Reception Theory

Theoretical Traditions

In the explicitly Marxist British tradition, which developed from the 1960s onward, theorists, most notably Stuart Hall, view cultural texts as sites of political struggle through which powerful groups encode texts with dominant understandings of reality and thereby attempt to legitimate the existing “institutional/political/ideological order” (Hall 1980/2002, 113). In this tradition, the meanings and messages encoded in a text are not transmitted seamlessly in the linear form of “sender/message/receiver” (107). Instead, the reception of a text is characterized as relatively autonomous from its production in the sense that there is no guarantee that the audience will decode the text as it was intended; rather, through discourse, meaning is continuously negotiated and contested. While the encoding of a text certainly limits the range of interpretations of a text, Hall stresses that communication is not a “perfectly equivalent circuit” (114) but a process in which audiences can create negotiated or even oppositional readings of texts. These alternate readings are likely to occur when the contradictions between the dominant ideology and the lived experience of a viewer are made visible, thus prompting the viewer to deconstruct a message's preferred code and reconstruct the meaning within an alternative frame of reference. Production and reception are thus two linked but distinct moments in a political struggle over discourse in which subordinate groups can, to some degree, actively resist ideological domination.

On the other hand, the American cultural studies and literary tradition was born of an interest in popular texts that appeal to a mass audience. Beginning in [Page 1203]the 1970s, scholars in this vein shifted the focus of literary theory from the abstract, aesthetic criteria used by elites to judge high culture to a reader-oriented approach that took the experience of everyday consumers of popular culture into account. This initial interest in the experience of readers has broadened to include consumers of many forms of popular culture, but scholars in this field remain united in the belief that accessing the full meaning of cultural objects—particularly those that are understood to be low in status—requires understanding the subjective experience of the audience within a particular time and place. This reader-oriented approach has inspired many empirical studies of audience reception. In Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, for example, Janice Radway challenges the widely held belief that readers of romance novels are passive dupes who simply absorb the patriarchal messages embedded in these low status texts. Ethnographically examining how real women use and make sense of these texts in their social contexts, she finds that for these women, the act of reading itself symbolizes an escape from their social roles as wives and mothers in which they are expected to emotionally and physically nurture their family members, often putting their families' needs before their own. Thus, simply claiming private time to read “connotes a free space where they feel liberated from the need to perform duties that they otherwise accept as their own” (1984, 93). Radway labels romance reading as “compensatory literature” (95), a thoughtful and even resistant act that enables women to temporarily deny the social obligations placed on them by systems of gender inequality. Yet, Radway concludes, romance reading does not unambiguously challenge traditional and unequal gender roles because the heroines of these texts embody the traits readers want to escape, namely, passivity and dependence on men. In this seminal study of reception, Radway illustrates how personal, private acts of reading take place within a wider political context.

...