ABSTRACT
Audiences are studied and theorized about by a bewildering array of disciplines, interdisciplinary fields, and particular approaches to research, and the relationships among these different views of the subject are quite complex. Revisiting, as so many others have done, the domain's natural history - some of the larger patterns and directions of its recent evolution - shed some light on people's subject. Because contrasting approaches to audience research share some points of contact and common interests, as the preceding analysis suggests, it seems likely that the interpenetration of claims produced by competing approaches increasingly will become an issue to be dealt with. Multimethod triangulation of results produced by different theories and methods is one thing; a comprehensive theory of audiences that incorporates and, presumably, integrates some number of different approaches is something else again. There are several distinctive features of reception analysis that are potentially important to the effort toward comprehensiveness.
