Module Identifier | TFM0730 | ||||||||||||||
Module Title | THEORIES AND TRADITIONS IN AUDIENCE AND RECEPTION STUDIES | ||||||||||||||
Academic Year | 2004/2005 | ||||||||||||||
Co-ordinator | Dr Ernest Mathijs | ||||||||||||||
Semester | Semester 2 (Taught over 2 semesters) | ||||||||||||||
Course delivery | Seminars / Tutorials | 40 Hours | |||||||||||||
Assessment |
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1. Display a secure knowledge of a number of main traditions for conceiving and understanding audiences and reception of cultural and media texts and events.
2. Compare and evaluate empirical studies conducted within each of the major framing traditions.
3. Demonstrate a critical awareness of a range of theoretical and conceptual issues and debates concerning the meanings of `audience?.
4. Evaluate different disciplinary traditions for thinking about audiences and reception, and their capacity to contribute to our knowledge and understanding.
Brief Description The module will seek to cover the main traditions and disciplinary sources for conceptualising and researching audience relations to a number of cultural and media practices, most notably: the mass communications tradition; the uses and gratifications tradition; the cultural studies tradition; the American reception studies tradition; literary theories and approaches to the `implied audience?; sociological and historical approaches relating to the formation of taste cultures; and fan studies. Through these, a range of questions about the meanings of `audience? and `reception? will be addressed. The primary focus of the module will be on traditions of work that have informed in various ways audience and reception studies in media and cultural studies (with particular focus on film and television), along with consideration of the weaker but still important traditions of research around theatrical and performance audiences. However some attention will also be given to related works on other media (eg, popular literature and magazines, comic books, and the press), and students will be encouraged to draw on backgrounds in other fields (for instance literary studies) for parallel traditions of enquiry. The module will lead to a consideration of the changes introduced by the arrival of new media, where new kinds of `audiencing?, centred on interaction, are involved. Equally there will be a consideration of the differences generated by the questions and requirements of academic, policy-directed and commercially-driven researches.
1. What is an `audience??
2. `Effects? traditions
3. Exemplary study from the `effects? tradition
4. Sociological traditions
5. Exemplary study from the `uses and gratifications? tradition
6. Pierre Bourdieu, `cultural taste? systems and the audience
7. Histories of the `audience?
8. Cultural studies traditions
9. Exemplary study: Janice Radway on women romance readers
10. Literary traditions of audience investigation
11. Exemplary study: Stanley Fish and `interpretive communities?
12. Reception studies
13. Exemplary study: Janet Staiger
14. Commercial researches
15. Exemplary study: finding target audiences for a comic book
16. Policy-directed research
17. Exemplary study: Broadcasting Standards Council research
18. Fan researches
19. Exemplary study: Henry Jenkins
20. Return to the question: what is an `audience??
This module is at CQFW Level 7