In Janice Radway’s classic Reading the Romance of 1984, she
referred to the romance-purchasing customers of a small-town bookstore
as a “female community—mediated by the distances of modern mass
publishing. Despite the distance, the Smithton women feel personally
connected to their favorite authors because they are convinced that
these writers know how to make them happy” (Radway, 1984/1991, p. 97).
Reading the Romance is an important work because it gave
attention to an otherwise dismissed genre and conceived of the
readership as a community, even if only vaguely. Radway partly improved
on this in her 1991 edition, admitting her theorization of community was
“somewhat anemic in that it fails to specify precisely how membership in
the romance-reading community is constituted.” Radway conceded the
concept of an “interpretative community” (previously used to refer to
critics and scholars of literature) might help, but “it cannot do
complete justice to the nature of the connection between social location
and the complex process of interpretation” (Radway, 1984/1991, p. 8).
This notion of “interpretive community” was coined in the seven years
between Radway’s first and second editions. And, as she noted, it wasn’t
a great fit. An “interpretive community” is a “collectivity of people
who share strategies for interpreting, using, and engaging in
communication about a media text or technology” (Lindlof, 1988, 2002).
Radway’s subjects shared little of this.
Rather, Radway was speaking of parasocial relationships
between the readers and the author where mass media permit an “illusion
of a face-to-face relationship with the performer” (Horton & Wohl,
1956, p. 215)—the authors, in Radway’s case.
It’s interesting that while the concept of parasociality had existed
for decades, Radway overlooked it and instead reached for the wrong one:
interpretive communities.
References
Horton, D., & Wohl, R. R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social
interaction.
Psychiatry,
19(3), 215–229.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049
Lindlof, T. R. (1988). Media audiences as interpretive communities.
Annals of the International Communication Association,
11(1), 81–107.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23808985.1988.11678680
Lindlof, T. R. (2002). Interpretive community: An approach to media and
religion.
Journal of Media and Religion,
1(1), 61–74.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15328415JMR0101_7
Radway, J. (1991). Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and
popular literature. University of North Carolina Press. (Original
work published 1984)
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