New
Directions in American Reception Study
Edited by Philip Goldstein,
Contemporary reception study has developed a diversity
of approaches and methods, including the institutional, textual, historical,
authorial, and reader-response, which, to a greater or lesser extent,
acknowledge the various ways in which readers have found texts. This collection
emphasizes that new diversity, examining movies, newspapers, fans, television
shows, and traditional American as well as modern Hispanic, Black, and Women's
literature.
The essays on literature include James Machor on Melville's short fiction, Kenneth Roemer on
Edward Bellamy's utopian work Looking Backward, Philip Goldstein on
Richard Wright’s Native Son, Amy Blair on the popularity of Sinclair
Lewis's Main Street, Marcial Gonzalez on Danny Santiago and his Hispanic
novel Famous All Over Town, and Leonard Diepeveen
on modernist fiction and criticism. The theoretical essays on reader-oriented
criticism include Patsy Schweickart on interpretation
and the ethics of care, Steven Maillox on Reading
Lolita in Tehran, Tony Bennett on the cultural analyses of Pierre Bourdieu, and Jack Bratich on
active audiences. Media versions of response criticism include Andrea Press and
Camille Johnson's ethnographic analysis of fans of the Oprah Winfrey Show,
Janet Staiger on Robert Aldrich's film version of
Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly, and Rhiannon Bury on the fans of the
HBO television show Six Feet Under. History-of-the-book versions include
Barbara Hochman on the popularity of the 1890s
editions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ellen Garvey on
nineteenth-century scrapbooks of newspaper, and David Nord on early
twentieth-century newspapers' relations to audience charges of bias and
unfairness. The collection concludes with essays by Janice Radway on the limits
of these methods and on the possibility of new forms of sociological and
anthropological reception study, and by Toby Miller on the "reception
deception" in relation to the worldwide distribution and reception of
movies and television shows.
February 2008