JAC Volume 12 Issue 1

Let me begin with two readings of advertisements. The first is by a student in a university writing course:

The problem, of course, is finding those other dumber viewers. Our society is saturated with ads. Everyone sees through them; no one is immune from their appeal. If we want to understand anything about how they work, we need to unravel this paradox. Instead, most writing on advertising treats the viewer as either a skeptic or a shill. And so, for instance, John Berger writes that advertising "is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be" (132). But it's hard to imagine Berger himself falling for such a scam. And, similarly, when Mark Miller writes of a TV spot for Shield soap that its "strategy is not meant to be noticed," we know immediately that here is one viewer who has not been taken in (48). But who has?

A Discourse of Alarm

And yet this is often precisely what happens. For instance, a few years ago, I asked a group of university students to come up with a magazine ad they found interesting or compelling and to write a piece that told why. A week or so later we sat in class and talked about two of their responses: one poked fun at the macho Americanism of an ad for Hero cologne; the other mocked the tacky fantasy of a layout for Forever Krystal perfume. The students were happy, this was easy stuff, they felt in the know. To a person, they had decoded my assignment as meaning: show me how you see through this ad. I looked around the room and counted eighteen pairs of jeans and eighteen pairs of running shoes. (I was the only exception, with my proper academic penny loafers and baggy corduroys.) How is it, I asked, that nobody here is taken in by advertising and yet we all dress alike? Can we find a way of talking about the effects ads have not on other people but on ourselves? And then our conversation, which had been going so well, began to falter.

We have few models of what such talk or writing might look like. What we have instead is a long tradition of speaking, usually in tones of consternation and dismay, about the effects popular texts could have on some other reader. We can trace this discourse of alarm back to the worries of Socrates and Plato that many of the Homeric verses they themselves are able to quote by heart might have a corrupting influence on lesser men, could in fact turn them into cowards or religious skeptics, and thus that all but the most "austere and less pleasure-giving" poets would need to be banned from their ideal city (Republic 398b). Similarly, a central aim of modern literary studies has been to get students to resist the (supposedly) coarse pleasures of popular culture in favor of the more refined ones offered by art—as can be seen in Matthew Arnold's concern with domesticating the tastes of the "bawling, hustling, and smashing" populace of his day (451), and later in the worries of F.R. Leavis about the threats posed to "culture" by "mass civilization." Since then there has been no lack of critics from Theodore Adorno and Dwight MacDonald to Laura Mulvey and Guy Debording to talk about how the mass media continue to fix the spectator (that is, other spectators) in a state of critical apathy and listlessness. And many current postmodern or leftist critics are just as presumptuous. A salient case in point is E. Ann Kaplan, who claims in Rocking Around the Clock to account for how "the institutional practices [of MTV] construct subjects to the tune of 28 million" (29), without feeling a need to talk with any one of these "subjects" personally, or to explain how she alone among them escaped the hegemonic clutches of music television.

One response to such moralizing has been to argue that the actual readers of popular texts are in fact far more active and resistant than they are often assumed to be. While this is in many ways an appealing stance, it still places the critic in the odd position of describing how someone else reads a text with the result that it is often not clear how the critic reads it. My hunch is that the responses of such "other readers," however well or sympathetically described, will almost always turn out to be less complex and interesting than those of the critic him or herself—so that, even at its best, such criticism is apt to run into the kind of problem faced by Janice Radway, whose Reading the Romance is a rare attempt to document some of the ways popular texts actually get read by "ordinary" people.

To do so, Radway interviewed some frequent readers of romance novels (or Harlequins) about "their own working definition of the genre . . . and their preferences for particular kinds of romances, heroines, and heroes" (13). Radway has been criticized for relying too heavily on the responses of a single master reader, a bookstore employee who also puts out a newsletter about romances; but that's not my worry here, since even if this charge is accurate, her lone informant is still one more than most critics have ever consulted. My concern is with what Radway does with the responses of her informants, with the relation she sets up between their ways of reading and her own. The troubling thing is that, after showing how the women in her study see their reading of romance novels as a way of contesting and escaping the demands placed on them as wives and mothers, Radway still feels compelled to note that

In their own texts, each of these writers, from Plato and Arnold to my student and Radway, presents a figure of the critic who can read (and often even enjoy) popular works without being injured or seduced by them. Yet each doubts that others can do the same, and so ends up arguing for a kind of censorship, or at least for a better world where the pleasures such texts offer are no longer needed (like sexless views of heaven). A deep anti-democratic impulse, a kind of fear of the mob, runs through such writings. Those other readers can't be trusted. Their responses need to be trained, domesticated, disciplined. And, in the meantime, they need to be guarded against the influences of popular and thus suspect texts—from things like imitative poetry in Plato's time, or serial novels in Arnold's, or television in our own.

In "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," Stuart Hall distinguishes between a kind of scholarship that looks at the particular ways a culture is lived and experienced by the individuals in it, and another whose aim is to uncover the ideological forces that structure and determine those experiences. While the first approach tries to see how the forms of a culture are taken up and revised by the people in it, the second looks instead for those ways in which that culture might be said to be "speaking through" the voices of such individuals (42). As teachers and critics, we clearly need to keep both emphases in mind. We need, that is, not only to listen closely to what "ordinary" people tell us about what they read and watch and listen to, but also to push against their usual modes of interpreting, to look with them for alternative ways of understanding our common culture. The problem, though, as I see it, has once again to do with the relations between these two kinds of work. Bringing the voices of ordinary readers and scholars, or of students and teachers, into anything like a reciprocal exchange (in which both sides of the conversation are able to affect the views of the other) proves something easier said than done. What often happens instead is that the structural or ideological analysis of the scholar subsumes the views of the ordinary reader, so that while the concerns of certain groups do get "spoken for" in some kinds of criticism, the actual words of non-academics rarely find their way into the writings of even the most political critics. And even on those odd moments that they do, they are usually positioned in ways that give them little power or authority.

And so, once again, the problem with Reading the Romance is not so much that Radway fails to listen to her informants, but that her own closing analysis discounts what they have to say, reduces their ways of reading to merely a "partial protest." The comments of her informants, that is, don't seem to have much influenced her view of the romance, and the reading she offers of it in her last chapter—in which she argues in solid if predictable academic fashion that such novels reproduce the values of patriarchy—often seems less to respond to their concerns than to correct them (209-22). But what if Radway had begun with her own ideological reading, and then tried to show the sorts of pressures these other non-academic readers brought to bear upon it, the ways their views of the romance forced her to revise her own? That is, can we imagine a kind of criticism in which the comments of ordinary readers (or students) function not only as material for the writer to work with and explain—as examples of what she herself has to say, perhaps, or as illustrations of the problem she wants to address—but also as checks against the bias of her own reading, as statements of views she must in some way respond to?

Listening to the Other Reader

Let me give an example. One of the recurring themes of much writing about soap operas is that such shows vicariously fill needs that are otherwise left unmet in the lives of their viewers, and thus serve to "reconcile her," as Tania Modleski argues, "to the meaningless, repetitive nature of much of her life and work in the home" (97). Such phrasings reveal a common image of the soap viewer as a housewife or woman with a low-status job, who, unlike us, often finds it hard to distinguish clearly between reality and the "mass-produced fantasies" of TV. Consider this exchange between soap critic and fan, which appears near the start of Ruth Rosen's "Search for Yesterday":

Rosen goes on to explain that she can "understand the feelings" of such viewers because once, some fifteen years back, she had been confined to a hospital bed (that is, temporarily an invalid), and had found some solace herself in watching General Hospital—though she has of course since then recovered (both physically and intellectually, it would seem) and is now at most only "an occasional abuser, not a confirmed addict" of soaps (43). But far stronger than her empathy for those still hooked on soaps, though, is a set of class antagonisms that separate her from such fans. Note how Rosen describes the cashier first as "quickly spotting" the magazine she has so discretely "hidden," which the young woman then "assumes" might give the two of them something to talk about—a faux pas that leaves the critic "stunned" as the cashier launches obliviously into a "monologue" while bagging her groceries. Note too how Rosen persistently reads everything this young fan says or does as a sign of her lack of sophistication. But isn't it at least possible that she might have meant "I think Grant and Celia will work it out, don't you?" in a kind of laughing or knowing way, as an ironic comment on the inevitable progress of such TV romances? If Tania Modleski had said the same thing to Rosen, how would she have interpreted it? And why is reading Soap Opera Digest so very different from reading literary criticism or biography? Would Rosen have been stunned in quite the same way if it had been a Viking Critical Edition the cashier had noticed, and if she had used that as a pretext to talk about, say, the marital problems of Vrosnky and Anna as if they were all "residents" of nineteenth century Moscow? And even if we were to accept her unflattering sketch of this young woman, wouldn't this still raise the question of why Rosen picks as her prototypic viewer of soaps someone who seems so foolish and naive? (My own experience is that many academics, professionals, and college students also watch and talk about soaps regularly and that about half of these viewers are men.)

What most strikes me here, though, is how little Rosen feels she needs to say about this woman. We are told her age and class ("the cashier in her late teens"), and quoted one sentence of her remarks, from which we are then expected to derive the tone and gist of the rest of her "monologue on Grant and Celia's marital problems." Rosen seems to assume, that is, that we already pretty much know what this young woman is able to say before she even begins to speak—and thus that there is little need for us to attend to her actual remarks. But what if we refused to suppose this? What if we assumed instead that fans of soaps are likely to know things about them that we don't, and that our job, both as teachers and critics, is to find out what these are, to help them articulate these sorts of alternative knowledges? And what if instead of representing these "other viewers" of pop culture with a single sentence, a casual comment in a supermarket line, we listened to their remarks at length and with some real care? Here, for instance, is an excerpt from an essay written by a first-year student at the University of Pittsburgh that shows her taking what seems to me a rather sophisticated sort of pleasure from the soaps. After beginning her piece by talking about her commitment to various soaps—taping them, talking about them with friends and family, reading Soap Opera Digest, watching the annual soap awards—she goes on to say:

So here is a fan who, far from experiencing some sort of blurring between her own world and that of the soaps, actually seems to delight in their conventionality, in the ways they distort and exaggerate the events of everyday life. From this point in her piece, she goes on to detail the twists of some particularly bizarre plot lines (a special pleasure of many soap fans), and then concludes by saying:

Cultural Criticism in the Composition Class

One way I've tried to do so is through having students look at the uses they make of popular texts in forming their own self-images or identities. The idea driving this work is that identity rises out of identification, that we define who we are by whom we choose to stand with and against, and thus that in an electronic culture much of our sense of self is shaped by (or set against) the voices and images of television, radio, movies, pop music, fashion, advertising, and the like. For such a course to work, it is vital that students don't get the sense that there is some sort of party line to be either mimicked or resisted, and especially that they don't feel required to adopt an adversarial stance towards their own culture, to side somehow with the university and against the media, but rather that they can write of the pleasures as well as the problems they find in popular texts.

Thus instead of asking students to interpret a series of pop texts that I have selected beforehand, I usually ask them to read the work of various critics and to test their ideas against the evidence of texts—ads, cars, buildings, clothes, celebrities—that they themselves choose to write on. The goal of such work is not simply to have them "apply" a certain interpretive method, but to point out its uses and limits, to extend or revise or argue against what a particular critic has to say. And so, for instance, I've asked students to offer a reading of a television show that either adds to or causes problems for Alexander Nehamas's claim that "television rewards serious watching" (158). At other times I've had them draw on the method and vocabulary of Judith Williamson in analyzing the workings of an advertisement, not in order to determine what the ad "really means," but to see what her approach might be said both to reveal and to obscure. I've had them send away for and analyze fan club materials in order to respond to what John Caughey has argued about the "imaginary relationships" people create between themselves and celebrities. And I've asked them to pick a text—a magazine, a television show, a rock song—and then define the sort of viewer or reader it seems to address, at first using Barbara Ehrenreich's critique of Playboy as a model for their work, and then doubling back to assess what the strengths and limits of such an approach are. The specific assignments and readings change from term to term. Their point stays the same: to offer students some chances to work with and through a number of ways of reading our culture, and, in doing so, to begin to define their own places in it.

In the process, they may also learn something about the sorts of power and insight that study at a university can offer them, much as we can learn, if we care to, from the alternative practices of reading they bring to the classroom. Nina Schwartz has argued that we need to help students draw on the various sorts of "inappropriate knowledge" they have all acquired, to make use of the things they know about the workings of schools, fraternities, families, workplaces, pop culture, and the like, but which they often are unable to talk about because we offer them no place or occasion to do so. We can all gain much when they do, for when students start to tell us what they know about our culture, it means they are no longer the sort of "other readers" whose responses critics must worry about and speak for—but people we can listen to and learn from.¹

University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

NOTES

Works Cited