Reader Acceptance Research Articles

Eye on Soweto - A study of factors in news photo use

This study tries to show how editors seek to balance their duties as journalists with the sensitivities of their audiences and, specifically, of how the editors of 57 North American newspapers decided to use a picture of a group of African National Congress supporters killing a man believed to be a Zulu spy, taken by freelance photographer Gregory Marinovich on September 15, 1990 in Soweto. His photos, although they would eventually won a Pulitzer Prize, presented editors with a tough set of decisions that day. Several editors said they had received little help from traditional gauges of reader acceptance such as the “breakfast,” “distance,” and “dead body” tests. The most significant finding was that editors who gave aggressive play to the more dramatic photos were generally also careful to place the graphics in the most complete news context available.

Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind by Katherine Eisaman Maus

1 80Comparative Drama after all, many different kinds of translation; when a play is successfully translated for performance in another language, it necessarily aims for speakability and credibility rather than for mere rigid correctness. Everyman is a work of genius in this regard, and its pioneering effort to bring Dutch dramatic innovations to the English stage has at last been followed up in our own century with Neville Denny's widely-performed 1972 translation of TAe Blessed Apple Tree and with others which have come after it. The emerging truth is that the Dutch plays in the Rederijker tradition were in many cases far more sophisticated and advanced in their dramaturgy than those of their English and continental contemporaries, and are eminently stageworthy to this day. Indeed it seems likely that generations of stage directors of the English Everyman will be among the most grateful of Conley's readers, for they will find in the carefully-translated text of Elckerlijc all manner of visual and vocal clues to the meaning of the English play—and even a few lines and moments worth appropriating into the English text. In this, and in so many ways previously enumerated, this volume is not merely a welcome addition to Elckerlijc-Everyman scholarship but also a model text of the process of comparative drama.1 ROBERT POTTER University of California, Santa Barbara NOTE 1 1 am indebted to Elsa Strietman of Cambridge University for assistance with this review, which could not have been written without her collaboration. Katherine Eisaman Maus. Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pp. ix + 212. $26.50. Katherine Maus has written a provocative book about the use Ben Jonson made of classical philosophy. She argues that Jonson's favorite classical authors—Seneca, Horace, Tacitus, Cicero, Juvenal, and Quintilian (p. 3)—were appreciative of and sympathetic to Stoicism (p. 15), and that Jonson based his art on their Stoical attitudes. As his understanding of that doctrine changed, so did his work, which Maus thinks falls into three phases. His early plays are satiric comedies with a virtuous protagonist, a Stoic hero. From 1605 to 1616 Jonson abandons the virtuous protagonist and makes ethical and aesthetic compromises. From 1616 until his death, Jonson's interest shifts to romantic lyrics and comedies. Clearly the issue of Stoicism is central to Maus's argument; one must ask, then, whether these writers can be considered Stoics. While Seneca is undoubtedly a late Stoic, Cicero is an Eclectic philosopher, and the others are not associated with any philosophical school. Certainly all endorsed moderation and virtue (hardly an exclusively Stoic position), and like many Romans they were drawn to the pragmatic, homocentric, and cosmopolitan nature of Stoicism. Nonetheless, they felt that Stoicism had its weaknesses, so the label of Stoic will really only do for Seneca. Reviews181 Maus recognizes this problem and refers to the group as the "Roman moralists." However, she insists on linking the moralists to Stoicism, speaking of "the Stoically inclined moralists" (p. 115), the "Stoic notions promulgated by the Roman moralists" (p. 167), "their predecessors, the Greek Stoics" (p. 114), and the moralists' "Stoic phase" (pp. 86, 109), as if the beliefs of six such diverse writers formed a coherent body of thought. If Jonson found the same philosophical beliefs in his favorite Roman writers as Maus does, then those beliefs could have influenced his work as she says they do. However, her insistence that these writers were, in some sense, Stoic and that they shared a consistent outlook may block a reader's acceptance of the book's arguments. Maus makes a good case for the idea that Jonson admired the Roman ideal of a virtuous man, yet she weakens her position by trying to trace that ideal to Stoicism. She argues in her second chapter that Jonson found the Stoic protagonist neither dramatic nor comic. Thus, although Jonson tried to include Stoic protagonists in his early plays, he moved in his middle period to plays in which the Stoic hero is either impotent or absent. Maus thinks that it is "impossible for someone who works with [the Roman moralists'] ethical framework to conceive of a...

The Moral Structure of Cheever's Falconer

2 THE MORAL STRUCTURE OF CHEEVER'S FALCONER Glen M. Johnson* Writing in the Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, Leo Braudy offers two generalizations about John Cheever's novel Falconer: it is "irresolutely plotted," and its mood "is more important than the matter."1 Braudy's evaluation follows the consensus of critics who reviewed Falconer when it appeared in 1977. Seeking to describe the "mood" that Braudy calls "almost incantatory," these reviewers praised the "grace" of Cheever's prose, the "light . . . shin[ing] through" his style, the "transcendance]" of his imagination At the same time, however, there were complaints like Braudy's about the novel's "puzzling" form, its "disjointed," "haphazard," or "loose" structure.3 The inability of these critics to find structural coherence in Falconer derives from their assumption that Cheever can be categorized among (to quote the title of Braudy's essay) "Realists, Naturalists, and Novelists of Manners." In fact, Cheever's novels are effective because their plots do not serve "realistic" expectations. Cheever's imagination is fundamentally a romancer's and specifically religious, as suggested by the tendency of Braudy and others to adopt the vocabulary of religious experience when describing the mood or style of Cheever's books. A religious imagination indeed controls the mood of Falconer; more important, it determines the plot. This novel's structure is moral: it defines right action and then rewards it, claiming the romancer's freedom to employ "miracles" in its plotting. The specific form of Falconer is a secularized version of the Christian pattern of redemption: forgiveness of sins through conviction, repentance, and the receipt of grace. Cheever prepares the reader's recognition of this redemptive structure by filling Falconer with religious diction and allusions. The measure of his success will be the reader's acceptance of the book's "Glen M. Johnson is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the American Studies Program at the University of Louisville. He has written articles for American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Popular Film, Studies in the American Renaissance, and Emerson Centenary Essays. He is currently editing volumes of Emerson's Journals and Works for publication by Harvard University Press. 22Glen M. Johnson culminating imperative and last word, "rejoice." But religious references begin early. Falconer, the prison whose name is the novel's title, suggests the central symbols of two familiar poems whose subject is faith, Hopkins' "The Windhover" and Yeats' "The Second Coming." Cheever's allusion to Yeats is most obvious and most crucial, indicating from the first the focus of moral attention in this novel: the "mystery of imprisonment" symbolized by Cheever's Falconer may be the unheard Word of Yeats's falconer—a disintegrating but perhaps recoverable "center" of faith for the contemporary world. Cheever's protagonist, who will experience the mystery and recover the faith, appropriately shares the name of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, who "saw visions of God" while "among the captives by the river."4 As Ezekiel Farragut enters Falconer in the novel's opening section, Cheever introduces two religiously charged symbols, both of which will reappear: "a man in prison grays feeding bread crusts to a dozen pigeons" and "a tarnished silver Christmas garland" hung on a water pipe. For Farragut, the convict St. Francis carries "resonance of great antiquity" while the Christmas garland supplies not irony but "a grain of reason."5 From the first, then, Cheever's method supports his vision by finding—or fashioning—transcendent value within a world of suffering and miscreancy. Cheever's word for Farragut is "miscreant," suggesting by etymology that Farragut's wrongdoing is at base a sort of heresy—a failure of responsibility deriving from a failure of belief. The first third of Falconer explores the nature of its protagonist's miscreancy, developing in the process Cheever's own ethical vision. Farragut's imprisonment evidences his violation of responsibility in three areas central to Cheever's morality; in each case the miscreancy is defined by human suffering but has religious resonances as well. First, Farragut has violated his responsibility to love: he is locked with his wife in a destructive relationship marked by "ritualistic" exchanges of hurt (p. 25...

Hawthorne's Editorial Pose

N THE CuSTOM-HousE Hawthorne announces that he wishes to place himself in his true position as editor, or very little more for the story of The Scarlet Letter.' He claims to have discovered a manuscript in the Custom House which gives the outline of the tale which is to follow. By so placing The Scarlet Letter in the tradition of the Gothic romance, which often used a discovered manuscript as basis, he begs for his reader's acceptance of the tale as authentic and for latitude to develop the outline of Surveyor Pue's manuscript. While his role as historian has received attention in recent criticism of The Scarlet Letter,2 Hawthorne's determined pose as editor has, not been taken seriously, perhaps because it is so obviously an imposture.3 The pervasiveness, m;oreover, of a similar

Guide to the Preparation and Disposition of Manuscripts for Publication in the Bulletin

Three important components for attainment of editorial excellence in the Bulletin are: the author, the editorial board, and the reader. With few exceptions, all are members of The American Association of Petroleum Geologists, dedicated primarily to the discovery and production of petroleum, and secondarily to the publication of a Bulletin which fairly represents their professional activities. By following several simple suggestions concerning the mechanics of articles, through the use of concise English and well-planned illustrations, by exercising care in the preparation of clean typescript, and, most importantly, by having a topic of interest to the wide readership of the Bulletin, the author submitting an article for publication in the Bulletin succeeds in attaining rapid and efficient editorial supervision of his manuscript, early publication, and wide reader acceptance of his contribution. The continued wide acceptance of the Bulletin as a publication medium dedicated to the petroleum geologist and his supporting colleagues is entirely dependent upon the excellence of the author's product and care in editorial supervision, followed by wide reader perusal. Manuscripts submitted to the editorial board may take one of several routes devised to aid both the writer and the editors in reaching accord as to acceptability of the contribution for the benefit of the greatest number of readers.

A Study in Practical Philosophy

URING the past season book has been published which will be of interest to many of those concerned about the motion picture. It is entitled Art and Prudence; Study in Practical Philosophy and is written by Mortimer J. Adler, associate professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Chicago., book is an outgrowth, apparently, of report upon recent empirical investigations concerning the influence of motion pictures upon human behavior which, as the author says in the Preface, he was asked to make by representatives of the motion-picture producers. original report is presented in this book in a somewhat extended form, as the substance of the tenth and eleventh chapters; and, along with preceding and succeeding chapter of epistemological comment and of critical summarization, it constitutes the second of the three sections into which the book is in reality divided. first section includes long survey of philosophic thought regarding the arts-especially the drama, briefer social history of the drama, and critical philosophical analysis of The Contemporary Issue and The Need for Knowledge. third section deals with the aesthetics and the techniques of the cinema. To the extent that these three disparate sections have actually unifying theme throughout the 676 pages of the book, it is found in the author's enthusiasm for Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas and his attempt to apply their philosophy to motion-picture problems. This book makes contribution in that it formulates practical suggestions by which one may think out solution to the issues which often arise in the conflict between autonomous art and the necessities of social control. A body of valuable information regarding the technical and aesthetic aspects of the cinema is also furnished in the last part of the book. But throughout the book, unfortunately, the reader's acceptance or rejection of what the author has to say will be predicated largely upon his willingness to accept the particular absolutist system of philosophy which the author imposes upon his treatment of each problem. Mr. Adler's contribution is further weakened by his lengthy and pompous expose of philosophic doctrines, his obvious and frequent contradictions, and, mostly, by his unmistakable and vocal prejudice against social science which cannot but make him an unfair 'New York: Longmans, Green and Company.