Introduction: Researching Reception and Discourse

Abstract

This book is situated within the context of reception studies and discourse analysis. Reception research is concerned with exploring the audience’s use and interpretation of media as a reflection of a particular socio-cultural context (McQuail, 1997). It offers an approach to textual analysis that proposes that the meaning of a text is not intrinsic to the text but rather is created in the relationship between the text and the reader (Jauss, 1982). Following from literary theorists and semioticians Barthes (1977) and Eco (1976, 1979), the audience reception tradition (Hall, 1980) emphasises the active role of the reader in decoding and constructing meanings from the media texts; it stresses that these meanings are never fixed or predictable but negotiated in the semiotic process (Hodge and Kress, 1988). From a discourse analytic perspective, Koller (2005b, p. 138) observes that ‘the meaning intended by the sender and the meaning constructed by the receiver … do not have to converge — indeed, they may hardly ever do so.’