Seinfeld: A Comedy of Spaces between The Subject and The Institution
Text begins by establishing key ideological dilemmas of the sitcom television genre. Sitcom (short for situation comedy) is with rare exceptions subjected to dominant ideological discourses of contemporary culture. The second part of the text is a case study of a popular genre product, the television show Seinfeld (1990-1999). We focus on its ability to surpass the rules of the otherwise ideological genre. Seinfeld consistently produces the so-called comedy of common life by pointing out the discomfortable dynamics between society and the individual. We consider the show as a productive ground for forming a philosophical thesis based on the theory of ideology and a psychoanalytic study of the uneasy relations between the Subject and the Institution.
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