy and
underrepresentation of the working class and poor [throughout those] years
of prime time television’s portrayal of economic class” (p. 184).
3. This one show has single handedly elicited a wave of scholarly attention
and has been the subject of numerous conferences including The Wire as
Social Science Fiction? (University of Leeds, November 26–27, 2009),
Race and Justice: The Wire (Harvard Law School, April 29, 2011), The
Wire: visages du ghetto, entre fiction et sciences sociales (Université Paris
Ouest, October 26–27, 2012), and Screening Class (University of Freiburg,
June 28–29, 2013) also used The Wire as a starting point to “sound out”
matters of class. Several contributors to this volume presented their work
at that conference. And more recently, Yale University organized Urban
Narratives of Injustice: On The Wire (November 6, 2015). The authorita-
tive study to date is Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro’s The Wire: Race,
Class, and Genre (University of Michigan Press, 2012).
4. Following Gosselin’s diagnosis of the financially precarious situation most
US residents experienced at the time the crisis hit, it might be safer to
argue that the middle class could relate to the fictional Walter White whose
personal downfall was triggered by his cancer diagnosis and the lack of a
health insurance that would cover the treatment. His fate resonates with
the anxieties a financially volatile middle class burdened by student loans,
mortgage and credit card debt experienced in the teens.
5. See Lemke, Sieglinde. Poverty, Inequality, and Precarity in Contemporary
American Culture. New York: Palgrave. Forthcoming 2016.
6. See President Barack H. Obama, “Remarks by the President on Economic
Mobility.” THEARC, Washington, DC. December 4, 2013. The White
House. The White House, June 2014.
7. When Janet McCabe and Kim Akass organized a conference on what was
(in 2004) considered a “new” form of entertainment, their colleagues
snickered over the idea of ‘quality’ on television (pp. 1–2). Among the
most influential publications are Robert Thompson’s Television’s Second
Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER (Syracuse University Press, 1997);
Amanda D. Lotz’s The Television Will be Revolutionized (NYU Press,
2008), Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon’s 2005, The Contemporary
Television Series (Edinburgh University Press), Jennifer Gillan’s 2010
Television and New Media: Must-Click TV (Routledge), Brett Martin’s
Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The
Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (Penguin Press,
2013), and probably most importantly Jason Mittell’s 2009 Television and
American Culture (Oxford University Press) and his 2015 book Complex
TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York
University Press) as well as Frank Kelleter’s Serial Agencies: The Wire and
its Readers (John Hunt Publishing 2014 reprint). For publications in
German, see for instance Die neue amerikanische Fernsehserie: Von Twin
Peaks bis Mad Men (Dustin Breitenwischer et al., Paderborn: Fink, 2014)
or Laura Bieger’s 2011 article “ ʻItʼs All in the Gameʼ—David Simons The
Wire als naturalistische Krisenerzählung” (see also bibliography).
8. For class matters in The Wire see: Potter, Tiffany and C.W. Marshall. The
Wire: Urban Decay and American Television. London/New York:
Continuum, 2009; and: Kennedy, Liam and Stephen Shapiro. The Wire:
Race, Class, and Genre. University of Michigan Press, 2012.
9. Lisa Blackman makes a similar point discussing televisual affect in the same
volume. She cites Couldry and Ouellette on the “choice-making neo-lib-
eral” (qtd. in Blackman p. 239), and builds on more recent work (includ-
ing McRobbie 2005; Jensen 2010) to claim that through reality TV shows
class-based distinctions and “[d]ifferences to middle-class consumer, citi-
zen and lifestyle norms are understood to be enacted through forms of
symbolic violence, which involve the denigration of working-class tastes
and habitus and their replacement with those consistent with the “choice-
making neo-liberal” (qtd. in Blackman p. 239). The point Couldry makes
in his contribution to Reality Television and Class (2011) is slightly differ-
ent but related as he claims that “[reality TV acts out] in public the judg-
ment process whose injuries an earlier sociology had treated as hidden”
(p. 38). Referencing Richard Sennett’s and Jonathan Cobb’s classic The
Hidden Injuries of Class, he then goes on to claim that reality TV is “[sup-
planting] general accounts of social, political and economic conditions
[…], replacing them with a new mode of social ‘knowledge’,” prefigured
in reality TV shows, which affirms neoliberal mandates (p. 38).
10. Their list deserves to be quoted at length: “Pygmalion narratives (from
female pauper to proper lady) structure many shows like Ladette to Lady,
From Asbo Teen to Beauty Queen, class conflict is set up in Wife Swap and
Holiday Showdown or class passing is encouraged in a show like Faking It.
Secret Millionaire is a Channel 4 format in which a millionaire goes under-
cover in a poor community to decide who deserves his/her help in the
form of large quantities of money, revealed at the end of the show in emo-
tive moments of tears and gratitude, which resonates with earlier narratives
of the deserving poor (p. 36).
11. See also Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, eds. White Trash: Race and Class
in America. New York: Routledge, 1997.
12. When Aho teases out the active involvement of viewers, she implicitly
upends the classist tradition in media criticism that goes back to Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s notorious attack of the cultural industry,
siding with those (cultural studies) scholars who acknowledge the agency
and critical engagement of the audience in decoding these shows.
13. House of Lies satirizes the homoeconomicus as emotionally dysfunctional;
Arrested Development and Breaking Bad reveal the destructive psychologi-
cal effects that ensue when the private and the public are no longer sepa-
rate spheres and when deceit infiltrates love and family life; Girls showcases
how the creative class justifies its own exploitation of labor; Here Comes
Honey Boo Boo busts old frames and classist stereotypes of the redneck (and
the fat female body as class marker) as it exaggerates the class differences
(between protagonists and viewers) while drawing attention to it in an
utterly unapologetic manner.
14. Seen from a historical perspective the class stratification model, which
evolved in the mid-twentieth century (W. Lloyd Warner, Erik Olin Wright),
calculates class by differentiating between three to seven—depending on
the sociological approach—socio-economic levels per groups. Towards the
later part of that century it was modified to accommodate not only material
factors but also increasingly social and cultural forms of capital (Bourdieu).
By the dawn of the twenty-first century, a growing number of US sociolo-
gists (Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins) also started to take into
account intersections between class belonging and other categories of social
inequality such as race, gender, age. As early as 1976, feminist scholar Heide
Hartmann started to investigate the interrelation of class, capitalism, and
patriarchy. Gender-based divisions and class-based divisions—the hierarchi-
cal division of labor, like that of gender—amount to forms of subjugation,
Hartmann argues, that are organized through “the partnership of patriar-
chy and capital.” See Heide Hartmann, “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and the
Subordination of Women” (1976) in Ronda F. Levine.
Bibliography
Bieger, Laura. 2011. ʻItʼs All in the Gameʼ—David Simons The Wire als naturalis-
tische Krisenerzählung. In American Dream? Eine Weltmacht in der Krise., eds.
Winfried Fluck and Andreas Etges, 215–240. München: Campus. Print.
Blackman, Lisa. 2011. ‘This is a Matter of Pride’: The Choir: Unsung Town and
Community Transformation. In Reality Television and Class, eds. Beverley
Skeggs and Helen Wood, 237–249. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Print.
Couldry, Nick. 2011. Class and Contemporary Forms of ‘Reality’ Production, or
Hidden Injuries of Class. In Reality Television and Class., eds. Beverley Skeggs
and Helen Wood, 33–44. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Print.
Gosselin, Peter. 2008. High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American
Families. New York: Basic Books. Print.
Havens, Timothy. 2013. Black Television Travels: African American Media
Around the Globe. New York: New York University Press. Print.
Holtzmann, Linda, ed. 2015. Media Messages: What Film, Television, and Popular
Music Teach Us About Race, Class, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. New York:
Routledge.
Kendall, Diana E. 2005. Framing Class, Vicarious Living, and Conspicuous

Consumption. In Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty
in America. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Print.
——— 2011. Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in
America., 2nd edn. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Print.
McCabe, Janet, ed. 2007. Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and
Beyond. London: Tauris. Print.
Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television
Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Print.
Sepinwall, Alan. 2015. Sepinwall on Mad Men and Breaking Bad: An eShort from
the Updated Revolution Was Televised. New York: Touchstone. n.p. EPUB file.
Skeggs, Beverley, and Helen Wood, eds. 2011. Reality Television and Class.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Print.
———. 2012. Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, Audience and Value.
New York: Routledge. Print.
Sklar, Robert. 1982. Prime-time America: Life on and Behind the Television Screen.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. Print.
Wilson, William Julius. 1990. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the
Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Print.
(Di)Vision: “Lower” Class
Televisibility
Framing Class, Vicarious Living,
and Conspicuous Consumption
Diana Kendall
The world leadership qualities of the USA, once so prevalent, are fading
faster than the polar ice caps. We once set the standard for industrial might,
for the advanced state of our physical infrastructure, and for the quality of
our citizens’ lives. All are experiencing significant decline … At a time when
a college education is needed more than ever to establish and maintain
a middle-class standard of living, America’s young people are moving in
exactly the wrong direction … Instead of exercising the appropriate mental
muscles, we’re allowing ourselves to become a nation of nitwits, obsessed
with the coming and going of Lindsay Lohan and increasingly oblivious to
crucially important societal issues that are all but screaming for attention
…. We no longer know how to put our people to work. We read less and
less and write like barbarians. We’ve increasingly turned our backs on the
very idea of hard-won excellence while flinging open the doors to deca-
dence and decline. No wonder Lady Gaga and Snooki from “Jersey Shore”
are cultural “heroes”.1
These words from New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a piece titled
“Putting Our Brains on Hold” may sound harsh; however, for many years,
Herbert has framed his articles and blogs to call attention to numerous
pressing social problems worldwide, including vast and growing economic
D. Kendall (*)
Baylor University, Waco, TX, USA
© The Author(s) 2016 21

S. Lemke, W. Schniedermann (eds.), Class Divisions in
Serial Television, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59449-5_2
22 D. KENDALL
inequality, high rates of un- and underemployment, and massive home-

lessness and poverty. It is no surprise, therefore, that Herbert’s words have
become more strident as he has wearied of being a lone voice in the wil-
derness calling for significant changes before these major economic and
social problems overcome us. The first edition of Framing Class, pub-
lished in 2005, argued that the media often trivialize heavy topics, such as
class and social inequality. Clearly, journalists like Herbert are the excep-
tion to this statement, and more media have shifted their framing of class-
related articles and entertainment programs as the USA has experienced
persistent economic problems in the 2000s.
The first edition of Framing Class also posited that the media encour-
age overconsumption among people of all classes, particularly those
who seek to emulate the rich—whether or not they can afford to do
so. Chapter 7 of Framing Class began with a TV critic’s statement that
Paris Hilton, a wealthy celebrity and occasional reality TV star, like oth-
ers who are “famous for being famous,” could take “the heaviest of top-
ics and make them weightless as a social X-ray.”2 That critic’s point was
well made: media representations of inequality frequently make light
of the problems of the poor and working class while emphasizing the
values and virtues of the middle class and celebrating the luxurious life-
styles and material possessions of those in the top tier of the social hier-
archy, regardless of how they may have accumulated these possessions.
Previously, I placed most of the blame on journalists, entertainment
writers, and web content providers who seemed insensitive or oblivious
to class-based inequality:
Rather than providing a meaningful analysis of inequality and showing realis-

tic portrayals of life in various social classes, the media either play class differ-
ences for laughs or sweep the issue of class under the rug so that important
distinctions are rendered invisible. By ignoring class or trivializing it, the
media involve themselves in a social construction of reality that rewards the
affluent and penalizes the working class and the poor.3
Although my newer data largely confirm this statement, the Great

Recession of the 2000s, for which there was no end in sight as of 2011,
is apparently affecting how some journalists, bloggers, and entertainment
writers represent the growing economic problems of individuals and the
nation as a whole.
FRAMING CLASS, VICARIOUS LIVING, AND CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION 23
Throughout Framing Class, I have provided many examples of how the

media frame class and the messages these framing devices may convey to
audiences. In this chapter I look at the sociological implications of how
framing contributes to our understanding of class and leads us either to
try to emulate other people or to take the ostrich approach, sticking our
heads in the sand and ignoring the everyday realities that surround us.
First, we look at two questions: How do media audiences understand and
act upon popular culture images or frames? Do we understand class differ-
ently today because of these frames?
Media Framing and the Performance of Class

in Everyday Life
In a mass-mediated culture such as ours, the media do not simply mirror

society; rather, they help to shape it and to create cultural perceptions.4 The
blurring between what is real and what is not encourages people to emulate
the upper classes and shun the working class and the poor. Television shows,
magazines, and newspapers sell the idea that the only way to get ahead is
to identify with the rich and powerful and to live vicariously through them.
From sitcoms to reality shows, the media encourage ordinary people to
believe that they may rise to fame and fortune; they too can be the next
winner of the lottery or American Idol. Constantly bombarded by stories
about the lifestyles of the rich and famous, viewers feel a sense of intimacy
with elites, with whom they have little or no contact in their daily lives.5
According to social critic bell hooks, we over-identify with the wealthy
because the media socialize us to believe that people in the upper classes
are better than we are. The media also suggest that we owe no allegiance to
people in our own class or to those who are less fortunate.6
Many people’s reading and viewing habits and their patterns of con-
sumption reflect vicarious living—that is, the tendency to watch how
other individuals live rather than to experience life for ourselves—through
media representations of wealth and success. According to hooks, televi-
sion promotes hedonistic consumerism:
Largely through marketing and advertising, television promoted the myth

of the classless society, offering on one hand images of an American dream
fulfilled wherein any and everyone can become rich and on the other sug-
gesting that the lived experience of this lack of class hierarchy was expressed
by our equal right to purchase anything we could afford.7
24 D. KENDALL
As hooks suggests, equality does not exist in contemporary society, but

media encourage audiences to view themselves as having an “equal right”
to purchase items that will somehow render them equal to people above
them in the social-class hierarchy. However, the catch is that we must actu-
ally be able to afford these purchases. Manufacturers and the media have
dealt with this problem by offering relatively cheap products that buyers
can purchase without actually having the money to pay for them.8
The media’s framing of stories about class does make a difference in
how we think about other people and how we spend our money. Media
frames constitute a mental shortcut (schema) that helps us formulate our
thoughts.
The Upper Classes: Affluence and Consumerism

Make People Happy
Although some media frames show the rich and famous in a negative man-
ner, they still glorify the material possessions and lifestyles of the upper
classes. Research has found that people who extensively watch television
have exaggerated views of how wealthy most US residents are and of the
material possessions they own. Studies have also found that extensive tele-
vision viewing leads to higher rates of spending and lower savings, pre-
sumably because television stimulates consumer desires.9
For many years, most media framing of stories about the upper classes
has been positive, ranging from consensus framing, which depicts the
wealthy as being like everyone else, to admiration framing, which por-
trays them as generous, caring individuals. The frame most closely associ-
ated with rampant consumerism is emulation framing, which suggests that
people in all classes should reward themselves with a few of the perks of
the wealthy, such as a larger house, a more luxurious vehicle, or better jew-
elry. The writers of television shows like Platinum Weddings, The Fabulous
Life, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians rely heavily not only on admi-
ration framing but on price-tag framing, according to which a person’s
worth is measured by what he or she owns and how many assistants cater
to his or her whims. In this world, the people with the most expensive
limousines, yachts, and jets are declared the winners in life. Reality shows
like American Idol, America’s Got Talent, and The Apprentice suggest that
anyone can move up the class ladder and live like the rich if he or she
displays the best looks, greatest talent, or sharpest entrepreneurial skills.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
they advanced across the plain of Marathon with leveled spears to
fall upon the heathen horde that came to plunder and destroy. To
commemorate the splendid victory of Miltiades over Darius, of
enlightened civilization over brutish barbarism, the Athenians erected
a mound on that historic plain, and as a special and the highest mark
of honor buried their heroes where they had fallen. The light of
Athens has gone out forever; her glory has departed, never to return;
her power has vanished, never to be regained; the voice of her
sublime philosophers and peerless orators is heard no more; the
language of Homer and Demosthenes lives only in immortal type,
the priceless heritage of the human race; the matchless art of
Phidias and Praxiteles is of the past, and the unapproached
masterpieces of the Parthenon have been eaten away by the
gnawing tooth of irreverent time; a melancholy gloom of utter
desolation and departed splendor broods over the “City of the Violet
Crown,” the once first and proudest city in the world. But, after a
lapse of more than twenty centuries,—centuries which have seen the
death of the old and the birth of the new civilizations, the rise and fall
of dynasties, the creation and decay of empires,—after a lapse of
more than twenty centuries the earthen mound at Marathon still
remains, clad to-day in the flowers of spring, an eternal witness to
the valor and heroism of Athens, a solemn reminder that those who
die in defense of Liberty and Country shall not perish from the
memory of men.
Let the monument to our heroes be the land they saved, domed
and canopied by the heavens that smiled upon their cause. For so
long as the sun in his coming kisses and glorifies that blessed
banner, or, sinking, burnishes our mountain tops with crimson gold;
so long as yonder waves roll inward to break and die upon the shore;
so long as the American heart beats to the transports of a true and
lofty patriotism, or man has aspirations of light and liberty; so long as
the nation lives; so long as the flag of Washington and Lincoln is in
the sky,—even so long will our heroes’ fame survive and be an
inspiration to the Union’s sons forever and forever.
SENATOR VEST’S EULOGY ON THE DOG

“Gentlemen of the Jury: The best friend a man has in this world
may turn against him and become his enemy. His son and daughter
that he has reared with loving care may become ungrateful. Those
who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our
happiness and our good name, may become traitors to their faith.
The money that a man has he may lose. It flies away from him when
he may need it most. Man’s reputation may be sacrificed in a
moment of ill considered action. The people who are prone to fall on
their knees and do us honor when success is with us may be the first
to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our
heads. The one absolutely unselfish friend a man may have in this
selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never
proves ungrateful or treacherous, is the dog.
“Gentlemen of the Jury: A man’s dog stands by him in prosperity
and poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold
ground, when the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if
only he may be near his master’s side. He will kiss the hand that has
no food to offer, he will lick the wounds and sores that come in
encounter with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of
his pauper master as if he were a prince.
“When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take
wings and reputation falls to pieces he is as constant in his love as
the sun in its journey through the heavens. If fortune drives the
master forth an outcast into the world, friendless and homeless, the
faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him,
to guard him against danger, to fight against his enemies, and when
the last scene of all comes and death takes his master in its
embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all
other friends pursue their way, there by his graveside will the noble
dog be found, his head between his paws and his eyes sad, but
open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true even to death.”
CHAPTER XIV
PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS FOR THE AFTER-DINNER SPEAKER
The practice of speaking at the banquet table is an ancient

custom. In modern life it is the most universally used form of public
speaking. Every educated man and woman sooner or later will be
expected to take part in post-prandial occasions. This need not be
an irksome task for any provided they consider carefully a few vital
essentials, keeping in mind that the after-dinner speech is primarily
to please. If it ever be to instruct, it is that kind of instruction which
comes by the stimulation of our higher sensibilities.
Essentials:
1. Have something worth while to say.
2. This something must be appropriate to the occasion and to the
guests.
3. Know who are to be present and who are to speak.
4. Know how much time is allotted you.
5. Strive your utmost to enjoy yourself and let what you say appear
as a spontaneous outgrowth of your environment.
6. Avoid using old jokes and hackneyed quotations.
7. Avoid stiff formality. Radiate kindliness and good fellowship
toward all.
8. Do not apologize. Let your appreciations and the fact that “some
one else could have responded better,” that “you are unprepared,”
etc., be taken for granted. Don’t waste time on these follies. Get
down to business.
9. Have your speech carefully prepared and stick to it.
10. Remember that this is a time that reveals your true self, so let
the best in you shine forth.
Let us discuss more fully some of the more important essentials.
One should never begin his speech with an apology. How boresome
it is to hear a speaker express surprise at being called upon;
regretting he is totally unprepared; telling us that some one else
could have spoken on this subject far better than he, etc., etc., etc.
This is never in place and it is never necessary. On one occasion
many prominent men and women were banqueting together in
Chicago. Dr. George Vincent, then a member of the faculty of the
University of Chicago, an orator himself of no mean ability, was
toastmaster. A program of unusual length had been prepared. Under
any ordinary chairman it would have kept the guests there until
morning. Dr. Vincent arose, and in a clear, brief and terse
introduction called attention to the long program. Then he said,
addressing the speakers who sat at his table: “Each of you can give
us the heart of your message in three, certainly not more than four
minutes. I shall expect you, therefore, to go right to the heart of your
subject. We will take it for granted that you are not prepared, that
some one else could do better than you, and all the rest of the
apologetic introductions. The moment your time is up I shall bring
down the gavel as a forceful reminder that you must stop.”
The result was wonderful. Every speaker did as the chairman
required. The audience heard a dozen or more bright, snappy
addresses, full of thought and wit, with scarcely a redundant word.
What otherwise would have been a long, tedious and wholly
wearisome occasion was converted into a function of grace, a noble
inspiration and a never-to-be-forgotten spiritual uplift.
Let the after-dinner speaker note that his speech should seem to
grow naturally out of the environment and fit the occasion and the
guests—that is, it should be appropriate. The manner of presenting it
should be genial and kindly. This is no time or place to give vent to
any personal animosity or didacticism. There is no disposition,
Nature says, for a man with a well-filled stomach to digest heavy
intellectual food. He would much rather be amused and entertained
—that is, the occasion is a convivial one. Do not mistake this to
mean triviality. Above all things, whatever you say or whatever you
do, do not be frivolous. And finally that indispensable quality
originality should distinguish both the matter and the manner of each
speaker. This may mean nothing more than a new way of presenting
an old subject.
The very fact that an after-dinner speech should be short,
sparkling and fit the one who delivers it, makes it a difficult form of
public address, and consequently necessitates very careful
preparation. It is more than “to tell a joke, make a platitude and give
a quotation.” While the after-dinner speech is supposed, primarily, to
please, and certainly should do so, it is often made the means of
conveying the most forceful lessons in business, religion, and
patriotism. But when, in conveying these lessons, the speaker
becomes prosy, or fails to please, he is out of place and should
never have been invited.
CHAPTER XV
THE CULTIVATION OF THE MEMORY
Nothing is of greater importance to the intelligent and thoughtful

man or woman who would become a public speaker than the
cultivation of the memory. Its pleasures and joys are no less than its
importance and usefulness. Well might Richter exclaim:
“Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned
out.” How it brings back to us joys of sights, sounds and emotions.
One has been thrilled with a gorgeous landscape, a brilliant and vivid
sunset, a majestic mountain, a vision of feminine beauty, or an
inspiring exhibition of physical prowess. He has seen the proud
march of armed men, or the gathering of gay and happy throngs in
the public play-grounds and parks. A thousand memories of sights
bring back joys and delights of other days. So is it with the memories
of sounds—concerts, symphonies, stirring songs, martial music, and
the sweet voices of loved ones passed away.
It can readily be seen that memory is the practical basis of all
knowledge. Indeed there is no conscious knowledge without
memory. No man can think without it; there is no business success;
no writing, no poetry, no literature, no oratory, no conversation, no
music, no art, no psychology, no anything of mental life without
memory. Without memory there is no identity. If I cannot remember
myself of an hour ago, of yesterday, of many yesterdays, I cannot be
a personality. Life would be disconnected and therefore incoherent
and useless.
A poor memory is ever a hindrance if not a positive curse. It is as if
one’s legs should fail to bear him up when he starts to walk, run,
leap, or as if his eyes should refuse to see, or saw but dimly when he
wished to observe. It is a never-ending cause of confusion,
embarrassment, irritation, and loss. No man in any walk of life ever
yet succeeded without a good memory, and many a public speaker
owes his success to his always ready power over this faculty.
Abraham Lincoln is a striking example of this truth.
Stokes’s Golden Rule of Memory
Psychologists have not yet determined what the memory is, but all
are agreed that it can be cultivated. A few general propositions can
be laid down, which, if faithfully followed, are certain to bring desired
results. Stokes, the great memory teacher of the Royal Polytechnic
Institution of London, formulated his golden rule of memory as
follows: “Observe, reflect, link thought with thought, and think of the
impressions.”
Strengthening the Observation

Careful observation is the basis of memory. To observe is to
regard with attention, to note with interest, in other words to see well.
How many people are there who see well? All persons who are not
blind can see, but do they see well? It must be confessed that good
observers are rare, and that is one reason why good memories are
rare. The discipline of the observation is one of the most important
ends of all mental education. Teach a child to observe and he can
and will educate himself. Indeed he cannot help becoming educated.
Without discipline of the observation one may pass through ten
colleges and yet remain uneducated. What is the reason the Indian
can follow a trail so much better than a white man? His life has
depended upon his powers of observation. From the earliest days of
his dawning intelligence his perceptive faculties were aroused and
highly developed by the struggle for his very existence. He was
compelled to watch the animals in order that he might avoid those
that were dangerous, and catch those that were good for food; to
follow the flying birds that he might know when to trap them. He
watched the fishes as they spawned and hatched; the insects as
they bored and burrowed; the plants and trees as they grew and
budded, blossomed and seeded. The tracks of animals, whether
upon the sand, the snow, the mud, or more solid earth, soon became
familiar signs to him. All these and many other things in nature he
learned to know thoroughly in his simple and primitive manner. This
knowledge in his daily struggle for existence came by means of his
attention to details. Hence to the untrained white man his powers of
observation seem little short of marvelous.
Children from their earliest years should be taught with systematic
persistence to cultivate this faculty. They should be urged to tell all
they can see in pictures. A table spread with diverse articles covered
with a cloth is also a good means of disciplining close attention and
memory. Let the children stand around it and, after removing the
cloth, give them a minute, or less, for observation, then re-cover.
Then give each child a chance to tell how many articles there are;
what they are; and what is their relative position to each other, etc.
An intelligent teacher will invent a score of devices for cultivation of
the powers of observation, and nothing will better repay her
endeavors.
Henry Ward Beecher used to illustrate the difference between
observers and non-observers by telling a tale of two city lads whom
he once sent out into the country. One he called “Eyes” and the other
“No Eyes.” Each was to go to a certain place and report upon what
he saw. The one on his return had seen little. The other—Eyes—was
filled to overflowing with the things he had observed.
It is undoubtedly due to the development of this faculty that the
hat-boys and hotel clerks are able to call the guests by name and
return to them their own belongings.
Read the novels of Frank Norris, of Jack London, of Winston
Churchill or any successful writer, the lines of any truly great poet,
and the ordinary mind cannot fail to be impressed with the wonderful
store of knowledge gleaned from a thousand and one sources
possessed by their writers. Think of the wealth of observations
poured forth by a Shakspere, a Browning, a Goethe. Every page
contains them by the score—observations of facts in nature, art,
science, literature, human action, and indeed of everything under the
sun. Hence, if you would be an educated man you must observe.
Suggestive Methods to Pursue

To discipline the power of observation, begin consciously to see
and then immediately to test your own remembrance of what you
see. See slowly, see surely. Be sure you have seen correctly. There
is so much uncertainty in all of our mental processes. If it is a pile of
books you are seeing, be sure, positive, that there are eleven. Do
not content yourself by saying there are about ten or twelve and let it
go at that. Note their size, color of their bindings, and, if possible,
note each title.
There are some librarians who seldom forget a book after once
seeing it, and can tell not only its appearance, but its place on the
book shelves, and the appearance of its neighbors on either side.
This is one of the qualifications of an efficient library assistant. What
is true of the librarian is likewise true of other people. What makes
the difference between an efficient clerk in a book-store and one who
is merely passable? It is this power of observation and memory
which makes his knowledge of books held in stock reliable.
Let us continue our suggestions. In looking over a landscape be
definite in your seeing. Be sure that the river is to the left, and not to
the right; that a certain tree is a sycamore, and not a poplar; that the
green on the hillside is the young, fresh green of the dawn of the
spring, rather than the richer green of the summer. What is it that
makes the landscape artist? His power to portray depends upon his
ability to discern and observe. The poet and orator do the same, but
they make their pictures with words and phrases instead of pigments
and canvas.
In seeing anything, get hold of every fact possible—size, position,
color, relative importance, and, then, before you conclude your
observations, close your eyes and reconstruct the scene mentally.
Do this over and over again, until you add and add to your mental
picture things you had before failed to see. Do not merely catalogue
mentally, but see everything in its own place, in full detail, and in its
relation to every other thing. A comparatively short period of this kind
of discipline will enable you to do things that will not only astound
your friends, but will be a source of infinite pleasure and, if used
intelligently in your business or profession, profit to yourself.
The same principle applies in reading. Read slowly. Be sure you
understand. Grasp every idea thoroughly. To do this you must learn
to picture mentally. You should compel yourself to make a mental
picture of every scene described. You are reading Victor Hugo’s “Les
Miserables.” You come to his incomparable description of the battle
of Waterloo. He tells us at the very commencement that it was the
rain that gained the victory at Waterloo. Observation and reflection
on Hugo’s part made it possible for him to make this declaration.
Carefully observe this statement and what follows.
Picture that great plain, the undulating sweep of ground. Place the
two armies, and then see the attack begin on Hougomont. Watch the
changing scene with your mental eyes. Follow Hugo as he describes
the general confusion from noon until four o’clock in the afternoon.
Now prepare yourself for a great picture of a tremendous day. See
Wellington’s disposal of his troops on the farther side of a long hill,
on the crest of which was a deep trench caused by a road whose
ruts during the centuries had worn down into the earth ten, twenty or
more feet. On the near side of this hill Napoleon’s cavalry are
ascending—three thousand five hundred of them, colossal men on
colossal horses. On, up, they sweep. They seem as irresistible as
the passing cyclone. Just as they reach the crest, to their horror they
discover this trench between themselves and the English. Let Hugo’s
own words now complete the picture for you:
It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there,

unexpected, yawning, directly under the horses’ feet, two
fathoms deep between its double slopes; the second file
pushed the first into it, and the third pushed on the second;
the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their
haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and
overwhelming the riders; and there being no means of retreat,
—the whole column being no longer anything more than a
projectile,—the force which had been acquired to crush the
English crushed the French; the inexorable ravine could only
yield when filled; horses and riders rolled pell-mell, grinding
each other, forming but one mass of flesh in this gulf: when
this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them
and passed on. Almost a third of Dubois’s brigade fell into that
abyss.
Take an illustration from the American novel—“Ramona.” Get a

real picture in your mind of the appearance of the country. See the
sheep with their lambs in the fields under the trees. Determine what
size, shape, and color these trees are. Picture Juan Can, the
foreman or major-domo, listen to his voice, so that you can definitely
sense what kind of impression it makes upon your mental ear. Do
the same with the Señora Moreno. Can you see that mustard-field
described by the author, where Ramona goes out to meet the good
Father Salvierderra? Have you got a picture in your mind of
Ramona, and the father, and how they met, and how they returned to
Camulos together? Picture, picture, picture, mentally, until every
scene, every landscape, every character is vividly before you.
This was the method followed by Macaulay, whose memory was
so phenomenal that Sydney Smith called him “an encyclopedia in
breeches,” and who used to say that he owed much of his memory
power to the discipline he used to give himself in mental picturing.
He never read in a hurry. He always allowed himself time enough
vividly to bring the scene before his mental vision, and once done,
with him, it was ready to be recalled at any time.
Joaquin Miller used to say that he even pictured abstract ideas. If,
for instance, he was thinking of the abstract quality of coldness, he
would make a picture of some one suffering from cold, or some
wintry landscape.
It Is Difficult to Observe Properly

By this time, if you have faithfully followed these instructions about
observation, you will have discovered that the mere observation of
unrelated facts amounts to very little. You will begin to see that no
observation of the mind is simple. While you are observing, you are
naturally doing something else, for you are classifying facts, seeing
their relation one to another, recognizing similarities or differences,
contrasts and harmonies. The mind works as a whole, not the
memory separately, nor the judgment by itself. Each part is
dependent upon each other part: they overlap one another; the
operations of one faculty imply the operations of all the other
faculties. It is for this reason that the student must seek to discipline
each apparently isolated faculty of the mind.
In observing, it is not enough mentally to picture what you read.
You must go even more into detail than that. You must observe
words. Did you ever read “Martin Eden,” that wonderful study in
mental development and self-analysis, written by Jack London,
revealing in retrospect his own mental processes? It will more than
pay you for the trouble of reading. Follow and practice what he
therein describes. Words are things, but they are things only when
you know them so intimately that they bring real concept to your
mind the moment you see them. It is not enough that you can
pronounce a word properly—that you seem to know it. Each word
must mean something to you, and that something must be definite,
so definite that no other can mean exactly the same thing.
One of the greatest dialectitians of our day was Monsignore Capel,
the private confessor of Pope Leo XIII. Even in extemporaneous
speech every word he used was the right word. No other word would
have done just as well. He was once asked how he gained his power
over words, and he replied to the effect that when he was a lad he
had several tutors. One only, however, was a real and thorough
teacher. He said: “My first day with him I shall never forget. He gave
me a lesson in Cæsar, and then sent me away with six lines, which I
was to translate and bring to him in the afternoon. That seemed
easy. When I went to recite my lesson I followed my usual wont—
gave a free and easy translation, which may have contained the
sense of the original, or may not. He heard me through without a
word. Then he began a dissection of my method of translation that
made my hair stand on end, every drop of my blood tingle, every
faculty of my brain respond, every power of my soul awaken to a
sense of the hitherto untold, undreamed of, unbounded capacities of
words. That man was a genius in quickening a lad’s dormant
faculties into living, driving, whipping forces for good. He took each
word of the original and demanded that I find its equivalent in
English, and he showed me how to do it. I must never take to him an
English word whose original parentage I could not trace. I must know
all its mutations and their whys and wherefores. There could be no
such thing as a free translation. It was either a strictly literal
translation or my version, lazy or otherwise, in another language
from that in which the author had written. From that day on, I began
the study of words. I learned how to trace the history of words; the
changes that had come into their meanings, and my teacher helped
me to do it during the whole of the time I was in his hands. To him I
owe whatever power I possess to-day.”
Read Trench’s book on words and then study John Ruskin’s
“Sesame and Lilies.” Get hold of all the modern books on the
subject. Read Shelley, Keats, George Sterling, Browning, Swinburne
—any author who has great felicity of phrase, rare delicacy of
expression, and seek to discover his secret, and you will be amazed
at the potent force of words. For, of course, while words themselves
are to be studied, it is in their relation one to another when put into
sentences that their power, sweetness, beauty, charm, and music lie.
And here we come to the real work of observing. All else is
preparatory to grasping the idea of the author. In his idea lies his
inspiration. The words he uses may be good, medium, or indifferent,
but if we grasp his idea, his high, intellectual and spiritual conception
and aspirations, we have gained the chief thing. Words are a
wonderful help in this. His power to arrange them, to give them new
settings, new and richer cadences, will not fail to quicken our own
intellect to readier and keener appreciation of his thought. Hence
words should be deeply, attentively and earnestly studied by all
authors and speakers in order that they may be able to arrange them
in this masterly fashion. For this personal arrangement of words and
phrases, this flow and rhythm, is that marvelous thing we call style.
Several times in “Martin Eden” Jack London refers to this. He has his
rude hero who is brought out of the streets, influenced by the love he
feels for the heroine, determine to educate himself. He studies and
begins to write.
He read to her a story [one of his own compositions], one
that he flattered himself was among his very best. He called it
“The Wine of Life,” and the wine of it, that had stolen into his
brain when he wrote it, stole into his brain now as he read it.
There was a certain magic in the original conception, and he
adorned it with more magic and phrase and touch. All the old
fire was reborn in him and he was swayed and swept away so
that he was blind and deaf to the faults of it. But it was not so
with Ruth. Her trained ear detected the weaknesses and
exaggerations, the overemphasis of the tyro, and she was
instantly aware each time the sentence-rhythm tripped and
faltered. She scarcely noted the rhythm otherwise, except
when it became too pompous, at which moments she was
disagreeably impressed with its amateurishness.
Just before this he said to her: “I hope I am learning to talk,
there seems to be so much in me I want to say. But it is all so
big. I can’t find ways to say what is really in me. Sometimes it
seems to me that all the world, all life, everything, had taken
up residence inside of me and was clamoring for me to be
spokesman. I feel—oh, I can’t describe it—I feel the bigness
of it, but when I speak, I babble like a child. It is a great task
to transmute feeling and sensation into speech, written or
spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens,
transmute itself back into the selfsame feeling and sensation.
It is a lordly task. See, I bury my face in the grass, and the
breath I draw in through my nostrils sets me quivering with a
thousand thoughts and fancies. It is a breath of the Universe I
have breathed. I know song and laughter, and success and
pain, and struggle and death; and see visions that arise in my
brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I would like
to tell them to you, to the world. But how can I? My tongue is
tied. I have tried, by the spoken word, just now, to describe to
you the effect on me of the scent of the grass. But I have not
succeeded. I have no more than hinted in awkward speech.
My words seem gibberish to me, and yet I am stifled with
desire to tell.”
That was her final judgment on the story as a whole—
amateurish, though she did not tell him so. Instead, when he
had done, she pointed out the minor flaws and said that she
liked the story.
But he was disappointed. Her criticism was just. He
acknowledged that, but he had a feeling that he was not
sharing his work with her for the purpose of schoolroom
correction. The details did not matter. They could take care of
themselves. He could mend them, he could learn to mend
them. Out of life he had captured something big and
attempted to imprison it in the story. It was the big thing out of
life that he had read to her, not sentence structure and
semicolons. He wanted her to feel with him this big thing that
was his, that he had seen with his own eyes, grappled with
his own brain, and placed there on the pages with his own
hands in printed words. Well, he had failed, was his secret
decision. Perhaps the editors were right. He had felt the big
thing, but he had failed to transmute it. He concealed his
disappointment, and joined so easily with her in her criticism
that she did not realize that deep down in him was running a
strong undercurrent of disagreement.
Later he enlarges upon this, and also relates how he gained his
mastery:
On the looking-glass were lists of definitions and

pronunciations; when shaving, or dressing, or combing his
hair, he conned these lists over. Similar lists were on the wall
over the oil-stove, and they were similarly conned while he
was engaged in cooking or washing dishes. New lists
continually displaced the old ones. Every strange or partly
familiar word encountered in his reading was immediately
jotted down, and later, when a sufficient number had been
accumulated, were typed and pinned to the wall or looking-
glass. He even carried them in his pockets, and reviewed
them at odd moments on the street, or while waiting in
butcher-shop or grocery to be served.
He went farther in the matter. Reading the works of men
who had arrived, he noted every result achieved by them, and
worked out the tricks by which they had been achieved—the
tricks of narrative, of exposition, of style, the points of view,
the contrasts, the epigrams; and of all these he made lists for
study. He did not ape. He sought principles. He drew up lists
of effective and fetching mannerisms, till out of many such,
culled from many writers, he was able to induce the general
principle of mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast about for
new and original ones of his own, and to weigh and measure
and appraise them properly. In similar manner he collected
lists of strong phrases, the phrases of living languages,
phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame, or that
glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of the arid
desert of common speech. He sought always for the principle
that lay behind and beneath. He wanted to know how the
thing was done; after that he could do it for himself. He was
not content with the fair face of the beauty. He dissected
beauty in his crowded little bedroom laboratory, where
cooking smells alternated with the outer bedlam of the Silva
tribe; and, having dissected and learned the anatomy of
beauty, he was nearer being able to create beauty itself.
This latter quotation shows us how Jack London mastered a

knowledge of that subtle thing called “style.” Every student of English
literature knows there are vast differences between the writings of
Johnson and Carlyle, DeQuincey and Coleridge, Ruskin and
Newman, Browning and Tennyson. Yet each uses the English
language and possibly it might be found that the vocabulary of each
was not very different from that of the other. Then wherein lies the
difference? It is in that marvelous personal quality, that individuality
expressed in its use of words, that we call style, that the difference
lies.
To aid your memory, study and observe styles. Ever be on the
alert to discover why an author appeals to you. In reading Bret Harte
ask yourself why his appeal is so different from that of Sir Walter
Scott, Browning from Longfellow, Whitman from Swinburne, Pope
from Sterling.
Observation also applies to hearing as well as seeing. How do you
hear? Carefully, definitely, specifically, or indifferently, generally?
Have you ever sought to disentangle the roar of noises you can hear
in the city’s streets? At first it is a dull confusion of sound that comes
as one great, indistinguishable roar. Listen! Observe, and you will
soon be able to distinguish the clatter of hoofs from the creak of the
car-wheels; the whistle of the traffic-officer from the cry of the
newsboy, or the honking of automobile-horns from the clang of
street-car gongs.
Most people think that only a highly trained musician should be
able to distinguish the various instruments as they are played in a
band or an orchestra, but any well-trained observer should be able to
differentiate between the instruments if he so desires. And this brings
us to a very striking discovery that we should not overlook; namely,
that the powers of observation should be under the personal control
of the individual. For instance, if he desires to observe the effect of
the music of an orchestra of a hundred pieces as a whole, he should
be able to do so. He should likewise be able to hear the different
instruments, either alone, or in their relation one to another. The
power to do this is one of the qualifications of a great conductor. His
faculties of observation are highly developed, or are naturally acute
in this regard; hence, when combined with other leadership qualities,
he becomes a great director.
As applied to hearing a speech, lecture, or sermon, how shall one
observe? Exactly the same as one observes in reading—by
concentration of attention, seeing details, visualizing or mentally
picturing every scene; listening to the speaker’s choice of words; his
power to make euphonic grouping not only for the sweetness of
sound, but for their potency as well.
Hard work, this observing, is it not? It is intensive and perpetual.
The athlete must keep in training so long as he desires physically to
excel; so with the student or scholar. He must not lag, must not
cease in his efforts, or he will lose his place or power. The will must
be evoked to aid in such concentration of effort. The desire must be
more fully excited, aroused, enthused, or the will will not respond.
How many people go to church, to hear a lecture, an address, with
the determination strong within them to allow nothing to interfere with
their observing to the full what is said by the speaker? Note the
turning around as late-comers take their places. Watch how easily
the major part of an audience’s attention can be diverted. It is pitiable
and even ludicrous were it not so lamentable, because it reveals that
in the training of our youth strict attention has not been demanded.
Develop the Power of Reflection

We now come to the second part of Professor Stokes’s rule—
Reflect. This word is made up of two Latin words re, back or again,
and flecto, to bend or turn. The meaning is thus made clear. By
observation through one or more of our senses we perceive things;
mental impressions are secured; these are now to be bent or turned
so that we can see them again, but the process is to be purely
mental. Reflection in itself implies recognition or memory, for without
memory there could be nothing upon which to reflect. Every normal
human being has the power to bend again, to turn back, and over
and over again the impressions he has received through
observation. Hence reflect continuously upon that which you wish to
remember. Go over it in every possible way. Dwell upon it, let it
develop within you until you are as familiar with every possible
phase, detail, change, enlargement in it, as a fond mother is with the
face of her precious baby. As you reflect, be sure your mind is not
playing you false. Refresh it by referring to the original again and
again if possible. In this way you deepen the original impressions,
make them more lasting, more secure. Then, too, as you look upon a
subject again—reflect upon it—you get new angles of vision. This
enlarges your conception and provokes original thought. For
instance: Newton observed an apple fall. There we have a simple
fact of observation. He began to reflect upon this fact. As he did so,
fresh thought upon the fact leaped into his mind and in due time the
theory of gravitation was born.
Centuries ago men observed the fact that when a string of any
kind was pulled tight and struck upon it gave forth a musical sound.
In due time a man or many men in succession reflected upon this
fact, and the guitar, the banjo, the ukulele, the violin and the piano
were invented, born of the processes of observation and reflection.
This is everywhere seen in fields where the inventive genius of man
is at play. It was John Dolland who observed that glass made of
different kinds, or different properties of sand and silica, etc., had a
different color, and produced a different effect when used in a
sidereal telescope. He reflected upon this fact. This led him to
experiment, and by and by he discovered that when he placed
lenses together, one concave and the other convex, and one of
crown and the other of flint glass, a telescope was made that
eliminated the extra and confusing images of the object gazed upon,
hitherto found on the outer rim of all telescopes. In other words, the
achromatic telescope was born—one of the greatest helps to
astronomical science—born of many careful observations and long-
continued reflections.
Another case in point is that of Franklin, who saw the lightning in
the clouds—a simple act of observation. He began to reflect upon his
observation. His reflections suggested something. He sent up a kite
to find out if there was any possibility of tapping that inexhaustible
reservoir of electricity in the heavens. Our use to-day of the
telegraph, telephone, wireless, electric light, electric power in the
thousand and one ways it is made to do service to mankind is the
result of those acts of observation and reflection. The same is true
with Luther Burbank, who looked more closely, more attentively, with
greater concentration, upon flowers, vegetables, plants, trees, than
most men, observed that extra fine potatoes resulted when the
flowers of the largest and best potatoes were cross-pollinated. He
reflected upon this fact. The results have astounded the world in the
development of improved and even new varieties of useful and
beautiful growths. Also Darwin’s observations, confirmed by those of
thousands of others, duly reflected upon, enabled him to write his
“Origin of Species”; and when Herbert Spencer read (observed) that
book and reflected upon it, and others cognate with it, he formulated
his “Synthetic Philosophy,” which absolutely changed the current of
the thought of the world.
So it is with all sciences, all theories, all working hypotheses, all
steps toward complete knowledge. They, each and all, invariably and
unalterably depend upon the two powers of observation and
reflection. There are no discoveries, no inventions, without these two
mental operations. Hence is it not apparent that no memory student
can over-estimate their importance? For, here is a fact that
observation has revealed and reflection and experience confirmed;
namely, that he who has carefully observed the most facts is the best
prepared to reflect profitably. Or to put it in still another way; no one
can properly, completely and successfully reflect unless his mind is
stored with many facts accurately and minutely observed. How could
Carlyle have written his wonderful “Heroes and Hero Worship”
unless he had carefully observed, through his reading, the effect of a
great man’s actions upon millions of his fellowmen? His “Cromwell”
and “French Revolution” still more fully reflect the wealth of his
stored facts (observations) and the result of his constantly turning
them over again and again (reflection) in his powerful, logical and
imaginative mind. Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona” is a similar result
of powerful observation of the California Indians and sympathetic
and clear-headed reflection, as was also Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Hence, Observe, Reflect, with greater and
increasingly greater care.
Thought-Linking
We now come to Stokes’s third requirement—“Link thought with
thought.” Few things are seen isolated from other things. Indeed,
unless one deliberately shuts out—inhibits—his observing faculties,
it is impossible for him to see one thing alone. Even the solitary star
is seen in relation to the sky, and the solitary vessel, as it moves, in
relation to the ever-changing surface of the deep. And it is this

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Class Divisions in Serial Television 1st

Edition Sieglinde Lemke

Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary

Mainstreaming Islam in Indonesia: Television, Identity,

Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV 1st Edition

Nineteenth Century Serial Narrative in Transnational

The Dexter Syndrome The Serial Killer in Popular

Handbook of Serial Communications Interfaces A

Serial Killers Box Set 8 True Crime Serial Killer Case

Television A Biography 1st Edition David Thomson

ISBN 978-1-137-59448-8 ISBN 978-1-137-59449-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958107

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover illustration: © Science Photo Library - MEHAU KULYK. / Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Introduction: Class Di_visions and the Cultural

Part I (Di)Vision: “Lower” Class Televisibility 19

Framing Class, Vicarious Living,

“Hillbillies,” “Welfare Queens,” and “Teen Moms”:

The Paradoxical Class Politics in Here Comes

Reality TV and Its Audiences Reconsidered:

Part II Di*Visions: Screening Exploitation, Neoliberal Lies,

Lifestyle Precarity and Creative Class Affirmation in Girls 121

House of Lies and the Management of Emotions 143

The Financialization of Domestic Space in Arrested

Realignment and Televisual Intellect: The Telepraxis

Figure 4.1 Honey Boo Boo, series 1, 2012. The city of McIntyre,

Sieglinde Lemke and Wibke Schniedermann

This volume investigates the way depictions of class matters on television

S. Lemke (*) • W. Schniedermann

© The Author(s) 2016 1

this volume to turn to the “operation aesthetics” of these shows. This

TV in the twenty-first century departs slightly, but noticeably, from

individuals. In other words, we are concerned with the visibility of class

ba­ckground. Our second contribution, Diana Owen’s “American Media’s

degrading images of redneck life. Kindinger demonstrates that the pop-

the exploitation of labor, by which wealth is accumulated in a capital-

Development and Breaking Bad,” takes us beyond the class representation

engages in what is the signature aesthetic feature of the show—the break-

to assess class alliances. Subscription television’s third-wave dramas such as

Kendall, Diana E. 2005. Framing Class, Vicarious Living, and Conspicuous

© The Author(s) 2016 21

inequality, high rates of un- and underemployment, and massive home-

Rather than providing a meaningful analysis of inequality and showing realis-

Although my newer data largely confirm this statement, the Great

Throughout Framing Class, I have provided many examples of how the

Media Framing and the Performance of Class

In a mass-mediated culture such as ours, the media do not simply mirror

Largely through marketing and advertising, television promoted the myth

As hooks suggests, equality does not exist in contemporary society, but

The Upper Classes: Affluence and Consumerism

SENATOR VEST’S EULOGY ON THE DOG

The practice of speaking at the banquet table is an ancient

Nothing is of greater importance to the intelligent and thoughtful

Strengthening the Observation

Suggestive Methods to Pursue

It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there,

Take an illustration from the American novel—“Ramona.” Get a

It Is Difficult to Observe Properly

On the looking-glass were lists of definitions and

This latter quotation shows us how Jack London mastered a

Develop the Power of Reflection

Part I (Di)Vision: “Lower” Class Televisibility 19

Part II Di*Visions: Screening Exploitation, Neoliberal Lies,

Lifestyle Precarity and Creative Class Affirmation in Girls 121

House of Lies and the Management of Emotions 143

Figure 4.1 Honey Boo Boo, series 1, 2012. The city of McIntyre,

background. Our second contribution, Diana Owen’s “American Media’s