Debate: Mourning Television: The Other Screen

This essay was originally presented as a closing plenary paper at the 2009 "Screen" conference, which invited critical reflection on "Screen Theorizing Today." In that context, Caughie comments that the paper reflected on "Screen's" engagement with television since the late 1950s. In a broader context, in which the slippage between "screen theory" and "'Screen' theory" often seems to mask an assumption of cinema as the defining primal scene, Caughie intended to offer a brief and selective history of "Screen's" enagement with that insistent other screen which has always threatened--or promised--to destabilize any classicist tendences of "Screen" theory, opening it to the wider complexities of a theory of the screen and the different public and private spaces which screens now occupy. Perhaps inappropriately in the context of a celebration, the argument begins and ends with mourning. Caugie discusses a reference made by Helen Piper that appeared in his 2000 book on British television drama, in which he acknowledged "the elegaic tones of a narrative of loss" that keep creeping into his account of television drama. Caugie wants to, in response to Piper, align elegy with mourning precisely in order to distant it from nostalgia.