Textual Agency: Quentin Skinner and Popular Media

This paper makes a case for how scholarship on popular film and television can potentially be inspired by the methodological writings of intellectual historian Quentin Skinner. While Skinner’s approach is canonical in the field of intellectual history, his thoughts on textual analysis have rarely been applied to material other than philosophical treatises and this article shows that Skinner’s thoughts on texts are applicable to studying television serials. The paper further suggests that intellectual historian Mikkel Thorup’s work is useful for pondering the challenges of contextualist readings of television serials and that Skinner and Thorup’s work provide useful ways of analyzing how politically charged television serials like those of David Simon which take issue with discursive and social realities in an American context.