An academic study of research literature on Czech television: The dawn of taking TV seriously

Abstract

In 2017 the first television studies university programme in the Czech Republic was officially opened at Palacký University in Olomouc. However, television has been a focus of Czech academics and television and film reviewers and practitioners for a long time. This review aims to introduce various forms of academic thinking about Czech and Czechoslovak television, published both in Czech and English. It distinguishes four academic and one insider position, based on institutional and disciplinary criteria. Additionally, the article points towards possible issues with trying to reflect on and teach television in a small, post-socialist East-Central European country where there is a limited number of original scholarly books, theoretical initiatives and translations of important texts from the field of TV studies. At the same time, the small size of the TV market, language barriers and the post-socialist heritage inform the local academic debate with specific research questions that have the potential of opening new perspectives on issues such as ideology, political power, mediated memory and globalisation.

Why translations matter – An introduction to Critical Studies in Television’s new section ‘In Translation’

“…Because English-speaking scholarship has put words and academic value to – most often English-speaking – television (see: Newman and Levine, 2012), it is also what becomes studied elsewhere, based on the concepts exported together with the internationally successful televisual objects. In their review of Czech television scholarship, Jedličková et al (2020: 414) recount how the Czech translation of Complex TV (Mittell, 2015) published in 2019 ‘was awaited as a “ground-breaking” event by domestic television scholars and students’, because it offered a way to connect with and localise the terminology of television analysis, which had not been developed in the Czech language. But analytical models for serialised TV developed in Czech, such as Radomir Kokeš’ (2016) distinction between serial macro-worlds and episodic worlds, which Jedličková et al (2020: 414) argue would be of value to non-Czech readers because of its wide applicability, has not been translated.…”

“…In their review of Czech television scholarship, Jedličková et al (2020: 414) recount how the Czech translation of Complex TV (Mittell, 2015) published in 2019 ‘was awaited as a “ground-breaking” event by domestic television scholars and students’, because it offered a way to connect with and localise the terminology of television analysis, which had not been developed in the Czech language. But analytical models for serialised TV developed in Czech, such as Radomir Kokeš’ (2016) distinction between serial macro-worlds and episodic worlds, which Jedličková et al (2020: 414) argue would be of value to non-Czech readers because of its wide applicability, has not been translated. When did we last await a translation of non-English-speaking work on television into English?…”