Module Information

This module will look at issues raised by how empirical audience cultures and practices have been marginalised in certain theoretical frameworks (e.g. work in the "effects" tradition and that which posits "ideal" audiences on the basis of textual study alone). It will trace how different paradigms have dominated audience studies, and how sociological/psychoanalytic concepts can be utilised. The module will consider the ways in which audiences "resist" and refocus textual meaning (through paratextual orientations), as well as how aesthetic, economic, social and personal values can play a role in the audience-text relation. In particular, this module will investigate how audiences have become objects of moral concern, and just how audiences are commodified as well as being highly active (something explored in relation to social media and digital fandom). We will investigate audiences' own cultural criteria of aesthetics/appreciation alongside discourses of factuality and authority which are central to media culture's DVD/blu-ray commentaries, extras and promotion. Finally, rather then assuming that audiences are 'active' as fans or lovers of screen (and other) media, what of "haters" and even indifferent, disinterested readers/spectators/viewers? Analysing audiences means considering a wider range of affects than have typically been represented in scholarship, as well as theorising the cultural specificity of ourselves -- academics and students -- as audiences.