Apologies for not updating more frequently. I'll be trying to do something about that from now on.
I have a new website here, complete with blog:
www.danielallington.net
Saturday, 6 April 2013
Saturday, 28 May 2011
The higher-brow and the not-quite-so-highbrow - a gay book club reads Joe Keenan
So now it's time for me to blog one of my own articles. It's called 'Distinction, intentions, and the consumption of fiction: negotiating cultural legitimacy in a gay reading group' (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1177/1367549410396002) and it appeared this month in European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 2. If your institution doesn't have a subscription, you can ask me for a copy.
It's an important paper for me, because it's on the cusp of so many things: balanced between my earlier interest in literary theory and my current interest in cultural sociology, my earlier commitment to a specific methodology for analysing qualitative data and my current frustration with the sheer pretentiousness of all methodologies for analysing qualitative data. (I don't care any more whether it's Discursive Psychology, Critical Discourse Analysis, or Grounded Theory... just tell me something you think you found out about the world. Positivist, me? Actually, no -- but that's another story.) Also, as the title makes clear, I have again found myself writing about sexuality: a topic that I have never set out to research, but which perennially springs up in the margins of whatever I'm doing. The fact that I didn't set out to research it is probably responsible for the unintended ambiguity of the title: the 'legitimacy' at issue in my article is not (as the non-specialist reader might expect) the legitimacy of homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, but legitimacy as in 'legitimate' (ie. highbrow) culture. The reading group I focused on was of such interest to me not in the first instance because it was composed of gay people, but because its reading preferences were so extraordinarily poised between the highbrow and the not-quite-so-highbrow. Throughout the article, I focus in depth on its discussions of a single work of gay fiction, My Lucky Star by Joe Keenan. Some of the group members liked it, some of them didn't, but that's not really the point.
So what is it that I think I found out? First, that the group's gayness was in large part the explanation for its poise: it was formed to discuss books 'of gay interest' regardless of how intellectual those books might be. Second, that this did not mean that the group didn't care how intellectual the books it discussed actually were: group members debated the intellectuality of individual books in depth and with passion (and returned to earlier discussions on that point both when talking to one another and when interviewed by me). Third, that expressing appreciation for a book that other members deemed insufficiently intellectual had the potential to put group members in an awkward position, because of the necessary connection (if you'll forgive the theoretical abstraction) between one's own cultural capital and the cultural capital associated with the things one likes (see also Kathryn Grafton's PhD thesis, which I blogged earlier in the week). Fourth, that group members could validate their appreciation of a book of the not-quite-so-highbrow sort both by arguing that one should 'take it for what it is' (sociologists, recall Richard Peterson's omnivore thesis!) and by reading it against a body of specifically 'gay' cultural knowledge (ie. by displaying subcultural capital). Fifth, that perceptions of authorial intention can play a key role in discussions of the cultural legitimacy of books: not perceptions of the author's intention to communicate some particular meaning or other, but perceptions of the author's intention to write a 'serious' work of literature or (conversely) an entertaining piece of popular fiction.
I happen to think that this last point has significant implications for literary theory, but I haven't had the opportunity to spell them out yet. Cf. my earlier argument that the important kind of intention is the intention to produce an artefact of a particular kind (ie. genre) having socially acknowledged success and failure conditions - an argument that (speaking as an inveterate self-citer) I unaccountably forgot to cite in the current article. Ah well, there's always this blog!
It's an important paper for me, because it's on the cusp of so many things: balanced between my earlier interest in literary theory and my current interest in cultural sociology, my earlier commitment to a specific methodology for analysing qualitative data and my current frustration with the sheer pretentiousness of all methodologies for analysing qualitative data. (I don't care any more whether it's Discursive Psychology, Critical Discourse Analysis, or Grounded Theory... just tell me something you think you found out about the world. Positivist, me? Actually, no -- but that's another story.) Also, as the title makes clear, I have again found myself writing about sexuality: a topic that I have never set out to research, but which perennially springs up in the margins of whatever I'm doing. The fact that I didn't set out to research it is probably responsible for the unintended ambiguity of the title: the 'legitimacy' at issue in my article is not (as the non-specialist reader might expect) the legitimacy of homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, but legitimacy as in 'legitimate' (ie. highbrow) culture. The reading group I focused on was of such interest to me not in the first instance because it was composed of gay people, but because its reading preferences were so extraordinarily poised between the highbrow and the not-quite-so-highbrow. Throughout the article, I focus in depth on its discussions of a single work of gay fiction, My Lucky Star by Joe Keenan. Some of the group members liked it, some of them didn't, but that's not really the point.
So what is it that I think I found out? First, that the group's gayness was in large part the explanation for its poise: it was formed to discuss books 'of gay interest' regardless of how intellectual those books might be. Second, that this did not mean that the group didn't care how intellectual the books it discussed actually were: group members debated the intellectuality of individual books in depth and with passion (and returned to earlier discussions on that point both when talking to one another and when interviewed by me). Third, that expressing appreciation for a book that other members deemed insufficiently intellectual had the potential to put group members in an awkward position, because of the necessary connection (if you'll forgive the theoretical abstraction) between one's own cultural capital and the cultural capital associated with the things one likes (see also Kathryn Grafton's PhD thesis, which I blogged earlier in the week). Fourth, that group members could validate their appreciation of a book of the not-quite-so-highbrow sort both by arguing that one should 'take it for what it is' (sociologists, recall Richard Peterson's omnivore thesis!) and by reading it against a body of specifically 'gay' cultural knowledge (ie. by displaying subcultural capital). Fifth, that perceptions of authorial intention can play a key role in discussions of the cultural legitimacy of books: not perceptions of the author's intention to communicate some particular meaning or other, but perceptions of the author's intention to write a 'serious' work of literature or (conversely) an entertaining piece of popular fiction.
I happen to think that this last point has significant implications for literary theory, but I haven't had the opportunity to spell them out yet. Cf. my earlier argument that the important kind of intention is the intention to produce an artefact of a particular kind (ie. genre) having socially acknowledged success and failure conditions - an argument that (speaking as an inveterate self-citer) I unaccountably forgot to cite in the current article. Ah well, there's always this blog!
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Commentary as genre as social action
I started this blog with the best of intentions, but lo and behold, it's well over half a year since I last posted. Blame it on the day job. But I'll try to get things back on track now. Throughout those seven months, I've been meaning to blog one particular work of reader study: Kathryn Grafton's PhD thesis, Paying attention to public readers of Canadian literature: popular genre systems, publics, and canons, which was successfully defended last year. So here we are.
Grafton's thesis belongs to what I like to think of (although to paraphrase the 'immortal' Mandy Rice-Davies: I would, wouldn't I?) as the new school of reader research. If this is a form of reception study, then it is reception study that refuses to reify reception, seeing the traditional materials of reception study (statements about texts by people who claim to have read them) as an aspect of cultural production. The primary inspiration for this turn is surely Pierre Bourdieu, who counted among cultural producers all those who contribute to the production of the value of literary or artistic works, and not merely those identified as the 'creators' of such works (Bourdieu 1993). If this is accepted, then 'receiving' the work is producing the work - and there is no such thing as 'reception'. Perhaps the sort of research I'm talking about should be called 'reception studies post-reception' or even 'post-receptionism'. Perhaps that's what I should have called this blog. But I digress.
Grafton's starting point is more or less the same as the one from which I started my own PhD research, ie. that what a person says or writes about a text must be analysed as a piece of speech or writing that he or she has produced, rather than as evidence of a mental event that previously occurred during an individual act of private reading. Her and my research draws on quite different traditions in order to theorise such words on words, however: while my PhD work was founded in a mish-mash of discursive psychology, literary theory, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, Grafton's arises from a sustained engagement with genre theory, which also led to her 2009 chapter 'Situating the public social actions of blog posts' and her 2008 article with Elizabeth Maurer, 'Engaging with and arranging for publics in blog genres'.
Grafton's main theoretical contribution is to argue that 'contemporary canons are discursive spaces comprised of publicly circulating and re-circulating literary texts and talk about these texts.' (Grafton 2010, p. 7) To some extent, that's the point I tried to make in my 2006 reception study of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In the aforementioned article, I first adopt Michel Foucault's conception of canonical literary texts as speech acts taken up and re-spoken through speech acts of commentary, and then use Michael Billig's theory of arguing as thinking in order to make sense of the relations between specific commentaries. The closer I look at that article, the more I commonality I can see between literary critics (as I theorised them) and the various old and new media commentators that Grafton studies; moreover, the ongoing production of canonicity is at the heart of my analysis, which even recognises the link between this and the publishing industry. It all makes me wonder whether I slipped off track between 2006 and the submission of my PhD thesis - a work limited by (and constantly chaffing against) a certain idealism. I could have studied the material basis for the production of academic literary criticism, and investigated the work of criticism as a contributor to the production of institutional status both for the critic and for the object of criticism. Then my thesis might, I think, have become the equivalent of Grafton's brilliant exploration of the interactions between the blogosphere, the library system, civic authority, and the broadcasting and publishing industries in contemporary Canada - and of the circulation of texts and of symbolic capital across those interlinked systems. That exploration is Grafton's main empirical contribution - and as you can see, I'm impressed.
I suspect that this says something about the theoretical and methodological foundations of my PhD research, which diverted my energies from the research itself to the extent that their construction became my research. I hope I'm not too immodest in supposing that my own PhD thesis makes empirical contributions of its own. But what empirical claims it does make come close to getting lost in all the theoretical and methodological hand-wringing, added to which I was never quite sure whether to do the interesting thing (generalising through comparison with other studies) or what is often taken for the rigorous thing (insisting that everything one finds is specific to the particular text or spoken interaction that one happens to be analysing). This makes me wonder about the following as tests for social theory:
Just a thought.
Grafton's thesis belongs to what I like to think of (although to paraphrase the 'immortal' Mandy Rice-Davies: I would, wouldn't I?) as the new school of reader research. If this is a form of reception study, then it is reception study that refuses to reify reception, seeing the traditional materials of reception study (statements about texts by people who claim to have read them) as an aspect of cultural production. The primary inspiration for this turn is surely Pierre Bourdieu, who counted among cultural producers all those who contribute to the production of the value of literary or artistic works, and not merely those identified as the 'creators' of such works (Bourdieu 1993). If this is accepted, then 'receiving' the work is producing the work - and there is no such thing as 'reception'. Perhaps the sort of research I'm talking about should be called 'reception studies post-reception' or even 'post-receptionism'. Perhaps that's what I should have called this blog. But I digress.
Grafton's starting point is more or less the same as the one from which I started my own PhD research, ie. that what a person says or writes about a text must be analysed as a piece of speech or writing that he or she has produced, rather than as evidence of a mental event that previously occurred during an individual act of private reading. Her and my research draws on quite different traditions in order to theorise such words on words, however: while my PhD work was founded in a mish-mash of discursive psychology, literary theory, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, Grafton's arises from a sustained engagement with genre theory, which also led to her 2009 chapter 'Situating the public social actions of blog posts' and her 2008 article with Elizabeth Maurer, 'Engaging with and arranging for publics in blog genres'.
Grafton's main theoretical contribution is to argue that 'contemporary canons are discursive spaces comprised of publicly circulating and re-circulating literary texts and talk about these texts.' (Grafton 2010, p. 7) To some extent, that's the point I tried to make in my 2006 reception study of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In the aforementioned article, I first adopt Michel Foucault's conception of canonical literary texts as speech acts taken up and re-spoken through speech acts of commentary, and then use Michael Billig's theory of arguing as thinking in order to make sense of the relations between specific commentaries. The closer I look at that article, the more I commonality I can see between literary critics (as I theorised them) and the various old and new media commentators that Grafton studies; moreover, the ongoing production of canonicity is at the heart of my analysis, which even recognises the link between this and the publishing industry. It all makes me wonder whether I slipped off track between 2006 and the submission of my PhD thesis - a work limited by (and constantly chaffing against) a certain idealism. I could have studied the material basis for the production of academic literary criticism, and investigated the work of criticism as a contributor to the production of institutional status both for the critic and for the object of criticism. Then my thesis might, I think, have become the equivalent of Grafton's brilliant exploration of the interactions between the blogosphere, the library system, civic authority, and the broadcasting and publishing industries in contemporary Canada - and of the circulation of texts and of symbolic capital across those interlinked systems. That exploration is Grafton's main empirical contribution - and as you can see, I'm impressed.
I suspect that this says something about the theoretical and methodological foundations of my PhD research, which diverted my energies from the research itself to the extent that their construction became my research. I hope I'm not too immodest in supposing that my own PhD thesis makes empirical contributions of its own. But what empirical claims it does make come close to getting lost in all the theoretical and methodological hand-wringing, added to which I was never quite sure whether to do the interesting thing (generalising through comparison with other studies) or what is often taken for the rigorous thing (insisting that everything one finds is specific to the particular text or spoken interaction that one happens to be analysing). This makes me wonder about the following as tests for social theory:
- to what extent does your theory enable you to get on with your job of investigating how the social world works? (Or conversely: to what extent does it tie you up in questions of ontology and epistemology?)
- to what extent does your theory enable you to draw meaningful links between case studies? (Or conversely: to what extent does it limit you to a fragmentary series of expositions of local contexts?)
Just a thought.
Sunday, 10 October 2010
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).
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).
Saturday, 9 October 2010
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
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:
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.
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 theUS and others in other industrialized nations such asCanada , theUK , the nations of Europe, and. Australia
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)?Lang 2010, p. 379, emphasis added
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
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:
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.
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