JANICE RADWAY "INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES AND VARIABLE LITERACIES: THE FUNCTIONS OF ROMANCE READING"
(SYNOPSIS BY ROBERT SCHMID)

Janice Radway begins her piece by making mention of a group of photographs, entitled "On Reading," by André Kertész. In the photo essay, which depicts many different people reading in various circumstances, she states that Kertész makes "commentary on some entrenched and familiar assumptions about literacy" (334). Radway notes how the photographs demonstrate " the astonishing variety of circumstance within which reading occurs" (334).

Radway states that she, like Kertész’s book, "echoes John Szwed’s call for an ethnographic study of different kinds of literate behavior" (334-335). Radway further suggests that these studies would be more effective "if they are grounded upon some recent theoretic arguments in reader response criticism" (335).

Radway states that reader response theory was developed largely in response to the new criticism movement’s insistence on the "absolute autonomy of the text" (335). Reader response theorists are a diverse group and Radway mentions several proponents of that philosophy including the: "rezeptioästhetik of the Constance school, the structuralism of Roman Barthes the semiotics of Umberto Eco and Johnathan Culler the interactionist work of Louise Rosenblatt and Stanley Fish, the subjectivist arguments of David Bleich and Norman Holland" (335). The aforementioned theorists disagreed with new criticism’s exclusion of the reader from the interpretation of the text. In response they "sought to re-insert the essential dependancy of meaning upon the interaction between the reader and the text"(335).

Radway complains that even newer theories continue conventional distinctions between types of literacy and perpetuate hierarchical divisions between texts. Radway states that

"despite their apparent interest in readers and reading activities such theories continue to support the notion that all readers are alike and all reading really one, simply because they assume that the technology of print and the character of the individual text together determine the activities that they initiate." (336)

Radway points to other theories that "call for a rethinking of the concept of literacy"(336). These other theories she mentions grant primacy to the reader over the text. Radway asserts that these theories shouldn’t be called reception theory or response criticism, like those that privilege the text, but should be labeled more appropriately reader construction or reader production theories. These theorists like Eco, Fish, Rosenblatt and Culler all "hold that reading is a productive activity in which the reader actually makes sense of the verbal inscriptions on the page" (336). Despite variations between their respective theories, they may all be called semiotic. The above mentioned theorists

"conceive of textual meaning as the product of a complex transaction between inert textual structure, composed of verbal signifyers and an actively productive reader who constructs those signifyers as meaningful signs on the basis of previously learned interpretive procedures and cultural codes." (336)

That being the case, we can agree with Radway’s assertion that "reading then is a complicated semiotic process that varies in both place and in time"(336). In other words, readers belong to various interpretive communities. Radway acknowledges Stanley Fish for his work in the study of interpretive communities, but finds his work to be limited. Radway feels that Fish is only concerned with th role of text and reading in the context of the academic environment. Regarding Fish, she states, "for him an interpretive community is a loosely connected group of literary scholars who share basic assumptions about the nature of literature about the goals of literary criticism and about the nature of the interpretive process" (336).

Radway suggests expanding Fish’s model to be more inclusive, since not all readers are equally literate in the world outside of academia, and not all share similar views on the functions of literature. The problem that Radway faces is one of identifying another interpretive community to study. "To call for such a project, however, is to confront obvious methodological problems almost at once. Because we do not know what an interpretive community actually is, we cannot identify one in order to study the ways in which its members are literate" (337).

Radway proposes identifying a particular group in order to study the large phenomenon of interpretive communities. She turns to the publishing industry, who have already identified groups of readers that read a ‘specific category’ of books. Radway asserts that such a group could be studied as an interpretive community, working on the assumption that these ‘category readers’ share interpretive strategies.

For her study, Radway selects a small group of women who are ‘category’ readers of romance novels. At this point she concedes that hers is a very limited study and one that may not apply outside of the group in her study. Radway explains that in eliciting information form a group she call the "Smithton women" she used "ethnographic interviewing techniques." She orally interviewed the women and also used anonymous questionnaires. In her questioning, Radway states "I was trying especially to describe their manner of textual production to discover what they did with the text to produce their characteristic interpretation" (339). Further, she states "at the same time I was investigating the readers use of the activity asking what the accomplished by or in the process of reading the books" (339).

Radway encountered many problems in trying to determine how readers interpret texts. "It is somewhat difficult to shed light on the interpretive process because so much of it occurs automatically and unconsciously" (339). Despite these difficulties, Radway felt that through her interviewing process she came to an understanding of how the Smithton women constructed the texts. Her findings caused her to question the feminist argument that romance novels "function to re-enforce the patriarchal status-quo" (340). Radway opposes the notion posited by feminist critics, that they are qualified to determine the meaning of texts because they are fully literate, while romance readers are only partially literate and therefore " ‘don’t know what the text really means’ "(340).

Radway found that because of their use of the texts, the Smithton women believe that the novels are about "an extraordinary woman who is overcome by unforseen circumstances, but who nevertheless manages to teach the hero how to care for her and to appreciate her as she wishes to be appreciated" (340-341).

The Smithon women’s reading of the romance leads Radway to the conclusion "that what we have here is not a form of partial literacy but a different form of literacy altogether, founded on its own conception of the word and what can be done with it" (341). The interview process also led Radway to the unexpected conclusion that the Smithton women read romance novels as a sort of educational text. "The romance for them is a kind of encyclopedia and reading a process of education" (341). Radway states that the process of what the women view as educating themselves, does more than that.

"Although the process of construction appears to the women as automatic and natural comprehension as learning in fact it is actually a form of production that has the ultimate effect of naturalizing and therefore rarifying the world in which the women ordinarily live." (342)

Reading therefore becomes a "highly reassuring process" (342).

The Smithton women also showed Radway that they were purposeful in their reading and were clear about the reasons for reading. "Not only do the Smithton women have an elaborate theory about the meaning and significance of reading as a literacy form, but they can articulate to themselves a coherent explanation of the meaning of the act of reading itself" (343).

In studying all of the information she compiled, Radway came to the conclusion there were socio-economic reasons why the Smithton women shared a preference for the romance. She found that most of the women were housewives of lower middle income families who felt overwhelmed and neglected. She found that romance reading allowed the women agency in their households. "In effect when buying a romance they are purchasing personal space and vicarious attention" (345). The expense of the books and the time spent reading made the women self-conscious about their reading and made them feel the need to justify it to their families. The women did so by demonstrating factual knowledge acquired through reading romances in order to justify the expense to their husbands. Radway states "this strategy defines the act of romance reading as a goal directed work and therefore assign to it a higher value in the male world" (345).

The study leads Radway to assert "it might be said that romance reading functioned for the women as a kind of tacit, minimalist protest against the patriarchal constitution of women; it enabled them to mark off a space where they could temporarily deny the selflessness usually demanded of them to acknowledge the validity of desires and needs created by the demeanor they otherwise accepted as part of that constitution, and to meet those needs by acquiring vicariously the nurturing and care that was lacking in their lives" (347).

Radway anticipates the feminist reaction to her writing by asking whether romance reading doesn’t in effect perpetuate patriarchy by making women feel complacent with their roles in society. She states that the only answer that she can offer to that question is that her study is too limited to determine the answer to such a question.

Radway further explains that even a more detailed study would still be a matter of interpretation on the part of the ethnographer. This is so because ethnographers must try to go beyond the "conscious comprehension" of the subjects of their study in order to draw conclusions.

In regard to the ethnographer’s conundrum, Radway states that the "link between imagination and action will always be an inferred one" (348).

Radway concludes by stating,

"All components of literate behavior in short including the desire to read a certain kind of material the interpretation of that material and the uses to which both the interpretation and the act of constructing it are put, may well be a consequence of the diverse material and social features that characterize the lives of real individuals. There may be in fact as many different forms of literate behavior as there are interpretive communities who buy and use books." (349)