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 1991, 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 1991, 8).
This notion of “interpretive community” was coined in the seven years
between her 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 and Wohl 1956,
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, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. 1956.
“Mass Communication and
Para-Social Interaction.” Psychiatry 19 (3): 215–29.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049.
Lindlof, Thomas 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.
———. 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, Janice. 1991. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and
Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.
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