Generating meaning of popular texts demonstrated on the czech television serial Místo nahoře

The starting point of this piece of work is proposition that television and its texts are an agent of the dominant ideology in society. Through the princip of hegemony the rulling class imposes its meanings and values on the subordinated classes. Hegemony is based on allowing resistent and alternative meanings which are nevertheless articulated in terms of the dominant ideology and are subsequently incorporated into the existing system. This thesis then follows John Fiske's understanding of popular culture and activated texts . These are texts which do not imp lose one limited meani ng on its readers, but which allow its readers by means of various strategies to interpret the text with regards to their social position. The second part of this work includes semiological analysis of a particular product of popular culture - the television serial Misto nahore. The emphasis is put on the process of encoding - how the dominant meanings and values are encoded and implied in the text. Besides, the attention is directed towards the 'opening' strategies of the text. This section also includes an analysis of the secondary texts (newspaper and magazine articles ) and terciary texts (viewers' reacti ons and opinions on the web). I examine whether the sec ondary texts promote dom inant or resistant reading strategies,..