Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

Activity 15.1
Unit 15 Positioning the reader or spectator
Section 3 Attributing meaning

The following is a horoscope from the Observer Magazine (2005) for Libra and Aquarius:

Libra: There’s quite a change unfolding now, what with the professional pressure back on and some patient, tender handling of your personal life being called for. Take care with your words; this week they can carry extra clout and can hurt. The Libran Moon on Friday/Saturday brings emotional issues to a combustible climax; you might as well go for broke, in every respect except financially.

Aquarius: Work: even if you are not in education, a teaching role plays in your favour. You’ll have to bi-locate like a Gemini in order to field imminent information overload. Good time to sign contracts, do deals.

Home: about to become one heck of a sight busier. Romance, not tonight Josephine - but you can raise quite a rumpus come Friday and Saturday.

Yes, you wild thing. Enjoy.

1 Construct a number of different readers’ lives for whom these predictions could be made to fit (i.e. someone thinking of leaving a relationship; someone thinking of changing jobs; for example, consider the range of interpretations for, in the Aquarius section, ’a teaching role plays in your favour’ and, in the Libra section, ’you might as well go for broke’).

2 Find evidence for things the readers of this horoscope share (for example, income, class, age, relationship).

Notes

1 It might be asserted that on the whole Marlow as a narrator is less than reliable, and therefore these statements cannot be taken at face value; however, his assertions about women do not seem to be subject to the same questioning as other statements that he makes in the novel.

2 There are further assumptions that are perhaps even more deeply embedded in the message of the text to do with race, and these are really at a higher discourse

level of interpretation. The fact that Black models are rarely used in advertisements for beauty products entails that femininity, or at least the seemingly universal femininity that is referred to in this advertisement, is constructed as white femininity.

3 The model in the Lancome advertisement we discussed previously has adopted the position of a woman who is to-be-looked at, in that she is not engaging in eye contact with the implied reader, but is presenting herself as an aesthetic object.

4 I would like to thank Keith Green and Jill LeBihan for bringing this example to my notice.

5 Eurocentrism is the form of thinking that makes an implicit assumption that other countries are lacking in relation to a Western norm. This involves viewing other countries not in their own terms, but weighed against Western criteria, such as industrial development and scientific achievement, which in other environments are not appropriate. Thus, small-scale self-sufficient communities in Latin America are judged to be lacking because they have not developed a certain type of technology appropriate to the Western world.

Reading

Fetterley, J. (1981) The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Mills, S. (ed.) (1994) Gendering the Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Mills, S. (1996) Feminist Stylistics, London: Routledge.

Toolan, M. (2001) Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, 2nd edn, London: Routledge.

Van Zoonan, L. (1994) Feminist Media Studies, London: Sage.