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18 books match the query 'Audiences'

cover of Acting the Part: Audience Participation in Performance

Acting the Part

Audience Participation in Performance

E. B. Hunter

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Acting the Part offers a paradigm for understanding how audiences participate in immersive theater, from physical spaces like the Globe in London to digital spaces like social virtual reality. Reading across twenty-first century productions of ancient Greek tragedies and William Shakespeare’s plays, E. B. Hunter proposes the concept of “enactivity” to describe the positionality audiences inhabit when their participation is critical to the narrative but cannot alter its intended course. This positionality is that of the archetype, the enactment of which is shaped by four production conditions: a historically resonant site, a canonical source, an immersive space, and a production-specific economy that incentivizes some behaviors and discourages others. At the heart of Acting the Part is a framework for identifying how a production’s management of these conditions gives rise to a range of archetypes, such as worshiper, sleuth, cinematographer, and others. Against the backdrop of an ever-increasing push for audience participation, Acting the Part sheds new light on the many ways in which productions shape that participation in real time.
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cover of Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere

Audiences and Publics

When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere

Edited by Sonia Livingstone

Intellect Books, 2005

In today’s thoroughly mass-mediated world, audiences and publics are, of course, composed of the same people. Yet social science traditionally treats them quite differently. Indeed, it is commonplace to define audiences in opposition to the public: in both popular and elite discourses, audiences are denigrated as trivial, passive, individualised, while publics are valued as active, critically engaged and politically significant.
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cover of Empathy and Performance: Enactments of Power in Latinx America

Empathy and Performance

Enactments of Power in Latinx America

Laura V. Sández

Vanderbilt University Press, 2024

Empathy and Performance advances a study of empathy and enactments of power by examining works from author-actors whose performances explore the boundaries between two kinship positions. Author Laura V. Sández studies the dramatized dilemma of cultural understanding in “Our America,” a notion that refers first to a collective political identity marking a common belonging in the Spanish-speaking America but also alludes to current struggles in the contemporary US. This book sees empathy as an affective response grounded in subjectivity and kinship. Sández argues that to conceptualize empathy one needs to understand how subjects organize, classify, and limit themselves, not only as agents, but also as interpreters. What sort of affiliations do these performances promote? How do they break, reinforce, or queer societal expectations about the Latinx body, the white body, or simply, the staged body?

To survey different answers to these queries, Sández studies Indigurrito (Nao Bustamante); Dominicanish (Josefina Báez); ¡Bienvenidos Blancos! or Welcome White People! (Alex Torra); the apology delivered by the group Veterans Stand with Standing Rock during protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline; and Kukuli Velarde’s body of work, from We, the Colonized Ones to A Mi Vida. In these artistic enactments, which range from 1992 to 2021, the historical construct of boundaries and bodies becomes evident. Following recent work on empathy by Lanzoni, Maibom, Calloway-Thomas, Bloom, Hogan, and Matravers, among others, Sández examines in-group/out-group divisions, the establishment of identity categories through performance, and the exploration of subaltern identities.
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cover of Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans

Exploiting Fandom

How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans

Mel Stanfill

University of Iowa Press, 2019

As more and more fans rush online to share their thoughts on their favorite shows or video games, they might feel like the process of providing feedback is empowering. However, as fan studies scholar Mel Stanfill argues, these industry invitations for fan participation indicate not greater fan power but rather greater fan usefulness. Stanfill’s argument, controversial to some in the field, compares the “domestication of fandom” to the domestication of livestock, contending that, just as livestock are bred bigger and more docile as they are domesticated, so, too, are fans as the entertainment industry seeks to cultivate a fan base that is both more useful and more controllable.

By bringing industry studies and fan studies into the conversation, Stanfill looks closely at just who exactly the industry considers “proper fans” in terms of race, gender, age, and sexuality, and interrogates how digital media have influenced consumption, ultimately finding that the invitation to participate is really an incitement to consume in circumscribed, industry-useful ways.
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cover of Listening to Homer: Tradition, Narrative, and Audience

Listening to Homer

Tradition, Narrative, and Audience

Ruth Scodel

University of Michigan Press, 2002

The Homeric poems were not intended for readers, but for a listening audience. Traditional in their basic elements, the stories were learned by oral poets from earlier poets and recreated at every performance. Individual nuances, tailored to the audience, could creep into the stories of the Greek heroes on each and every occasion when a bard recited the epics.
For a particular audience at a particular moment, "tradition" is what it believes it has inherited from the past--and it may not be particularly old. The boundaries between the traditional and the innovative may become blurry and indistinct. By rethinking tradition, we can see Homer's methods and concerns in a new light. The Homeric poet is not naive. He must convince his audience that the story is true. He must therefore seem disinterested, unconcerned with promoting anyone's interests. The poet speaks as if everything he says is merely the repetition of old tales. Yet he carefully ensures that even someone who knows only a minimal amount about the ancient heroes can follow and enjoy the performance, while someone who knows many stories will not remember inappropriate ones. Pretending that every detail is already familiar, the poet heightens suspense and implies that ordinary people are the real judges of great heroes.
Listening to Homer transcends present controversies about Homeric tradition and invention by rethinking how tradition functions. Focusing on reception rather than on composition, Ruth Scodel argues that an audience would only rarely succeed in identifying narrative innovation. Homeric narrative relies on a traditionalizing, inclusive rhetoric that denies the innovation of the oral performance while providing enough information to make the epics intelligible to audiences for whom much of the material is new.
Listening to Homer will be of interest to general classicists, as well as to those specializing in Greek epic and narrative performance. Its wide breadth and scope will also appeal to those non-classicists interested in the nature of oral performance.
Ruth Scodel is Professor of Greek and Latin, University of Michigan, and former president of the American Philological Association.
"Ruth Scodel's Listening to Homer proves it is still possible to explore the workings of epic without recourse to a battery of jargon or technicalities. This is not a 'one big idea' book but a rich . . . set of reflections; it makes refreshing reading . . . ."
---Greece & Rome
"This is an important book, putting the receiving rather than the sending side of the performance of the Homeric epics center stage. The many observations on narrative technique are often new and worthwhile."
---Irene J.F. de Jong, Gnomon
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cover of Misinformation and Mass Audiences

Misinformation and Mass Audiences

Edited by Brian G. Southwell, Emily A. Thorson, and Laura Sheble

University of Texas Press, 2018

Lies and inaccurate information are as old as humanity, but never before have they been so easy to spread. Each moment of every day, the Internet and broadcast media purvey misinformation, either deliberately or accidentally, to a mass audience on subjects ranging from politics to consumer goods to science and medicine, among many others. Because misinformation now has the potential to affect behavior on a massive scale, it is urgently important to understand how it works and what can be done to mitigate its harmful effects.

Misinformation and Mass Audiences brings together evidence and ideas from communication research, public health, psychology, political science, environmental studies, and information science to investigate what constitutes misinformation, how it spreads, and how best to counter it. The expert contributors cover such topics as whether and to what extent audiences consciously notice misinformation, the possibilities for audience deception, the ethics of satire in journalism and public affairs programming, the diffusion of rumors, the role of Internet search behavior, and the evolving efforts to counteract misinformation, such as fact-checking programs. The first comprehensive social science volume exploring the prevalence and consequences of, and remedies for, misinformation as a mass communication phenomenon, Misinformation and Mass Audiences will be a crucial resource for students and faculty researching misinformation, policymakers grappling with questions of regulation and prevention, and anyone concerned about this troubling, yet perhaps unavoidable, dimension of current media systems.

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cover of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle

News Parade

The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle

Joseph Clark

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A fascinating look at the United States’ conflicted relationship with news and the media, through the lens of the newsreel

When weekly newsreels launched in the early twentieth century, they offered the U.S. public the first weekly record of events that symbolized “indisputable evidence” of the news. In News Parade, Joseph Clark examines the history of the newsreel and how it changed the way Americans saw the world. He combines an examination of the newsreel’s methods of production, distribution, and reception with an analysis of its representational strategies to understand the newsreel’s place in the history of twentieth-century American culture and film history.

Clark focuses on the sound newsreel of the 1930s and 1940s, arguing that it represents a crucial moment in the development of a spectacular society where media representations of reality became more fully integrated into commodity culture. Using several case studies, including the newsreel’s coverage of Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the Sino–Japanese War, News Parade shows how news film transformed the relationship between its audience and current events, as well as the social and political consequences of these changes. It pays particular attention to how discourses of race and gender worked together with the rhetoric of speed, mobility, and authority to establish the power and privilege of newsreel spectatorship.

In the age of fake news and the profound changes to journalism brought on by the internet, News Parade demonstrates how new technologies and media reshaped the American public’s relationship with the news in the 1930s—a history that can help us to better understand the transformations happening today.

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cover of No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience

No Innocent Bystanders

Performance Art and Audience

Frazer Ward

Dartmouth College Press, 2012

At a moment when performance art and performance generally are at the center of the international art world, Frazer Ward offers us insightful readings of major performance pieces by the likes of Acconci, Burden, Abramovic, and Hsieh, and confronts the twisting and troubled relationship that performance art has had with the spectator and the public sphere. Ward contends that the ethical challenges with which performance art confronts its viewers speak to the reimagining of the audience, in terms that suggest the collapse of notions like “public” and “community.” A thoughtful, even urgent discussion of the relationship between art and the audience that will appeal to a broad range of art historians, artists, and others interested in constructions of the public sphere.
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cover of Postcinematic Vision: The Coevolution of Moving-Image Media and the Spectator

Postcinematic Vision

The Coevolution of Moving-Image Media and the Spectator

Roger F. Cook

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A study of how film has continually intervened in our sense of perception, with far-ranging insights into the current state of lived experience

How has cinema transformed our senses, and how does it continue to do so? Positing film as a stage in the long coevolution of human consciousness and visual technology, Postcinematic Vision offer a fresh perspective on the history of film while providing startling new insights into the so-called divide between cinematic and digital media.

Starting with the argument that film viewing has long altered neural circuitry in our brains, Roger F. Cook proceeds to reevaluate film’s origins, as well as its merger with digital imaging in the 1990s. His animating argument is that film has continually altered the relation between media and human perception, challenging the visual nature of modern culture in favor of a more unified, pan-sensual way of perceiving. Through this approach, he makes original contributions to our understanding of how mediation is altering lived experience.

Along the way, Cook provides important reevaluations of well-known figures such as Franz Kafka, closely reading cinematic passages in the great author’s work; he reassesses the conventional wisdom that Marshall McLuhan was a technological determinist; and he lodges an original new reading of The Matrix. Full of provocative and far-reaching ideas, Postcinematic Vision is a powerful work that helps us see old concepts anew while providing new ideas for future investigation.

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cover of Public Face Of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, And Reception, 1905-1920

Public Face Of Modernism

Little Magazines, Audiences, And Reception, 1905-1920

Mark S. Morrisson

University of Wisconsin Press, 2000

Between the 1890s and the 1920s, mass consumer culture and modernism grew up together, by most accounts as mutual antagonists. This provocative work of cultural history tells a different story.  By delving deeply into the publishing and promotional practices of the modernists in Britain and America, however, Mark Morrisson reveals that their engagements with the commercial mass market were in fact extensive and diverse.
    The phenomenal successes of new advertising agencies and mass market publishers did elicit what Morrisson calls a "crisis of publicity" for some modernists and for many concerned citizens in both countries. But, as Morrisson demonstrates, the vast influence of these industries on consumers also had a profound and largely overlooked effect upon many modernist authors, artists, and others. By exploring the publicity and audience reception of several of the most important modernist magazines of the period, The Public Face of Modernism shows how modernists, far from lamenting the destruction of meaningful art and public culture by the new mass market, actually displayed optimism about the power of mass-market technologies and strategies to transform and rejuvenate contemporary culture—and, above all, to restore a public function to art.
    This reconstruction of the "public face of modernism" offers surprising new perceptions about the class, gender, racial, and even generational tensions within the public culture of the early part of the century, and provides a rare insight into the actual audiences for modernist magazines of the period.  Moreover, in new readings of works by James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and many others, Morrisson shows that these contexts also had an impact on the techniques and concerns of the literature itself.
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cover of Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation

Reactivations

Essays on Performance and Its Documentation

Philip Auslander

University of Michigan Press, 2018

Most people agree that witnessing a live performance is not the same as seeing it on screen; however, most of the performances we experience are in recorded forms. Some aver that the recorded form of a performance necessarily distorts it or betrays it, focusing on the relationship between the original event and its recorded versions. By contrast, Reactivations focuses on how the audience experiences the performance, as opposed to its documentation. How does a spectator access and experience a
performance from its documentation? What is the value of performance documentation?

The book treats performance documentation as a specific discursive use of media that arose in the middle of the 20th century alongside such forms of performance as the Happening and that is different, both discursively and as a practice, from traditional theater and dance photography. Philip Auslander explores the phenomenal relationship between the spectator who experiences the performance from the document and the document itself. The document is not merely a secondary iteration of the original event but a vehicle that gives us meaningful access to the performance itself as an artistic work.
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cover of Rhetorical Refusals: Defying Audiences' Expectations

Rhetorical Refusals

Defying Audiences' Expectations

John Schilb

Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

The first book to explore rhetorical refusals—instances in which speakers and writers deliberately flout the conventions of rhetoric and defy their audiences’ expectations— Rhetorical Refusals: Defying Audiences’ Expectations challenges the reader to view these acts of academic rebellion as worthy of deeper analysis than they are commonly accorded, as rhetorical refusals can simultaneously reveal unspoken assumptions behind the very conventions they challenge, while also presenting new rhetorical strategies.

Through a series of case studies, John Schilb demonstrates the deeper meanings contained within rhetorical refusals: when dance critic Arlene Croce refused to see a production that she wrote about; when historian Deborah Lipstadt declined to debate Holocaust deniers; when President Bill Clinton denied a grand jury answers to their questions; and when Frederick Douglass refused to praise Abraham Lincoln unequivocally. Each of these unexpected strategies revealed issues of much greater importance than the subjects at hand. By carefully laying out an underlying framework with which to evaluate these acts, Schilb shows that they can variously point to the undue privilege of authority; the ownership of truth; the illusory divide between public and private lives; and the subjectivity of honor.

According to Schilb, rhetorical refusals have the potential to help political discourse become more inventive. To demonstrate this potential, Schilb looks at some notable cases in which invitations have led to unexpected results: comedian Stephen Colbert’s brazen performance at the White House Press Association dinner; poet Sharon Olds’s refusal to attend the White House Book Fair, and activist Cindy Sheehan’s display of an anti-war message at the 2006 State of the Union Address.

Rhetorical Refusals explores rhetorical theories in accessible language without sacrificing complexity and nuance, revealing the unspoken implications of unexpected deviations from rhetorical norms for classic political concepts like free debate and national memory. With case studies taken from art, politics, literature, and history, this book will appeal to scholars and students of English, communication studies, and history.

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cover of Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey

Siren Songs

Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey

Lillian Eileen Doherty

University of Michigan Press, 1995

In Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey, Lillian Eileen Doherty shows us that the attitude of Odysseus, as well as of the Odyssey, is highly ambivalent toward women. Odysseus rewards supportive female characters by treating them as privileged members of the audience for his own tales. At the same time, dangerous female narrators--who threaten to disrupt or revise the hero's story--are discredited by the narrative framework in which their stories appear.
Siren Songs synthesizes audience-oriented and narratological approaches, and examines the relationships among three kinds of audiences: internal, implied, and actual. The author prefaces her own reading of the Odyssey with an analysis of the issues posed by the earlier feminist readings on which she builds. Should the Odyssey be read as a "closed" text, that is, as one whose meaning is highly determined, or as an "open" text whose contradictions and ambiguities undercut its overt meanings?
Siren Songs presents a feminist critique of the Odyssey in an accessible manner aimed at a more general audience. All Greek is translated, and critical terminology is clearly defined.
Lillian Eileen Doherty is Associate Professor of Classics, University of Maryland, College Park.
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cover of Staged Otherness: Ethnic Shows in Central and Eastern Europe, 1850–1939

Staged Otherness

Ethnic Shows in Central and Eastern Europe, 1850–1939

Dagnoslaw Demski

Central European University Press, 2022

The cultural phenomenon of exhibiting non-European people in front of the European audiences in the 19th and 20th century was concentrated in the metropolises in the western part of the continent. Nevertheless, traveling ethnic troupes and temporary exhibitions of non-European humans took place also in territories located to the east of the Oder river and Austria. The contributors to this edited volume present practices of ethnographic shows in Russia, Poland, Czechia, Slovenia, Hungary, Germany, Romania, and Austria and discuss the reactions of local audiences. The essays offer critical arguments to rethink narratives of cultural encounters in the context of ethnic shows. By demonstrating the many ways in which the western models and customs were reshaped, developed, and contested in Central and Eastern European contexts, the authors argue that the dominant way of characterizing these performances as “human zoos” is too narrow.

The contributors had to tackle the difficult task of finding traces other than faint copies of official press releases by the tour organizers. The original source material was drawn from local archives, museums, and newspapers of the discussed period. A unique feature of the volume is the rich amount of images that complement every single case study of ethnic shows.

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cover of The Audience Experience: A Critical Analysis of Audiences in the Performing Arts

The Audience Experience

A Critical Analysis of Audiences in the Performing Arts

Edited by Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow, and Katya Johanson

Intellect Books, 2013

The Audience Experience identifies a momentous change in what it means to be part of an audience for a live arts performance. Together, new communication technologies and new kinds of audiences and audience research have transformed the expectations of performance, and The Audience Experience explores key trends in the contemporary presentation of performing arts for audiences, among them convergence marketing and cocreation, children and young people as audiences, and the screening of live performance. The book also presents case studies of audience engagement and methodology, reviewing both conventional and innovative ways of collecting and using audience feedback data. Directed to performing arts companies, sponsors, stakeholders, and scholars, this collection of essays moves beyond the conventional arts marketing paradigm to build new knowledge about how audiences encounter, value and experience quality in the performing arts.

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cover of Watching While Black Rebooted!: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences

Watching While Black Rebooted!

The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences

Beretta E. Smith-Shomade

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means in an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this updated edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters. Contributors traverse programs and platforms to wrestle with a changing television industry that has exploded and included Black audiences as a new and central target of its visioning. The book illuminates history, care, monetization, and affect. Within these frames, the chapters run the gamut from transmediation, regional relevance, and superhuman visioning to historical traumas and progress, queer possibilities, and how televisual programming can make viewers feel Black. Mostly, the work tackles what the future looks like now for a changing televisual industry, Black media makers, and Black audiences.

Chapters rethink such historically significant programs as Roots and Underground, such seemingly innocuous programs as Soul Food, and such contemporary and culturally complicated programs as Being Mary Jane and Atlanta. The book makes a case for the centrality of these programs while always recognizing the racial dynamics that continue to shape Black representation on the small screen. Painting a decidedly introspective portrait across forty years of Black television, Watching While Black Rebooted sheds much-needed light on under examined demographics, broadens common audience considerations, and gives deference to the preferences of audiences and producers of Black-targeted programming.
 
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cover of Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences

Watching While Black

Centering the Television of Black Audiences

Smith-Shomade, Beretta E

Rutgers University Press, 2013

 2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Television scholarship has substantially ignored programming aimed at Black audiences despite a few sweeping histories and critiques. In this volume, the first of its kind, contributors examine the televisual diversity, complexity, and cultural imperatives manifest in programming directed at a Black and marginalized audience.

Watching While Black considers its subject from an entirely new angle in an attempt to understand the lives, motivations, distinctions, kindred lines, and individuality of various Black groups and suggest what television might be like if such diversity permeated beyond specialized enclaves. It looks at the macro structures of ownership, producing, casting, and advertising that all inform production, and then delves into television programming crafted to appeal to black audiences—historic and contemporary, domestic and worldwide.

Chapters rethink such historically significant programs as Roots and Black Journal, such seemingly innocuous programs as Fat Albert and bro’Town, and such contemporary and culturally complicated programs as Noah’s Arc, Treme, and The Boondocks. The book makes a case for the centrality of these programs while always recognizing the racial dynamics that continue to shape Black representation on the small screen.  Painting a decidedly introspective portrait across forty years of Black television, Watching While Black sheds much-needed light on under-examined demographics, broadens common audience considerations, and gives deference to the the preferences of audiences and producers of Black-targeted programming.

           

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cover of Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences

Writing Himself Into History

Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences

Bowser, Pearl

Rutgers University Press, 2000

Winner of the 2001 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Awards | Winner of the Theatre Library Association Award

Writing Himself Into History is an eagerly anticipated analysis of the career and artistry surrounding the legendary Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. With the exception of Spike Lee, Micheaux is the most famous—and prolific—African American film director. Between 1918 and 1948 he made more than 40 “race pictures,” movies made for and about African Americans. A man of immense creativity, he also wrote seven novels.

Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence concentrate here on the first decade of Micheaux’s career, when Micheaux produced and directed more than twenty silent features and built a reputation as a controversial and maverick entrepreneur. Placing his work firmly within his social and cultural milieu, they also examine Micheaeux’s family and life. The authors provide a close textual analysis of his surviving films (including The Symbol of the Unconquered, Within Our Gates, and Body and Soul), and highlight the rivalry between studios, dilemmas of assimilation versus separatism, gender issues, and class. In Search of Oscar Micheaux also analyzes Micheaux’s career as a novelist in relation to his work as a filmmaker.

This is a much-awaited book that is especially timely as interest in Micheaux’s work increases.

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