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Mass media: effects research - reception analysis
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Mass media: effects research - reception analysis
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In the following sections we'll take a look at a few reception studies, just to give you a flavour of the New Audience Research. The one we'll be examining here is:
Janice Radway's outstanding ethnographic investigation (1987) of the female readers of romantic fiction centres on 'Smithton', a midwestern town in the USA. There the readers bought their novels from Dorothy Evans, a seller of romantic novels. Mrs Evans (known as Dot throughout) was so helpful in advising her customers and helping them find their way through the bewilderingly wide range of titles on offer that they returned again and again to buy form her store. Dot began writing a newsletter for bookstores and editors, offering them advice on selecting romantic fiction. This was so successful that she achieved considerable status within the industry and found that her advice was actively sought by the publishers.
Radway, Associate Professor of American Civilization at Pennsylvania University, arrived in Smithton expecting to be able to explain the readers' fascination with romantic fiction and the effects it had on them by means of the analysis of textual features and narrative details. She very soon realized that such methods would not furnish the explanations she was looking for and that, although common features in the narratives did indeed explain some of the novels' attraction, the women readers themselves placed the main emphasis on 'the pleasures of the act itself' (p.86). Thus Radway, as a result of her investigations, is particularly concerned to avoid what Thompson (1990) refers to as the fallacy of internalism, i.e. the assumption, which has hitherto bedevilled much media research, that the effects on readers of media texts can be deduced from semiotic analysis of the texts themselves.
Radway's research allows her to discover which books are considered by the readers themselves to be successful and which are not - the 'failed romance'. Using a method of analysis derived from Propp, she determines that the narratives of 'successful' romances all exhibit the same underlying narrative structure:
(note that Radway's analysis is more detailed than this brief summary implies)
Typically, the heroine is removed from her familiar surroundings, usually associated with a fairly comfortable background in childhood or family. She meets an aristocratic man whose advances she initially rejects because she believes he has only a sexual interest in her. Thus she is typically antagonistic towards him. Then the intermediate intervention occurs. Typically, heroine and hero become separated in some way. This makes possible an eventual reversal of the initial rejection and antagonism. The hero typically displays an act of tenderness which is not fully explained at this juncture, but provides the opportunity for a gradual re-interpretation of the hero's initial behaviour. Eventually, the hero declares his love for the heroine and they are happily reconciled.
Thus, we can see that the successful romance repeatedly tells its readers the same story about heterosexual relationships. It repeatedly tells them that, whatever their doubts, beneath the possibly harsh and uncaring exterior, a man has genuine warmth and tenderness. It may be considered, then, that the ideological effect of such stories is to maintain existing social relations, to maintain patriarchy. Radway also details the market imperatives behind publishers' development of pulp fiction. Taking together the ideological content of the novels and the capitalist profit motive, with the resulting standardization, we might arrive at a view similar to Adorno's and Horkheimer's critique of the stultifying effect of the culture industries. However, Radway sees that it is important to distinguish between the ideological implications internal to the text, the meaning of the text as it is received and interpreted and, finally, the significance of the activity of receiving and interpreting.
Radway's book is sub-titled 'Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature' and it emerges from her investigations that the readers' prime motivation in reading the romances is to seek escape from the domestic pressures laid upon them in their daily lives. To an extent they feel guilty about giving themselves the pleasure of this escape, not unlike the women in Morley's Family Television study, who tended to watch television while performing domestic chores. It is apparent from Radway's research that most of the families from which these women come see the 'psychologically demanding and emotionally draining task of attending to the physical and affective needs of their families' as being uniquely the women's task. Reading romances provides them with the opportunity of temporary escape from that task.
The shame which many of them feel about reading popular romances is often cultivated by their husbands who will criticize them for wasting 'their' hard-earned money and for spending time absorbed in a novel rather than devoting time to the household, their family and husband. Perhaps the most effective tactic that the women have evolved to defuse the criticism from their husbands is to quote 'facts' from the novels they read. They are convinced that the writers of the novels conduct extensive research into the places and historical times they write about. To an extent, therefore, the women learn 'facts' about the world from reading the novels. What they might have learned about human character and relationships from reading the novels is not valorized by their husbands, but concrete facts about geography, history, transportation systems and so on are, the more obscure the better.
Radway was surprised to find how few of Dorothy Evans' customers actually knew each other. However, drawing on Stanley Fish's notion of an interpretive community, Radway shows how the women 'join forces symbolically and in a mediated way in the privacy of their individual homes and in the culturally devalued sphere of leisure activity'. (p.212)
The Smithton readers are convinced that romance reading changes the readers. Radway was not able to determine with any precision just what they thought had changed. However, the favourite heroines were almost invariably described as 'spunky', 'extremely intelligent', 'independent' and 'unique' and Radway came to the conclusion that the women saw that romance fiction demonstrated that men were attracted by such qualities. Thus, the fiction 'encourages them to believe that marriage and motherhood do not necessarily lead to loss of independence or identity' (p.102). The women saw the act of reading as combative and compensatory:
It is combative in the sense that it enables them to refuse the other-directed social rôle prescribed for them by their position within the institution of marriage. In picking up a book ... they refuse temporarily their family's otherwise constant demand that they attend to the wants of others even as they act deliberately to do something for their own private pleasure. Their activity is compensatory ... in that it permits them to focus on themselves and to carve out a solitary space within an arena where their self-interest is usually identified with the interests of others and where they are defined as a public resource to be mined at will by the family.
(p.211)
Whilst the narrative form of the romance story is ideologically conservative and may, by and large, be seen as a recommendation of patriarchy, the fact remains that the women readers develop oppositional readings (see preferred reading):
... when the act of romance reading is viewed as it is by the readers themselves, from within a belief system that accepts as given the institutions of heterosexuality and monogamous marriage, it can be seen as an activity of mild protest and longing for reform necessitated by those institutions' failure to satisfy the emotional needs of women.
(p.213)
Indeed, the mere fact of reading romances may lead to changes in the women's behaviour. Dorothy and her readers believe that, simply because they have to justify their reading to others so often and have to defend their right to the pleasure they gain through these novels, they necessarily become more assertive.
Whether, in the long run, the Smithton women's romance reading makes any difference to the way they lead their lives, in other words whether the resistive or compensatory function eventually wins out, is an open question which would probably require a lifelong study of the Smithton women. What is important about Radway's study is that it shows us the importance of breaking away from an exclusive focus on the political economy of the media or on textual analysis and focusing on the actual conditions of reception and interpretation.
Radway does not in fact make grandiose claims of 'resistance' for her Smithton women's experience, but the 'ethnographic' studies which have followed upon her work routinely celebrate the semiotic resistance of the studies' subjects and frequently cite Radway's study as an exemplar of this new turn in audience research. To me celebration of the Smithton women's negotiated readings as 'resistance', which seems to be the central finding of so many of the studies which Radway inspired, seems a dubious interpretation of their experience. Angela McRobbie shows how shopping may grant women a space for indepedendent self-expression, Fiske sees Madonna as affording young women a site to locate their struggle against patriarchy and so many other researchers present their respondents' negotiated readings as a form of 'resistance'. The commonly presented view seems to be that those of us who question the value of such resistance, who wonder whether it really does have any ultimately emancipatory effect, must necessarily belittle and patronize these 'active audiences', treating them as 'cultural dopes'. I don't see this as an either/or. Admittedly, I don't read romances and, if pressed, I would no doubt say that I don't read them because I find them boring, banal, formulaic and predictable, and often plain silly. But I'd probably say much the same about Star Trek, which I do watch with
plasure. I don't deprecate the cultural experience of those who do read romances and I have no wish to impose my cultural standards on them. What concerns me is that this alleged resistance should be celebrated by cultural studies scholars as emancipatory if it in the end leaves the material relations of power unchanged. The pleasures, the sense of empowerment are not discovered through cultural artefacts which are in an economic, social or cultural vacuum. It would be more appropriate to describe the 'tactics of the weak' here as tactics for 'coping' than for 'resisting', as Nicholas Garnham suggests:
Can we not admit that there are extremely constrained and impoverished cultural practices that contribute nothing to social change? We may wish to salute the courage and cultural inventiveness shown in such circumstances and still wish to change the circumstances.
Garnham (1997 : 68)
de Certeau's views
Brown on soap operas
Hermes on women's magazines
Morley: The Nationwide Audience
Morley: Family Television
Criticisms of reception studies
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