| Popis: |
The Introduction situates this book’s approach to cinema audiences within two theoretical frameworks: analyzing cinema audiences in terms of the discursive creation of historically constituted social subjects such as “the people;” and using the concept of historical contingency. Extant scholarship has tended to focus on the relationship between the audience/spectator on the one hand and the screen image and viewing conditions (theaters, movie-going practices, areas surrounding theaters, audiences’ social positions, etc.) on the other. In contrast, this book pays attention to discursive and non-discursive phenomena, which worked to associate cinema audiences with the formation of historical social subjects, whose terms gained relative degrees of currency in their respective contexts. The Introduction, by critically examining previous scholarship, also develops an approach through which cinema audiences and the social subjects they feed into are conceptualized as simultaneously “subjects” and “agents.” This approach may enable us not only to illuminate the complexity and significance of cinema and media audiences from a far-reaching socio-historical perspective, but also to recapture the hundred-year socio-cultural Japanese history as a whole from the lens of connections between cinema and media and social subjects. Finally, the Introduction demonstrates how the approach of this book offers a drastically different historical vision of Japanese cinema and media from that of previous scholarship in the field. Here and throughout the book, terms are constantly placed in quotations marks to remind readers of the nature of the terms endowed with historical contingency. |
