The Audience And Its Landscape

by James Hay (editor), Ellen Wartella (Editor), Lawrence Grossberg (Editor)

This book offers a major reconceptualization of the term “audience,” including the landscape of a given audience—the situated and territorializing features of any way of seeing and defining the world. Given de Certeau’s hypothesis that listening, watching, and reading all occur in places and result in produce transformed paths or spaces, the contributors to this landmark volume have provided innovative essays analyzing the transformations that take place in the geography between sender and receiver. The book acknowledges, in the face of conventional “discourse analysis,” the contextual features of discourse, to produce a complex and textured understanding of the concept of audience.The Audience and Its Landscape, presents the work of a vital cross-section of international scholars including Sweden’s Karl Erik Rosengren, the UK’s Jay G. Blumler and Roger Silverstone, Australia’s Tony Bennett, Israel’s Elihu Katz, Canada’s Martin Allor, and the United States’s Janice Radway, Byron Reeves, and John Fisk, to name a few. This book is truly groundbreaking in its depth and scope, and will speak to students of rhetoric, mass communication, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology alike.

420 pages, Paperback

First published July 4, 1996