New Directions In American Reception Study

by Philip Goldstein (editor), James L. Machor

Contemporary reception study has developed a diversity of approaches and methods, including the institutional, textual, historical, authorial, and reader-response, which, to a greater or lesser extent, acknowledge the various ways in which readers have found texts-- literature, television shows, movies, and newspapers--meaningful. This collection emphasizes that new diversity, examining movies, newspapers, fans, television shows, and traditional American as well as modern Hispanic, Black, and Women's literature. The essays on literature include James Machor on Melville's short fiction, Kenneth Roemer on Edward Bellamy's utopian work Looking Backward , Amy Blair on the popularity of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street , Marcial Gonzalez on Danny Santiago and his Hispanic novel Famous All Over Town , and Leonard Diepeveen on modernist fiction and criticism. The theoretical essays on reader-oriented criticism include Patsy Schweickart on interpretation and the ethics of careand Jack Bratich
on active audiences. Media versions of response criticism include Andrea Press and Camille Johnson's ethnographic analysis of fans of the Oprah Winfrey Show , Janet Staiger on Robert Aldrich's film version of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly , and Rhiannon Bury on the fans of the HBO television show Six Feet Under . History-of-the-book versions include Barbara Hochman on the popularity of the 1890s editions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin , Ellen Garvey on nineteenth-century scrapbooks of newspaper, and David Nord on early twentieth-century newspapers' relations to audience charges of bias and unfairness. Poststructuralist studies include Philip Goldstein on Richard Wright's Native Son , Steve Mailloux on Reading Lolita in Tehran , and Tony Bennett on the cultural analyses of Pierre Bourdieu. The collection concludes with essays by Janice Radway on the limits of these methods and on the possibility of new forms of sociological and anthropological reception study and byToby
Miller on the "reception deception" in relation to the worldwide distribution and reception of movies and television shows.

408 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2007

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was, overall, a very nice collection. Though there were some uneven contributions in the middle bits, it was bookended beautifully by a wonderful review essay regarding reception study at the beginning and two critical essays (by Janice Radway and Toby Miller, respectively) that take a critical look at reception studies and suggest avenues for future endeavors in and around the methodology in the future. The middle sections of the book are biased toward reception studies in the literary realm, with two long sections devoted to readers, writers, authorship, etc. (un)balanced by a far shorter section looking at reception of film, television etc. Likewise, the section on film and tv seems far more traditional in its contents than the other sections, which might reflect the sorts of reception studies regularly done in communication fields, but (given my somewhat limited knowledge of British Cultural Studies) I feel actually reflects the disciplinary biases/knowledge bases of the the volume's editors. Nonetheless, this was an enormously useful anthology, worth reading from beginning to end in order to get a glimpse of the broad reaches of literary reception studies and think critically about their utility and future.