FROM TEXT TO RECEPTION

FROM TEXT TO RECEPTION

There are at least three bodies of research indicating a general reorientation of qualitative content analysis. First, one major tendency has been a displacement of the analytical focus from langue to parole, and from the level of signifieds or conceptual content to that of the signifiers, emphasizing now the specificity, materiality, and concrete uses of signs in mass communication as a social practice. This tendency is evidenced, for instance, in a number of “close readings” of classic Hollywood films (see studies presented in the British journal Screen in the 1970s and 1980s; also Bellour, 1986, and Heath, 1981). These readings focus on individual films and characterize their meaning not as a fixed structure, but as a process which serves to transform the langue or generic codes of cinema into a specific discourse, an instance of parole emerging at the precise moment when the images are seen to proceed across the screen. Significantly, these studies pay special attention to any differences of how meanings are articulated through these moving images, as opposed to, for example, verbal, written language. Even though such analyses focus on a quite limited material, the ambition has been to use the analysis of sample films for the broader study and interpretation of how the cinema audience may have “read,” and currently read, Hollywood films of the classic era.

A related perspective is found in a second body of works studying what is termed enunciation—the specific modes in which cinematic and other texts address their audience. The assumption is that such modes of address serve to “situate” the addressee in a particular position vis-à-vis the media message. Thus, enunciation is said to play a crucial role in the very structuring of media content and of the form in which it is understood. Drawing on so-called reception theories as developed in recent European literary studies, much of this research examines the general techniques through which texts work to direct the recipient’s attention and understanding (for a general overview of reception theory, see Eco, 1987a; also Chapter

7 in this volume). The application of reception theory to media studies, further, is discussed by Allen (1987), who also includes analyses of different types of television programs from a reception perspective. Other work in this tradition examines the modes of address which are specific to particular media or genres (see Bordwell, 1985 on film, and Morse, 1985 on popular television

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genres). Some of the most interesting studies in this area approach the problematic of reception from a broadly feminist perspective. Arguing that the principal modes of address are biased in terms of gender—especially that the structuring of content which is characteristic of most media and genres presupposes a male audience—these studies have served to differentiate further the notion of ideology and of the nature of ideological impact in qualitative content analysis. The seminal work remains Mulvey’s (1986) analysis of the implicit spectator in classic Hollywood films, but a great deal of later research has developed this perspective in concrete analyses (for an overview, see Kaplan, 1987).

The third body of research shifts also the empirical focus of the analyses from text to audience. In the first two groups of studies, the analysis of textual features normally is used to infer certain general conclusions of how texts and genres are read or assimilated by the audience. The “reader” is, in a sense, constructed from within a textual-theoretical perspective, being regarded as an implicit position in the text which serves to frame the reading process, and which the reader presumably occupies in order to make sense of the text. However, much recent mass communication research (see Chapters

7 and 8 in this volume) has challenged this argument, and has been devoted to the study of actual readers and reading processes in a qualitative perspective. Whereas these studies rely mainly on such methodologies as participant observation and varieties of interviewing, they frequently include qualitative content analyses as part of their design. The assumption is that textual analysis, first, can provide guidelines for interviews with empirical readers about texts, and, second, that textual analysis, as applied to both the media texts and interview texts, may serve as a general approach to interpreting and explaining empirical readings.

One interesting example of this combination of textual analysis and qualitative audience research is Janice Radway’s (1984) study of the genre of “romance” in popular literature. Basing her study on

a series of group interviews, Radway provides a detailed description of how a specific group of American female readers respond to and make use of the group of novels published as “Harlequin Romances.” In the course of the interviews, it turned out that most of the women made a spontaneous distinction between “ideal” and “failed” romances, a fact which prompted Radway to select a group of novels in each category for closer examination. Analysing the novels from

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a narratological point of view, she demonstrates that what the women intuitively experienced as “ideal” romances were in fact a type of novel which had been built on a specific narrative structure consisting of thirteen major events or actions that were carried out by a limited set of agents endowed with a limited set of features. Further, this sequence of events enacts a movement from an initial situation in which the heroine suffers a social and emotional loss, to a final situation in which she is reintegrated into society and achieves emotional fulfillment. This textual analysis, in turn, led Radway to a renewed examination of how her empirical readers responded in the interviews to such “ideal” texts. Ultimately, Radway (1984) is able to establish a plausible connection between the conflicts that are solved in the novels by textual or narrative transformation, and those real social and emotional conflicts which dominate the lives of their female readers.

From one point of view, Radway’s content analyses may be said to lie squarely within the tradition of semiological and other qualitative textual analysis, since she employs many of the analytical procedures developed from the 1960s. Indeed, her general conclusions regarding the social functions of texts for their audiences do not differ substantially from those of most genre studies in the Lévi-Straussian tradition. Nevertheless, Radway’s account of the relationship between text and audience is more specific and differentiated because of the dual strategy of analysis. While the interviews with readers point to groups of texts and to discursive details which deserve closer examination, the textual analysis returns the analyst to a reinterpretation of the readers’ interview statements and, further, to theorizing on the social functions of texts. A social theory of communication may be substantiated, above all, by further research which simultaneously considers media texts and audiences.