 Seven theses about border genres / five modest proposals about docudrama Seven theses about border genres
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Humankind cannot live by regulation alone ([paraphrasing] Brian Winston). The best rules are not rules at all but common acceptances within a culture. When I worked in the theatre, there was only one bad audience - the one that didn't show up. In the light of research and theory, is it any longer credible automatically to castigate TV audiences for bad taste? New audience research (Annette Hill) asks: what do audiences get from hybrids through the culture's widespread acceptance of them? In the 'second order experiences' offered, what kinds of knowledge and understanding are possible? The emergence of Border Genres has been fun to contemplate aesthetically, but (if the puritan pleasures of sobriety are now prurient pleasures) what is our responsibility as researchers and educators towards a new politics of reception based on 'confrontations between self and other' [Janelle Reinelt]? I see a 'Return to Value' (John Caughie), and regret the political space we academics vacated when we tried to prove that what we do is a science not a humanity. Humanism lives. OK? |
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