A broad survey on how audiences make meaning out of mass media Media Reception Studies broadly surveys the past century of scholarship on the ways in which audiences make meaning out of mass media. It synthesizes in plain language social scientific, linguistic, and cultural studies approaches to film and television as communication media. Janet Staiger traverses a broad terrain, covering the Chicago School, early psychological approaches, Soviet theory, the Frankfurt School, mass communication research and critical theory, linguistics and semiotic theory, social-psychoanalytical research, cognitive psychology, and cultural studies. She offers these theories as a set of tools for understanding the complex relationships between films and their audiences, TV shows and their viewers. She explains such questions as the behavior of fans; the implications of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity with regard to the media; the effect of violence, horror, and sexually explicit images on viewers; and the place of memory in spectatorship. Providing an organized and lucid introduction to a staggering amount of work, Media Reception Studies is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in understanding the effects of mass media.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Reception introduces students and academics alike to the study of the way in which texts are received by readers, viewers, and audiences. Organized conceptually and thematically, this book provides a much-needed overview of the field, drawing on work in literary and cultural studies as well as Classics, Biblical studies, medievalism, and the media history of the book. It provides new ways of understanding and configuring the relationships between the various terminologies and theories that comprise reception study, and suggests potential ways forward for study and research in the light of such new configurations. Written in a clear and accessible style, this is the ideal introduction to the study of reception.

The coming of age of audiovisual translation studies has brought about a much-needed surge of studies focusing on the audience, their comprehension, appreciation or rejection of what reaches them through the medium of translation. Although complex to perform, studies on the reception of translated audiovisual texts offer a uniquely thorough picture of the life and afterlife of these texts. This volume provides a detailed and comprehensive overview of reception studies related to audiovisual translation and accessibility, from a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Focusing on all audiovisual translation techniques and encompassing theoretical and methodological approaches from translation, media and film studies, it aims to become a reference for students and scholars across these fields.

Placed within the context of reception studies, this book investigates how advertisements that rely on re-contextualising shared cultural knowledge are understood by their viewers, and examines their persuasive potential.

This book examines the reception of rhetoric and the rhetoric of reception. By considering salient rhetorical traits of rhetorical utterances and texts seen in context, and relating this to different kinds of reception and/or audience use and negotiation, the authors explore the connections between rhetoric and reception. In our time, new media and new forms of communication make it harder to distinguish between speaker and audience. The active involvement of users and audiences is more important than ever before. This project is based on the premise that rhetorical research should reconsider the understanding, conceptualization and examination of the rhetorical audience. From mostly understanding audiences as theoretical constructions that are examined textually and speculatively, the contributors give more attention to empirical explorations of actual audiences and users. The book will provide readers with new knowledge on the workings of rhetoric as well as illustrative and guiding examples of new methods of rhetorical studies.

Employing a wide range of examples from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best, Janet Staiger argues that a historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the history, criticism, and philosophy of cultural products. She maintains that as artifacts, films do not contain immanent meanings, that differences among interpretations have historical bases, and that these variations are due to social, political, and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. After proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. Staiger gives special attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent developments in post-structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies, and includes a discussion of current reader-response models in literary and film studies as well as an alternative approach for thinking about historical readers and spectators.