English Studies and my own reception of Bourdieu and St Clair

I have in the past committed myself to a strongly 'discursive' (even linguistic) approach to reception study (see virtually all of my papers that have seen print to date). Despite that, it now seems clear to me that it is in extra-discursive conditions of the sort discussed in my last couple of posts that a great part of the explanation of reception (and indeed production) must be located. Circulation for one thing, but also circulation of the resources necessary for understanding. And this makes me wonder about my own reception of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of Gallic taste and William St Clair's economic history of British reading.

It is obvious to me now that these works have more to contribute to an understanding of reception than almost anything else that has yet been published. And yet when I encountered them as a PhD student, I missed so much of their significance. Is that because I encountered them within the context of English Studies? I'm thinking back on the use of schooled interpretive resources in appreciating Joss Whedon (blogged here), or the different interpretive resources various groups of professionals seem to have brought to bear on The Wire (blogged here).

Whether carried out from the point of view of language or of literature, English Studies as it currently manifests itself neither demands from its practitioners nor provides to its students the resources needed to investigate the production, circulation, and reception of texts - never mind an appreciation of its own disciplinary role in those processes - and thus perpetuates the mystification of its own objects of study.

So hard to know which box to think outside of, when encased in so many. I looked beyond 'the text', but not beyond linguistic codes (McGann 1991).

The reception of Dr Horrible - and the material conditions of reception

Anouk Lang's paper in the current issue of Narrative investigates the initial reception of Joss Whedon's low-budget musical, Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Lang does this by examining a staggeringly large corpus of online responses: something approaching a quarter of a million words of text, harvested from discussion threads referring to the work. Because Dr Horrible was released in three parts, Lang was able to observe the formation and frustration of viewers' anticipations in real time. She finds that though many viewers were initially disappointed by the musical's unhappy ending, a consensus view later overcame this disappointment by re-assigning the musical as a whole to a different genre: the origins story (in Thomas J Roberts's terms, not strictly a genre but a 'formula'). All this makes Lang's paper a very worthwhile contribution to narratology and to genre theory, and (of course) to reception studies. As Lang writes, the material she analyses

offers examples of individuals making sense of stories and allows us to see how certain sense-making tools are deployed: how readers use genres to orient themselves to what a text can be expected to deliver; how character identification works to influence the experience of a text; the kinds of hermeneutic moves that occur within an interpretive community; and the difference in how readers understand a text part-way through its telling compared to its end, to name just a few. Among the most striking insights in the data was the centrality of genre as a tool in the sense-making arsenal of many of the Dr. Horrible viewers.

Lang 2010, p. 377

Fascinating though this is, it is not what I find most interesting about the paper. To me, it seems that Lang's major contribution is rather the opportunity she gives us to think carefully about importance of the particular material conditions of any text's production, distribution, and reception. On one level, she does this simply by carrying out her analysis on a economically unusual work. Dr Horrible was financed by Whedon himself and distributed free over the internet, with the cast and crew effectively being paid in IOUs. The reason for this was the Writers' Strike of 2007-2008, which was itself partly motivated by a dispute over the remuneration owed to writers for online distribution of content. In this context, Dr Horrible can be seen as an assertion of the writer's creative independence from the studio system - or perhaps one should say, of the star writer's entrepreneurial independence from the studio system that produced him - in the brave new world of digital distribution. Numerous revenue-generating Dr Horrible products have since been released on the back of the free online version's success, thus demonstrating that this independence was no fantasy. And in this respect, one might want to see Whedon as having very briefly taken on the mantle of a 21st century Alexander Pope.

When read in this context, Lang's analysis of Dr Horrible's reception is even more illuminating. Web 2.0 is not a neutral medium: it does not simply reveal the reception of the work. That reception was, Lang shows, communal, with its communality being facilitated by Web 2.0 technology. Moreover, though Dr Horrible was released internationally and for free, technological (which is to say, economic) and educational (which in many cases is also to say, economic) factors appear to have played a key role in mediating its reception. Consider the following:

A comparatively high level of adherence to the conventions of written English such as grammar and spelling, in addition to displays of linguistic capital - such as the ability to produce witty, arch, or linguistically deft comments (see Bury [2008, p.] 292) suggest that many of the contributors had at least some level of tertiary education. Many made reference to white-collar jobs which gave them access to a computer; a number of others referred to university courses. In the course of discussions about accessing the text online, many identified their location, with the majority of participants located in the US and others in other industrialized nations such as Canada, the UK, the nations of Europe, and Australia.

Lang 2010, p. 379, emphasis added

Consider these observations on the geographical, educational, and social situation of Lang's research subjects in the light of her argument that the interpretive and appreciative strategies they applied to Dr Horrible were educationally instilled. Might schooling at the higher levels of a western educational system be as important to enjoying Whedon's 'freely-available' text as a broadband internet connection is to accessing it (and its fan-created paratexts)?

New issue of Reception, latest issue of Participations

I was pleased to find that Reception, the journal of the Reception Study Society, is not (as I had assumed) defunct, as it has recently put out a second issue. I particularly enjoyed Barbara Hochman's article on Uncle Tom's Cabin, which does a fine job of analysing anecdotal recollections of that particular book in context of its public reception history and, of course, the political history of the United States. Hochman's approach works particularly well, I think, in her reading of James Baldwin's autobiographical references to Uncle Tom's Cabin against his more famous critique of the work.

One of the nice things (there had to be some) about working in a field as lacking in official recognition as reception study is that the main journals are open-access - Reception is, and so is Participations. Which reminds me how pleased I was to read Julian McDougall's article on The Wire in this spring's issue. Given my own lingering prejudice towards 'naturally occurring' data, I would probably have appreciated a little more on what McDougall calls 'self-determining online Critic-Fans' and a little less positioning of particular groups of research participants into producing particular kinds of response. But that is a prejudice on my part. And what comes out of McDougall's methodology is fascinating:

The high levels of critical reflection, intertextuality and self-awareness [displayed by the Creative and Media teachers], playful as they are, are a marker of ‘distinction’ (Bourdieu, 1979) in so much as they differ from the ways that the other participant groups... locate the viewing activity. The Drama teachers... focus on the ‘craft’ of the construction but avoid references from popular culture, preferring to relate [The Wire] to Greek Drama.... The Youth Workers... focus on its ‘reality’ and the Education Students on its complexity and its distance from their local experiences.

McDougall 2010