Text Reception Research Articles

Do you see yourself?: Reflected subjectivities in youthful song texts

Reflexivity has been a focal theme in much recent youth research, including my own. This theme connects studies of identity construction, subject form­ation and text reception with diagnoses of cultural modernization and method­o­log­ic­al issues of qualitative ethnography. Popular-cultural mass-media texts are continuously drawn into reflexive practices in everyday life, appar­ent­ly in increasingly intense and complex ways. ‘Reflexivity’ derives from the Latin ‘reflectere’: fold back. What is being folded back in cultural con­texts are thoughts or symbol­i­za­tions. Human sub­jects may be more or less reflexive, as people use texts (from talk and gestures to books and computers) in self-mirroring identity construct­ions, by explicitly defining who they are. Cultural texts may also be (more or less) reflexive, in two possible senses. A text (dialogue, magazine, film, etc.) may be auto-reflexive, i.e., mirror itself, thematize or make explicit its own construction. Advertisements or tele­vision programmes nowadays often depict how ads or TV works, sometimes in an ironical mode (cf. Hutcheon, 1980/1984; Stam, 1985/1992). Texts may secondly also be subject-reflexive, i.e., mirror the self-mirror­ings of human individuals and problematize the identities of the subjects who are symbolically produced in these texts. Some youth cultural texts (including words, songs and images) used and/or made by young people depict the pro­cess of reflexive sub­ject formation as an explicitly formulated theme. All these forms of reflexivity are closely inter­con­nect­ed, since reflexive texts mirror reflexive practices and in turn are used as mirrors in them. But it is this last sense of reflexivity as a theme in youth cultural texts, bridging subject‑ and text-reflexivity, which will be ana­lyz­ed here.

The Enticement To Re-Read: Repetition as Parody in 2 Samuel

AbstractThe story of Nathan's parable in 2 Samuel 12 and the story of David's encounter with the woman of Teqoa in 2 Samuel 14 bear striking structural similarities. In both, the king is enticed into committing himself by an oath in response to a fictional story retailed to him on behalf of a third person. The argument of this paper is that the relationship between the two is parodic; 2 Samuel 14 contains a bathetic reprise of motifs and devices from the earlier story. Once the reader has registered this, the effect is to raise questions as to what is going on in the earlier story. Rereading 2 Samuel 12 in the light of 2 Samuel 14 raises questions about David's capacity to read events clearly. Both stories provide an internal model of text reception, which is complicated by the parodic reflection of the model. Drawing on studies of similar devices in ancient Greek novels, I argue that the result for the reader is to throw into question the categories of reading strategies we apply to the text.

Representation and Authority in Ethnographic Film/Video: Reception

What has to be identified is the use to which a particular text is put, its function within a particular conjuncture, in particular institutional spaces, and in relation to particular audiences. (Neale 1977:39-40) Discussions of ethnographic authority and representation usually focus on ethnographic research and writing, concerned primarily with the production of ethnographies and their conventional shape as texts. Perhaps because they assume an ideal reader of academic peers, and therefore a shared framework for assessing the ethnographic authority of representations, these discussions tend to slight consideration of the text's reception, particularly by audiences outside of academic circles. Aside from a small literature looking at the subject group's reception of ethnographics featuring themselves, exemplified by Steven Feld's reflections on the Kaluli reaction to Sound and Sentiment (Feld 1987), reflexive analyses which consider representation and authority in the context of other audiences' reception of ethnographic works are rare.1 Ethnographic film presents us with an even murkier situation. Given the financial resources necessary for film/video production, most producers need to obtain funding from government agencies, and vindicate their budget requests by gearing their work to wider, more audiences. The reactions of these general audiences are diverse, somewhat unpredictable, and divergent from those within academia. There are other frameworks for interpreting representations and assessing their authority, and we need to relativize our analyses of ethnographic authority to address these other interpretive positions. At the outset, the audience's reception of a film hinges on their receptivity towards the subject. With works about other cultures, reception is influenced by potential audiences' interest in those particular cultures. Jeff Titon, Tom Rankin and I encountered a complex mix of reactions with the reception of Powerhouse for God (1989), an ethnographic documentary about an Appalachian Baptist church and its preacher. Powerhousefor God has been well received in academic presentations to audiences of folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists, but seems to be fighting against

The Pastoral Epistles and the Ethics of Reading

Critical theory needs to concern itself with the ethics of a text's reception. Ethical reading involves respecting the otherness of the text, and also being responsible to oneself by articulating difference. The paper explores the Pastoral Epistles from this perspective. Distinctions are drawn among the stated, implied and actual readers, and these are linked with the question of 'reading genre'. The importance of entering the world of the text is then explored, four areas of difference between then and now being sketched. Text-genre and authorship are discussed, prior to an exploration of the rhetoric of these texts. Passages are discussed as examples. The conclusion is reached that an ethical—indeed sympathetic—reading of these texts is possible, despite their apparent pseudonymity. A responsible reading must involve attention both to past meaning and future potential.

Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies, and: Criticism without Boundaries: Directions and Crosscurrents in Postmodern Critical Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies, and: Criticism without Boundaries: Directions and Crosscurrents in Postmodern Critical Theory Vincent B. Leitch Jonathan Arac . Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies. Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms, Vol. 1. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. 358 pp. $32.50. Joseph A. Buttigieg , ed. Criticism without Boundaries: Directions and Crosscurrents in Postmodern Critical Theory. Ward-Phillips Lectures, Vol. 12. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1987. 259 pp. $28.95. During the decades following the 1960s one widespread reaction against the New Criticism that had dominated American academic literary studies in the 1940s and 1950s was a recovery of critical allegiance to sociohistorical and political modes of inquiry, which were widely discredited in the immediate postwar years for nonliterary preoccupations. The environment from which a literary text emerged, including its anthropological, socioeconomic, political, and cultural determinants, received renewed scrutiny, as did the historical milieu of the text's reception by readers. Among those critics advocating a return to such inquiries were certain hermeneuticists, feminists, ethnic critics, reader-response theorists, Marxists, and poststructuralists. Of course, some New York intellectuals, myth critics, biographers, and literary historians had practiced sociohistorical and political criticism during the postwar period of relative eclipse. Although it is sometimes forgotten, the New Critics generally favored poetry over fiction, so that the attacks in the Sixties and thereafter against the New Critics entailed a self-conscious renewal of critical interest not simply in sociology, politics, and history but in fiction. However, such fiction was often "noncanonical," consisting both of popular genres by such disenfranchised groups of writers as women and blacks and of avant-garde texts by experimental scriptors. To generalize, forms of "cultural criticism" practiced in the wake of New Criticism revived interest in sociology, history, politics, fiction, and popular culture. Not surprisingly, some practitioners of cultural criticism in the Space Age turned suspicious eyes on the institution of the university literature department for its proclivity to foster conformity, elitism, sexism, and racism. Propounded by cultural critics of varying stripes, attacks on the regnant institution and the reigning ideology of literary studies exhibited a more or less counter-cultural orientation as well as a penchant for institutional and ideological inquiry. It should come as no surprise that the broad critique of New Criticism implied a hostility to modernism frequently in favor of an emergent liberating postmodernism. After all, New Criticism was created by partisans of high modernism. Some enemies of New Criticism made their hostility to modernism explicit whereas others did not. Whatever the case, tensions simmered in literature departments into the immediate post-Vietnam era. Among the critics associated with the emergence of new modes of postmodern cultural criticism in the 1970s and 1980s were the members of the boundary 2 group, particularly Jonathan Arac, Paul Bové, Daniel O'Hara, and William Spanos, all of whom served in editorial capacities for the journal during these decades. Whereas the work of the group in the 1970s depended fundamentally on lessons adapted from Martin Heidegger's phenomenological hermeneutics, its undertaking in the 1980s rested upon insights gleaned from Michel Foucault's genealogy of culture. The shift from Heidegger to Foucault as tutelary figure signaled a turn to interest in institutional and ideological analyses as part of a widened project, a project [End Page 319] of cultural criticism. In essence, a sociopolitical analytics was joined to a historicist hermeneutics, forming a mode of literary criticism having much in common with related contemporaneous leftist kinds of criticism, including neo-Marxism. As the leading members of the boundary 2 group moved progressively into practicing cultural critique, the enmity toward modernism, especially its critical offspring—New Criticism—displayed both an unrelenting hostile tone and a modulated historical understanding. These interests and directions of the group can be discerned in Jonathan Arac's Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies and Joseph Buttigieg's collection of essays from the group titled Criticism without Boundaries: Directions and Crosscurrents in Postmodern Critical Theory. In his Acknowledgments, Arac notes: "My greatest professional debt and pleasure is spread among the editorial group of boundary 2. . . ." In his Preface, Joseph Buttigieg explains that the essays in his...