Echo and Narcissus

Download or read book Echo and Narcissus written by Polona Petek and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-03 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Echo and Narcissus: Echolocating the Spectator in the Age of Audience Research came about as a response to the recent shift of focus in the studies of cinema. While the seventies and the eighties were marked by increasingly complex theorisations of spectatorship, the last two decades have witnessed a turn towards ethnographic research into film reception. However, this long overdue turn towards the empirical viewer has not produced a genuinely broader scope of analysis. It has rather, all too hastily, consigned the spectator, a textually constructed viewing position, to oblivion, thanks to the concept’s perceived hegemonic and totalising premise. Echo and Narcissus intervenes into this state of affairs by arguing for a productive nexus between theorisations of spectatorship and the currently more fashionable audience research. Petek maintains that an informed mapping of contemporary (and past) filmviewing practices still requires a spectatorial model and she offers such a model through a re-reading of Ovid’s tale of Echo and Narcissus. She demonstrates that the myth’s central role in traditional theorisations of spectatorship has not yet been properly reflected upon. Her critical recuperation of the Ovidian myth provides a revised model of the spectator—one with discursive access to all types of cinema, yet, flexible enough to accommodate a range of viewers’ responses and their cultural diversity.