ABSTRACT
Most of the pieces included in this volume implicitly assume the activities of a perceiving subject: a viewer or reader who, for such as Lévi-Strauss, Geertz and Goffman, is adept with the knowledges and interpretative practices specific to his or her culture; one already politically interpellated in the cases of Althusser, Cixous and Bristol; whereas Brecht, Grosz and Lyotard each in their different ways posit a spectator who is capable of change, of rejecting received views to adopt new, interrogative positions. What differentiates the following excerpts is that the perceiving subject is their central concern. They are arranged in order of increasing ‘magnitude’. Starting from the subjective, largely acultural philosophy of Phenomenology, aesthetician Wolfgang Iser (b. 1926) describes the individual reader’s active role in the creation of textual meaning. Laura Mulvey (b. 1941) expands the perspective to encompass the social and political, exploring the psychic processes undertaken by spectators of film and the way these are gender-coded. Raymond Williams (1921-88) examines the necessarily historically and culturally specific relationship between artwork and audience.
