Reception

Ika Willis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138955097
• eBook ISBN: 9781317355540
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

1

REWRITING

This chapter focusses on what I call text-to-text approaches to reception. It covers theories and methods of reception which take as their object of analysis not readers or audiences directly, but instead the texts which readers/authors generate in response to other texts.

The divide between text-to-text approaches and text-to-reader approaches is one of the deep divisions in terminology and methodology that, as we saw in the Introduction, characterize the field of reception as it currently stands. In many disciplines, notably media and film studies but also including traditional literary studies, reception is understood as a text-to-reader relationship: it is a process that takes place in readers or audiences. Text-to-text approaches, by contrast, are central in Classical and Biblical reception; in medievalism; and in the strand of fan studies which focusses on creative production. In these disciplines, reception scholars usually work not on audiences, but on texts which have been created in response to earlier texts. These responding texts are then seen as the place where the process of reception happens.

Thus, work on film in Classical reception studies usually analyses the films themselves as the locus of reception; it ‘tends to overlook the end user, the person watching the film in the cinema or at home’ (Potter 2009: 220). Similarly, in Biblical reception studies of popular music, ‘the primary units of study are songs’: texts, not listeners (Abraham 2015: 248). For example, the Biblical reception scholar William John Lyons (2015a: 225) finds in Depeche Mode’s 2005 song ‘John the Revelator’ a polemical interpretation of the apostle John as a ‘liar, thief, [and] tyrant’. Lyons shows how the Depeche Mode song borrows elements from a traditional gospel song of the same name, ‘using both its title and its call and response structure to good effect’ (225), but ultimately presenting a very different interpretation of the Book of Revelation. His approach, however, cannot tell us how Depeche Mode’s listeners understand or relate to ‘John the Revelator’ itself (Abraham 2015: 250–252). Are they persuaded by the song’s interpretation of Revelation? Are they even aware that the song is an interpretation of Revelation, or do they just like to dance to it? To understand how listeners receive texts, we need different methodologies, some of which will be covered in the next two chapters of this book.

In media studies the word ‘reception’ is usually used to refer to text-to-reader processes. This discipline does provide useful tools for studying text-to-text reception, but it uses different terminology to do so, most notably terms such as ‘adaptation’ or ‘remix’. In literary studies, the phenomenon that I am calling text-to-text reception has also been discussed in terms of intertextuality, translation, performance and tradition. This chapter will introduce and explain all these terms.

Firstly, however, I need to define the phenomenon itself. What is it that theorists describe by so many different names? Broadly, text-to-text reception scholars study texts that adapt, appropriate, allude to, continue, critique, comment on, translate, revise or reframe other, existing texts. In this chapter, for simplicity and consistency, I will use the term ‘rewriting’ for all these texts and processes, although I use it in a broad sense to include rewritings which do not take primarily written form, such as film adaptations and visual art.

Some examples of rewriting might be: ancient Greek tragedy’s retellings of myth in the fifth century BCE, including stories from Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, composed two centuries previously (Davidson 1994); medieval rewritings and continuations of Classical texts, including a new ending to Virgil’s first-century Latin epic the Aeneid written by Maffeo Vegio in the fifteenth century (Kallendorf 1984; Rogerson 2013), or William Henryson’s sixteenth-century additions to Chaucer’s fourteenth-century poem, Troilus and Criseyde (Storm 1993); nineteenth-century retellings of Bible stories for children (England 2015); contemporary fan fiction, which tells new stories about existing characters set in the fictional universes of media texts (Penley 1991); and machinima, an art form which uses graphic software engines to create new video works out of existing video games (Ito 2011).

Widely disparate in historical and cultural context, genre, mode and medium, these texts have only one thing in common. That is the condition of being ‘in the second degree’, a term coined by Gérard Genette (1997a [1982]: 1) for all texts which are ‘in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts’. We can think of these second-degree texts as receiving earlier texts: taking those texts into themselves, interpreting them, and/or making use of them for their own purposes.

Textual reception, or rewriting, thus covers many different kinds of texts and also many different modes of relationship between texts. Rewriting can be partial, as when one text quotes or refers to another in passing, or total, as when one text translates or adapts the whole of an ‘original’. It can remain within the same mode or medium, as with the blues, pop and hip-hop genre of ‘answer songs’, which directly respond to other artists’ songs. One example is Roxanne Shanté’s ‘Roxanne’s Revenge’, a song from the point of view of the woman described in U.T.F.O’s 1984 hit ‘Roxanne, Roxanne’ and the first of over a hundred songs in the so-called ‘Roxanne Wars’. Rewriting can also change medium, as with adaptations from book to graphic novel, graphic novel to film, or film to stage musical. It can be fictional, as when a fan writes a new story set in an existing universe, or non-fictional, as when a scholar explicates her interpretation of an existing text in the form of a commentary (Hawkes 1992: 31–39).

Rewritings can also take a range of different attitudes, or what Genette calls ‘moods’, in relation to the texts they rewrite: in Genette’s (1997a: 28) terms, they may be playful, satirical or serious. A rewriting may parody another text or pay homage to it; it may critique it, or claim it as an authenticating or legitimating predecessor; it may use it as a model of excellence, or try to outdo it, as in the rhetorical technique of aemulatio in Roman and Renaissance poetry or the increasingly spectacular action sequences in the Die Hard sequels. Finally, what is taken over from one text to another in rewriting varies too. Rewritings may quote sections of other texts verbatim or in paraphrase; retell their stories; insert their characters into other stories and universes; or imitate the style, mode or structure of an earlier text.

Text-to-text reception thus covers a vast area. In fact, as we shall see later in this chapter, some critics believe that no text can be produced or received outside the network of relationships to other texts in which it is enmeshed. Framing the relationship between texts as one of reception, however, gives us a specific set of questions and approaches with which to start making sense of this vast and disparate set of texts and textual networks. If we think about a rewriting text as receiving another text, we will ask questions about how the later text interprets the earlier one. We will also ask questions about the nature of reception as a process, based on what we see happening in these text-to-text receptions.

This chapter will first of all introduce some of the basic principles underlying the study of text-to-text, as opposed to text-to-reader, reception. It will then go on to explore some of the models of reception which underpin these principles, and investigate the theoretical questions they open up and address. We will look at reception as intertextuality; as creation; as interpretation; and as ‘writing back’. Next, we will explore the related notion of tradition, which is an important way of thinking about the broader system of communication which structures relations between texts. That system of communication is both intertextual and extratextual, and the chapter concludes with a brief discussion of reception beyond the text.

TEXT-TO-TEXT RECEPTION: TRANSFORMATION AND CONTINUITY

Text-to-text approaches to reception proceed, as I have indicated, on the basis that texts, rather than audiences, are the place where reception happens. John Frow (2008: 26) makes the case that studying rewritings, ‘taking new production as a stand-in for reception’, enables us to ‘focus on relatively objective transformations which can be taken as correlates for a process of reception that can otherwise be reconstructed only with great difficulty and in ways that are methodologically cumbersome’.

Frow’s point here is that text-to-text approaches to reception are both less methodologically complex and more secure in their use of evidence than text-to-reader approaches. By looking at a ‘new production’, a text that rewrites an earlier text, we can bypass the attempt to reconstruct the complex processes involved in text-to-reader reception. These processes are not directly available to observation, because they take place inside a reader’s mind and body, and must be represented in some form before we can access them. In text-to-text approaches to reception, however, we can look directly at a text and see how it ‘registers either transformation or continuity’ in comparison to the text it rewrites. It prompts questions such as: what has the new text kept the same as the old one? What has it changed?

Any text which draws on or receives an earlier text ‘works by selection’, as the Classical scholar Gian Biagio Conte puts it. Textual reception is not a passive process of repetition or copying, but an active process of selection, intervention, interpretation and reworking. A receiving text ‘realign[s] along its own axis the features of the [earlier text] that are pertinent to it, activating some of them and disregarding others’ (Conte 1986 [1980]: 133). Thus, in studying text-to-text reception, we observe how a text has selected and reorganized aspects of an earlier text: which elements it has activated, and which it has disregarded. Conte is writing about the Latin poet Virgil’s use of the Orpheus myth in his Georgics (29 BCE). The same principles can be used to analyse contemporary modes of rewriting. One example which makes the processes of selection and realignment very visible is the phenomenon of the fan edit. Fans use video editing software to edit movies, selecting out elements from the original film and rearranging or realigning them according to the tastes and preferences of the fan editor and their intended audiences. The new text can then be analysed through direct comparison to the original. It functions as what Frow calls a ‘stand-in’ for the complex processes of reception and adaptation through which the fan edit is produced. Thus, for example, in 2000, Mike J. Nicholls circulated The Phantom Edit, a popular fan edit of George Lucas’s Star Wars film The Phantom Menace, which activated or emphasized some aspects of the film and disregarded others: most conspicuously, his version completely deleted the character Jar Jar Binks, who was hated by many Star Wars fans.

In more subtle ways, texts may signal both transformation and continuity, similarity and difference, in their relationship to earlier texts. For example, the 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, based on a 1974 novel by John Le Carré, opens with the lead character, George Smiley, played by Gary Oldman, at an optician’s. Smiley/Oldman exchanges a pair of wire-framed glasses for a pair with large, square, tortoiseshell-style frames, very similar to those worn by Alec Guinness in his iconic performance of the same role in the 1979 BBC television adaptation. The scene signals a blend of continuity and transformation: Oldman wears Guinness’s glasses. The 2011 film thus shows an awareness that Oldman’s performance will inevitably be compared to Guinness’s, and sets up a comparison between itself and the BBC version which centres on the performance of the male lead. The optician scene does not significantly advance the narrative of the film or Smiley’s characterization. Its function is solely to communicate something about the relationship between the present film and the earlier adaptation. As Harold Bloom (1975: 108) claims, ‘meaning is always wandering around between texts’.

RECEPTION AS INTERTEXTUALITY

The state of the ‘between-ness’ of meaning is often called ‘intertextuality’. The prefix ‘inter’ is a Latin preposition which simply means ‘between’. The term itself was coined in French by Julia Kristeva in 1968, when she showed that any text is ‘a permutation of texts; an intertextuality [intertextualité]’ (Kristeva 1980 [1968]: 36). Texts are not created out of nothing, but from already existing texts and discourses. Neatly enough, Julie Sanders explains this idea in her book Adaptation and Appropriation by quoting and adding to Graham Allen’s book Intertextuality. Allen (2000: 1) writes that literary texts ‘are built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature’; Sanders adds that they are also built from those ‘derived from companion art forms’ such as ‘art, music, drama [and] dance’ in ‘an ever-expanding network of textual relations’ (Sanders 2006: 3).

If meaning wanders around between texts, we understand texts in part through comparing them to others. When texts refer specifically and openly to a particular earlier text, as with the 2011 version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the process of comparison involves a kind of double vision or layered reading. We understand the meaning of Gary Oldman’s glasses only by recalling Alec Guiness’s, and thus, in a sense, reading both texts simultaneously. As a ‘second-degree’ text, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has a palimpsestuous quality, to use a term taken from the title of Genette’s book Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. A palimpsest is a page, usually from a vellum manuscript, which has been written on once, then erased and reused for a new text. The original writing remains detectable and partially legible beneath the new words. Adaptations and other forms of rewriting are indeed ‘inherently “palimpsestuous” works, haunted at all times by their adapted texts’ (Hutcheon 2006: 6).

Even works which are not openly and intentionally palimpsestuous in this way, however, can be understood as intertextual in a broader sense. All texts necessarily situate themselves within a literary system both by referring to an earlier model, suggesting a relationship of sameness or repetition, and comparing themselves to that model, suggesting difference. Thus, ‘intertextuality creates meaning in texts through a dialectic between sameness and difference’ (Fowler 2000 [1997]: 121), and texts are produced and read ‘within a matrix of possibilities constituted by earlier texts’ (Fowler 2000: 117).

Don Fowler’s theory of intertextuality builds on that of Conte, who demonstrates that interplay between texts is not just a quirky feature of some particularly self-conscious or second-degree texts, but an irreducible part of the way in which we read and interpret all literary texts. On this view, literary texts are inextricably part of a system or a matrix of possibilities, rather than isolated, self-contained entities. Literary texts cannot be purely new or entirely original; indeed, ‘a work that had only original elements would be doomed to incomprehensibility’ (Conte 1986: 91). Authors do not create out of nothing, but ‘realize, transform or transpose’ – that is, actively receive and rework – material which already exists within the system in which they write. Literary texts are original, then, insofar as they creatively rework or transform the possibilities that have been set up for them by past texts and contexts: creativity becomes a matter of transformative imitation.

RECEPTION AS CREATION

In a four-part Web series from 2011, the filmmaker Kirby Ferguson states that ‘everything is a remix’; the ‘basic elements of creativity’ are copying, transforming and combining. He both implicitly and explicitly counters those who believe that remixing, borrowing or imitating earlier artworks is a form of copying or plagiarism, a derivative act devoid of originality and creative merit. Linda Hutcheon (2006: 33) similarly argues for the creativity of adaptation, defining adaptation as ‘a creative and interpretive transposition of a recognizable other work or works’ and writing that it is ‘a process of creation’ and ‘a derivation that is not derivative – a work that is second without being secondary’ (8–9). Indeed, as Hutcheon also points out, adaptations are legally differentiated from straightforward plagiarism or theft of intellectual property on the basis that they ‘recast’ or ‘transform’ the adapted text. The category of ‘transformative use’ of a text has protected legal status (9).

The notion of transformative use has been taken up vigorously by the fan-run Organization for Transformative Works (OTW). Like adaptations, the creative works of fans, including fan fiction, fan art and fan vids, have often been seen as derivative and without merit. Established in 2007, the OTW advocates a different view of fanworks, adopting from legal discourse a terminology and a framework within which creativity and/or originality reside not so much in invention as in transformation. In the words of its mission statement, the OTW ‘believe[s] that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate’, and ‘envision[s] a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity’ (n.d.).

These defences of the legitimacy and creativity of transformative work or remix ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: definitions, histories, objects
• 1 Rewriting
• 2 Readers
• 3 Reading
• 4 Meaning
• 5 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index