Mary Jackson Pitts, Ph.D.

mpitts@astate.edu

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Audience-centered criticism

n    

What is audience-centered criticism

n     An understanding about the industry and auters about the audiences they wish to reach.

n     An understanding of the television text considering the audience

n     Uses the concept of the audience and the experiences and positioning

The Debate

n     Invisible mass

n     Anonymity

n     Inability to influence

New concerns

n     Content

n     Types of art

n     Popular versus mass

n     Our well-being

Audiences

n     Were often seen as masses to be reached or “taste” publics whose opinion could be molded

Commercial television

n     Different from novels

n     Addresses, appeals, implores

n     Projects itself

Ethnographic audience research

n     Direct observation of television viewing behavior

Reader-Oriented Criticism

n     Reader-response criticism

n     Reception theory

Elizabeth Freund

n     Reader-response criticism is “a labyrinth of converging and sometimes contradictory approaches.”

Gap filling

n     Roman Ingarden

u  Student of Husserl

Process by which the imaginary words in the text is constructed in the mind of the reader.

Iser

n     Wondering viewpoint

n     Protension

n     Retention

n     Paradigmatic

n     Syntagmatic

Approaching the Audience

n     Do we see ourselves in the audience or apart from it?

n     Perspectives of the audience may be varient and elusive.

The elusive audience

n     What exactly is the television audience?

n     Critics need to be clear about their vantage point.

Vantage Points

n     Textual determinism

n     Structural determinism

Priorities

n     Construct focus as an equation that equals a multiplicative product:

u  Fans=Genres X Cultures

u  Characterization=Audiences X Texts

Critical context

n     Institutional perspective

n     Behavioralist perspective

Radway

n     Etymology

n     Rhetor

n     Rhetoric

Communication Process

n     Audience Power and Interpretation

n     Audience in the text

Approach

n     Audience-Oriented Criticism

n     Critical Audience Study

Audience-Oriented Criticism

n     German critics-Reception Theory

n     American- Reader response criticism

Doing Audience-Oriented Criticism

n     Implied viewers

n     Interpretive Communication

n     The Addresser

n     Characterized Viewers

n     The Reading Act

n     Writing Audience-Oriented Criticism

n     Strengths and Limitations

Critical Audience Study

n     Media Group at CCCS

n     Hegemony

n     Polysemic

n     Study begins with the selection and analysis of a television text, genre, or context of viewing

Doing Critical Audience Study

n     Method and Approach

n     Writing the Critical Audience Study

n     Strengths and Limitations