Editors’ Introduction

With this issue, we at Reception honor the work and mourn the loss of a scholar, mentor, and friend: Dr. Patrocinio “Patsy” Schweickart. This issue, which is dedicated to Dr. Schweickart’s memory, contains three articles that bear witness to her transformative influence on reception studies; in her scholarship and in her teaching, Patsy continuously highlighted and theorized reading as an inherently social practice that can only be understood by acknowledging the cultural contexts of readers as well as the texts and authors they engage. We also celebrate her legacy as a founding member and guiding light of the Reception Study Society, and rededicate ourselves to continuing her work at a time when questions around the mediation and cooptation of readerly sociality have increasing ethical, economic, and political stakes. _______ Steven Mailloux, President’s Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric, Loyola Marymount University Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine“Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,” which Judith Gardiner praised as the “most ambitious” essay in the “impressive” collection Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, received the MLA’s 1984 Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship. The essay is a provocative and direct intervention into contemporaneous reception study, taking on Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, and Wayne Booth for ignoring the effects of gender on reading. In describing the complex dialectics of reading while female, Schweickart also demonstrated the analytic brilliance and philosophical mastery that characterized all of her work. In her tribute (later in this volume), Barbara Hochman focuses on this essay’s close reading of an ellipsis—a “tour-de-force” moment in which Schweickart could be seen (our apologies to Audre Lorde) as using masculinist tools to dismantle their rhetorical house.The introduction to Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response, which Schweickart again coedited with Elizabeth Flynn, challenges reception studies to focus on reception across difference. Emphasizing the contexts of reception, Schweickart and Flynn describe canny reading subjects who have the capacity to comprehend, and then to choose (or refuse to choose) among a variety of different readings of texts. This model of attending to the interplay of self and text, this complication of notions of “identification,” seems to undergird, or to have created the conditions of possibility, for the first article in this issue of Reception. In “To Understand the Other, You Have to be a Mother: Jenna Bush Hager’s #ReadWithJenna Book Club and the Politics of Race, Empathy, and Motherhood,” Tamara Bhalla demonstrates the ways that celebrity book club culture reorients the social relations of reading from the reader-text interaction to the reader-fellow reader bond. Allowing that such clubs do not entirely foreclose the transformative potential of such cross-cultural reading, Bhalla argues that such clubs, and particularly #ReadWithJenna, “do not always—or even often—encourage reading practices that illuminate the political and cultural investments of these texts.”As the hashtag signals, #ReadWithJenna is a born-digital institution that sometimes has televisual or in-person iterations; the next article in this issue looks at the effects of a transition from a primarily televisual to a primarily online platform on the most influential—some would say category-defining—celebrity book club: Oprah’s. “Reading Race with Oprah: The 2.0 Years” is a “composite essay” coauthored by our book review editor, Yung-Hsing Wu, and several students from her Fall 2022 Black Print Culture course at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette: Cheylon Woods, Yamane Hill, Camille Duhon, Ladi Opaluwa, Kaylin Ambrose, and Bek Credeur. The essay’s innovative form, Wu writes, “reflects convergences as well as tensions in our thinking.” The authors “refer to one another to register [various perceived] connections and tensions [in their objects of study], for they have made all of us consider what we each of us believed we were discerning,” thereby modeling the multiple intersecting influences of texts, contexts, fellow readers, and “pre-reception” framings on the part of both Oprah and the OBC as a distinct cultural institution. This issue of Reception was not curated to have a particular thematic focus, but we could not have planned a better pairing of Bhalla’s article, which finds the “privileged and normative position of whiteness” to be reinforced by #ReadWithJenna and its ilk, and this composite piece in which Wu et al. find two sometimes convergent, sometimes competing vectors in the OBC 2.0: “the personal touch that anchored the OBC to Oprah, which led again and again to an emphasis on her reading experience, and the turn to render Blackness knowable through a universalizing logic.” The spirit of Patsy Schweickart’s collaboration with students lives on through this composite piece, in the overall editorial philosophy of Reception, and in the Reception Study Society more broadly.If one looks at the programs of the Reception Study Society’s biannual meetings, one unfailingly finds one, if not two, panels comprised of Dr. Schweickart’s students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Our most recent meeting at New Mexico State University was organized by Dr. Allison Layfield, a former student of Patsy’s and now member of the RSS Executive Board. Layfield’s tribute in this volume remembers the lasting impact of Schweickart’s final graduate seminar on both its students and on her university’s campus, an impact due in no small part to the group’s effort to follow the ideals set forth in an article Schweickart published in the inaugural issue of these pages in 2008: “The Receiving Function: Ethics, Communication, and Reading.” In 2015, Schweickart would coedit a special issue of Reception with Dr. Philip Goldstein on “Reception Study and Cultural Diversity.” That issue was just one highlight of Goldstein’s long friendship with Dr. Schweickart, which began long before he organized the first meeting of the RSS in 2005.“The Receiving Function” was an expanded treatment of Schweickart’s presentation at the inaugural RSS conference in Delaware; after significant revision, it also appeared as the leadoff essay in a collection inspired by that meeting (New Directions in American Reception Study, ed. Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008]). This iteration, “Understanding an Other: Reading as a Receptive Form of Communicative Action,” is characteristic of Schweickart’s insightful, interdisciplinary, and profoundly ethical work; it opens with drama critic Alice Rayner’s provocation to complicate monolithic and passive notions of the “audience” and calls reception study to task for its similar inattention to what she terms the “‘receiving function,’ the interaction between reader and a text that, multiplied countless times, constitutes the phenomenon of reception” (4). The relationship between the speaker/writer and the listener/reader, Schweickart insists, is asymmetrical. By focusing on reading rather than listening, Schweickart avoids overvaluing the “intimacy, immediacy, and identification” that are often associated with the latter and highlights instead “the necessity of motivational displacement, the cognitive, moral, and emotional labor the reader must undertake in the service of the communicative project of another” (17). This move is compelled by an ethical imperative, and is fundamental to the work of the literary critic: “our sense of literary criticism as a worthy knowledge project, our confidence that we are doing meaningful work, depends to a large degree on whether we can relate what we do to the cultivation of the ideal of oneself as an intelligent, careful, fair, responsible reader of the works of others” (18).James L. Machor’s memories of Dr. Schweickart center on the way she lived out this ideal in her work as an inaugural member of this journal’s Editorial Board:Dr. Schweickart particularly valued this journal’s interdisciplinarity and its engagement with global reception study. She herself was born and raised in the Philippines; after graduating from the University of the Philippines she came to the United States to pursue graduate study, earning first a Masters degree in chemical engineering at the University of Virginia, and then another in mathematics at The Ohio State University. It was only after this intensive work in STEM disciplines that she turned to the study of literature, earning her PhD in English from The Ohio State University. We would like to believe that she would particularly appreciate not just the subject matter but also the methodological approach of this issue’s third article, “From Creative to Speculative Audience: The Conversational Viewing of WandaVision on Twitter.” In their study of social media posts about the Spanish reception of the international media conglomerate Disney+ streaming series WandaVision, Irene Raya Bravo, Sergio Cobo-Durán, and María del Mar Rubio-Hernández bring both qualitative and quantitative methods to bear on questions of the relationship between fan reception of a streaming series and the content provider’s choice to release a show serially, in bulk, or in some combination of the two. The study shows how Disney+ encourages and leverages fan conversations on digital social media to boost audience interest, and argues that the gradual release of the series turns the online community into “prosumer[s] . . . by forming alternative theories to the canonical diagesis through conjectures or speculations, whether based on the production context or related to the narrative universe, which are shared globally and amplify the impact of the series.” We opened this introduction by asserting that Patsy Schweickart “continuously highlighted and theorized reading as an inherently social practice that can only be understood by acknowledging the cultural contexts of readers as well as the texts and authors they engage,” and this final article demonstrates the reach and the capaciousness of the analytic turns her life’s work exemplified and enabled. We are proud to publish these three unintentionally but definitively resonant articles in an issue in her honor. _______The book reviews in this issue are strong reminders that authorship and public belief continue to animate scholarly thinking about reception. The reach of literary history is at stake, for instance, in James L. Machor’s The Mercurial Mark Twain(s): Reception History, Audience Engagement, & Iconic Authorship (reviewed by Matt Seybold) and Dara Barnat’s Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry (reviewed by Jennifer Glaser). As the reviewers of both books make clear, Twain and Whitman exist as figures beyond the initial moment of their writing—temporally and ideologically—because of the investments of readers, audiences, and institutions. Meanwhile Shiloh Carroll identifies in The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman: From Beowulf to Sleeping Beauty (reviewed by Em Kightley) an inverse energy, one through which an authorial signature like Gaiman’s emerges from his reception, in this case, of the medieval. The broader view, as John Potts argues in The Near-Death of the Author (reviewed by Joseph Worthen), underscores the ongoing interplay between authors, the worlds they write, as well as those that occupy their imaginations.In that interplay a variety of publics—constituted by readers, viewers, and consumers—find their desires the object of film studios, corporate brands, the tourism industry and archives. Readers will find, for instance, that books by Leslie H. Abramson, “Mary Poppins”: Radical Elevation in the 1960s (reviewed by Ana Stevenson) and Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen, Brand Antarctica: How Global Consumer Culture Shapes Our Perceptions of the Ice Continent (reviewed by Amy Clary), address the intermedial capitalism that both underpins the split reception of a beloved film and fuels the imagination of a “pure” and immensely marketable and appealing Antarctica. That popular receptions can also occasion community-building and resistance, meanwhile, is a throughline that yokes Alexandra Edwards’s Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom (reviewed by Kelsey Squire), Margaret Galvan’s Invisible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s (reviewed by Jaime Harker), and Leigh Gilmore’s The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women (reviewed by Cecilia Konchar Farr). Edwards argues, as Galvan does, that communities built on belief were sustained by their relations and the materials they made. Thus the history of US fandom finds an earlier twentieth-century origin in regional pockets once centered on women’s literary clubs, the letters women wrote to magazines, and the fan mail they wrote to authors; the history of queer activism acquires a new dimension once a host of photographs, visual art, and comics are added to that political mix. Their feminist beliefs drive, in other words, their scholarship, a form of recovery work that Gilmore, accounting for the #MeToo gesture to articulate the culture of doubt defining women’s realities and fictional lives, calls a much-needed “narrative activism.” _______Finally, with this 2024 issue of Reception we are happy to welcome Ika Willis, Associate Professor of English & Theatre Studies (Education Focused) at the University of Melbourne, on board as coeditor with Amy L. Blair. Many of this journal’s readers will know Ika best as the author of Reception (London: Routledge, 2018). She is also widely published in the fields of classical reception (e.g., a chapter on Xena: Warrior Princess in Marguerite Johnson’s edited collection Antipodean Antiquities [London: Bloomsbury, 2018], and a paper on “Philology, or the Art of Befriending the Text” in the journal postmedieval [2014]) and fan studies (“Amateur Mythographies: Fan Fiction and the Myth of Myth,” Transformative Works and Cultures [2016]; “Fan Theory/Theory Fan, or, I Love This Book,” in Fandom as Methodology, ed. Catherine Grant and Kate Random Love [London: Goldsmiths University Press, 2019]). Her coedited collection with Ellie Crookes, Medievalism and Reception, was published by Boydell & Brewer in December 2024.Aside from this work, Ika will also bring the Reception Study Society closer to the Australian Reception Network, of which she is founder and convener, and we are thrilled to have her on board. In our 2025 issue, we will announce the new composition of the journal’s Editorial Board as we continue to bring together and champion the work of leading-edge researchers in reception, in all its interdisciplinary and international splendor.