A new book explores how the outlandish, yet reoccurring, plots of our favourite television shows and films ask fundamental questions about life in the modern world.
Netflicks: Conceptual Television in the Streaming Era by Professor Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Chair of Australian Literature at The University of Western Australia, has been published by UWA Publishing.
Professor Hughes-d’Aeth said the streaming era had inaugurated a new kind of television — conceptual television.
Image: Professor Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Chair of Australian Literature at UWA.
“The scenarios in some of our most loved shows and films are driven by the complexities of modern life,” he said.
“Dystopian, zombie, amnesia and ‘Groundhog Day’ themes are treated seriously in Netflicks and it aims to explain that screen dramas are a form of thought.”
The book is the first in the Vignettes series from UWAP, co-edited by UWA Associate Professor Sarah Collins and Professor Hughes-d’Aeth, which aims to sharing the knowledge emerging in contemporary academia.
“Each book provides an image, or a vignette, of a particular phenomenon and how this is being thought through by intellectual practitioners in today’s universities,” Professor Hughes-d’Aeth said.
As well as Australian literature, Professor Hughes-d’Aeth has a longstanding interest in teaching and research in comparative media and screen studies, and in the psychoanalytic study of culture.
The book will be officially launched at the City of Perth Library on Thursday 7 March at 5.30pm. The author will be in discussion with Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University. For more information and tickets .
Netflicks: Conceptual Television in the Streaming Era is now .
