Episode 510

The academic part of my brain has officially run out of dissertation-topic-picking steam. So, I have decided to enlist the more engaging and stimulating part of my brain: the TV lobe. While the connections between sixteenth-century Italian literature and contemporary American television may be few, I figured it was worth giving it a shot. Here are a few ideas I've come up with:

1) The role of Machiavellian thought in reality television.
2) The dialogue genre as a precursor to the talk show.
3) The relationship between the Commedia dell'arte and semi-improvised television.
4) Pietro Aretino's erotic works and their relationship to "That's what she said."

At first I was worried that my adviser would see right through these. But I think if I use enough big words in my title, I might be able to pull it off. So, here are the proposed corresponding titles:

1) The hegemonic discourse of Machiavellian anti-Utopian thought in the hermeneutics of strategy in contemporary American reality television.
2) The polyphonic Renaissance dialogue genre and its representation of Neoplatonic thought as a precursor to the discussion-based media culture of the American talk show.
3) The emergence of the Commedia dell'arte in response to the crisis of early modernity and its relationship to the current trends in improvisational and semi-improvisational television.
4) The presence of subversive erotica in the multi-generic works of Pietro Aretino and their implication in the commonly-employed television innuendo of "That's what she said."

And hey, I didn't even need to use the word "intertextuality." You may think I'm exaggerating -- it sounds kind of like Joey using the thesaurus to write Monica and Chandler's recommendation to the adoption agency -- but check out ProQuest with a search for any humanities-related term, and you will encounter titles equally, if not more, absurd.

Please send any other suggestions my way. If you can't tell, I'm kind of desperate.