Debate: A Response to John Corner

Lury responds to John Corner's article "Television Studies and the Idea of Criticism." She uses Corner's observations as a starting point from which to refute certain assumptions and anxieties that seem to unnecessarily inhibit television criticism in the academy. The important issue is not what television criticism can do but how it is different from other kinds of art criticism. The distinction of the television aesthetic is that it is topological, so complexities and relations between different kinds of space and time in the encounters between viewer and television text cannot be separated. Television critics should attempt to stop retreading debates monopolized by, and appropriate only to, other art forms.