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