"Rethinking Reception" Conference
Durham, NC, March 24-26,2005
This conference both proposes, and interrogates the utility of the concept of reception for understanding audience interaction with texts in all their various forms — be it readers and novels, readers and critical theory, viewers and films, viewers and television, web-users and the internet, listeners and radio, consumers and products, and nations and the trans-national flow of cultural objects. Thus the conference proposes to bring together work on readership, spectatorship, and consumption under the broader analytic of reception, and to initiate a dialogue between work in film studies, literary studies, cultural studies, critical theory, philosophy, and cognitive psychology. The conference aspires to shed light on different aspects of reception and to develop and to refine trans-disciplinary avenues of approach to questions of audience interaction with texts.
