Editorial Introduction
The publication of this issue is
important to the editors of Participations for more than its
specific contents. The main part of the issue comprises a special
issue of work deriving from the 2007 Conference associated with the
Birmingham, UK, ‘Beyond The Book’ project. Up until now, with a few
valuable exceptions, the work which this Journal has been able to
publish has come overwhelmingly from those fields of cultural
practice in which cultural studies-influenced audience research has
particularly taken root. Centred around what can be broadly called
‘mass/popular media’, and heavily interested in how the media are
integrated into the everyday lives of its audiences, consumers, or
users, this turn to audience research has been much brokered by the
distinctive phases of cultural studies’ history: the revived
interest in ‘ideology’, and in the close examination of cultural
forms and practices embodying it (thence, ‘power’ as a key concept);
the revaluations of the ‘popular’, and the debates about resistance,
cultural formations and communities, and identities (with
theorisations of the ‘everyday’ at their heart). Complicated by
special areas of interest and method, such as the rise of fan
studies, and the growth of reception studies, this tradition has
always known that a lot of its concerns, and indeed its audiences,
struggle for respectability.
Reader-research is different. While
particular studies (and of course most famously Janice Radway’s
Reading The Romance) have faced up to the challenge of the
dismissed ‘popular/formulaic’, by and large, books come with a
cachet. This is one of the reasons why close attention to practices
of reading has been quite slow to develop – although, in another
direction, histories of reading are quite substantially developed.
When the study of reading did grow, its roots and routes were
decidedly different. Strongly influenced by hermeneutic traditions,
and by the American uptake (via Stanley Fish) of European reception
theory, what reader research has struggled against is simply
very different. In recent years, the growth of a very particular
tradition of studying reading groups is perhaps the equivalent for
reader research of fan studies for audience research.
Yet as a Journal our sense is that the
two traditions really need to talk more with each other. A sharing
of questions, theories, concepts and methods is what we are looking
for. In opening the pages of Participations to the
organisers and participants in Beyond The Book, we are hoping
to stimulate just such dialogue. The potentials for overlap, apart
from anything else, are immense. Imagine future research projects
using the methods and insights of reading group research to look at
cinephile organisations – or amateur theatre groups. Imagine,
conversely, the study of reading practices conceived within
theorisations of everyday life. Then, imagine the potential of
projects exploring back and forth between books, television and
films for the ways in which different versions of pervasive cultural
forms carry, for different audiences, the ‘charge’ of the status of
these different media, and the different practices of attention,
participation and evaluation associated with each. Of such stuff
are dreams and applications made!
We are therefore very pleased to be
publishing these six essays, both their individual value, and for
the chance to explore the ways in which they are both like and
unlike most work we have so far published. My personal thanks both
to the organisers of Beyond The Book for agreeing to work
with us on this, and in particular to Dru Pagliasotti for taking on,
and discharging brilliantly, the role of Guest Editor for this
Special Issue.
Also in this issue we publish three
essays which are outside the Special Issue. This does not diminish
them at all. One of the great virtues we have seen for publishing
online is the flexibility we attain to devote as much space as we
can, to whatever has completed our editorial processes. And in this
case it is in our view a positive advantage to have work from such
different background domains published together. Ideally, it will
support and encourage eclecticism and experimentation among our
readers. So, alongside the six essays which Dru outlines in her
Introduction, we also carry three other essays.
Barbara
Klinger explores the ways in which audiences adopt quotes, lines
and sayings by use of which they are able to perform (in particular
masculine) public identities.
Yiu Fai
Chow and Jeroen de Kloet compare the reception of two local pop
stars, Hong Kong’s Leon Lai and the Dutch Marco Borsato, comparing
the grounds and implications of their stardom. And
Joost de
Bruin explores young audiences’ engagement with the contemporary
Dutch television soap opera Good Times Bad Times, looking at
the ways in which ethnicity, religion, gender, and age interweave to
shape three distinctive ‘performative styles’ in responses to
lesbian storylines with the series, so that a response to the
programme becomes a means of demonstrating wider attitudes and
orientations to the world.
The range of kinds of work thus carried
in this issue really does exemplify the richness of the audience and
reception, and now reader fields, that we hope to continue to
support and promulgate through this Journal.
Contact (by email):
Martin Barker
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