Understanding the Audience: The Bi-Annual Conference of the Reception Studies Society

Kansas City, Missouri, 27-29 September 2007

In late September the bi-annual conference of the Reception Studies Society, hosted by the University of Missouri - Kansas City Communications Studies Department, took place at both the University of Missouri - Kansas City and the nearby Holiday Inn at Country Club Plaza. Founded just two years ago with an inaugural conference at the University of Delaware, the Reception Studies Society is an organization that should be of great interest to many SHARPists, for it is dedicated to the study of how audiences for various types of “texts” – including books, periodicals, movies, television shows, and events, among others – interacted with them.

The opening reception of the conference took place on Thursday the 27^th in a venue that more SHARPists should visit and take advantage of for their research: the Linda Hall Library on the University of Missouri - Kansas City campus. This library is a relatively unknown jewel, housing one of the country’s most extensive collections of rare scientific volumes and an impressive array of primary materials related to the history of science, engineering, and technology. The highlight of this evening was a keynote address by Patsy Schweikart of Purdue University entitled “The Receiving Function: Ethics and Reading.” Schweikart first outlined the difficulties faced by those who wish to foster a change in attitude among audiences and then proposed a solution: a model of text / reader relations that requires empathy, patience, and work on the reader’s part.

During the next two days, conference participants had the opportunity to hear presentations about a wide variety of “texts.” The majority of papers were concerned with readers of printed texts. Some of these papers highlighted how historical readers responded to canonical works; examples included “The New England Readers of Walter Scott in the 1820s” (Emily Todd, Westfield State College), “The Lessons of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for Children in an Age of Segregation” (Barbara Hochman, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), and a number of papers on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Most papers, however, were about lesser-known authors. For instance, Edgard Sankara of the University of Delaware delivered a paper on “The Ambiguous Reception of Hampâté Bâ,” and Michael Davey of Valdosta State University presented “American Novel, Transatlantic Audience: Brown’s Ormond, the Representation of Class in the United States, and Its Reception.”

Many other papers analyzed the reception of literary works by audiences previously deemed as not especially important, especially periodical readers. This was seen in such papers as “Reading for the Hair Dryer Crowd: Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Good Country People’ in Harper’s Bazaar” (Linda Peterson, University of Nebraska at Omaha); “‘Puzzl[ing] us more and more’: The Reception of Post-bellum Women Poets in American Periodicals” (Shannon Thomas, Ohio State University); “Training Is Everything: High School Teachers, Literature, and Periodicals, 1880-1914" (Chuck Johanningsmeier, University of Nebraska at Omaha), and “Crossing the Atlantic: English Novels in Nineteenth-Century Brazil” (Sandra Vasconcelos, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil). One of the most interesting papers of this type, in my opinion, was given by Emily Satterwhite of Virginia Tech. In “Deliverance from Suburbia: A Reception Geography of the Romance and Nightmare of Appalachia,” Satterwhite analyzed hundreds of letters that James Dickey received from fans after the publication of his famous (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view) novel in 1970. Linking her analysis to the place of origin of these letters (most came from suburban areas of the Northeast and the South, with very few from the Midwest or West), she determined that the book served to confirm many readers’ previously-held stereotypes of the South and of rural inhabitants. Satterwhite’s paper amply demonstrated how valuable a resource fan mail can be for those investigating the cultural work performed by literary texts.

The conference, however, did not confine itself solely to the reception of literary works. A number of papers provided fascinating insights into how audiences have engaged movies, television shows, audiobooks, and “events.” Two panels were devoted to the subject of “Receiving Modern Cinema.” Papers in these sessions discussed not only familiar movies such as Brokeback Mountain, Psycho, and films of various Shakespeare plays, but also less well-known movies such as Hiroshima Mon Amour and Goodbye, Lenin. Joseph Militello of Emporia State University delivered an especially illuminating paper entitled “From Ostalgie to Ostphobie: Comparative Eastern and Western Responses to Recent ‘East German’ Cinema.”

Only one panel was devoted to the audiences for television shows, but it was jam-packed with exciting topics. Joseph Kerr of Georgia State University presented his paper entitled “Fan Reaction to the Grey’s Anatomy Controversy: Homophobia, Racism or an Overdose of Political Correctness?,” Kevin Sanson of the University of Texas at Austin spoke on “No Sex Farce, Please, We’re American: Translating the BBC’s Coupling for U.S. Network Television,” and Catherine Preston of the University of Kansas delivered “Does Murder Turn You On? Women’s Responses to the Sexualization of Murder in Recent Crime Drama Television Series.”

Major highlights of the conference, scattered throughout, were the addresses by four keynote speakers. Besides the aforementioned talk by Patsy Schweikart, conference goers heard from David Nord of Indiana University, speaking on “Ephemeral and Elusive: Journalism History as Reading History”; Janet Staiger of the University of Texas at Austin, whose paper was entitled, “The Revenge of the Film Education Movement: Cult Movies and Fan Interpretive Behaviors”; and John Frow of the University of Melbourne, on “Afterlife: Texts as Usage.” Unfortunately, space constraints here do not allow me to provide details about these uniformly excellent presentations.

Overall, the conference brought together an interesting array of scholars from across the country and around the world. While no conference can cover all topics, I would note that conspicuously missing from these proceedings were papers investigating the reception of non-literary written texts; David Nord was the only person at the conference who demonstrated his engagement with readers of non-literary texts – in his case newspaper readers. More papers on topics such as the reception of textbooks, speeches, advice columns, and so forth would have made the conference even better than it was. In addition, future conferences of the Reception Studies Society would benefit from the inclusion of more historians on the panels, for they bring to audience studies a perspective and approach that is quite different from those represented by literary scholars and those in communication studies.

Clearly, the Reception Studies Society fills an important scholarly niche, and those interested in learning about it and its journal, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, can visit the Society’s website at <http://copland.udel.edu/~pgold/webpage/RSSsite/index.html>. SHARP members should also be on the lookout for the next conference of the RSS, which is tentatively scheduled to be held at Purdue University between September 11-13, 2009.

Chuck Johanningsmeier

University of Nebraska at Omaha

Scraps:

He showed how in recent years German filmgoers in the former East have tended to favor those films that portray life in that country favorably and nostalgically, such as Goodbye, Lenin, while they have generally avoided films that depict the less savory aspects of East Germany, such as The Lives of Others. Interestingly enough, Militello points out, the latter film has been incredibly popular in the former West Germany, chiefly because it makes “Wessies” feel superior to “Ossies” and serves to justify their attempts to transform the former East into a mirror image of Western Germany.