I don't like the idea of being yoked to just one theory. Each one is a particular perspective, and particular perspectives hide as much information as they reveal. You simply can't understand the universe's complexities and contradictions if you look at it from only one (metaphorical) angle.
But the question remains: what is my method, then, if I'm not picking a theory to use? I want to say that I simply select whatever theoretical perspective seems to be appropriate to the subject at hand, but that merely (as Williams pointed out just yesterday) implies a sub-theory of "appropriateness" that is conveniently invisible, and therefore ostensibly shielded from criticism. It would supposely "just make sense," which is a code phrase for "it would be based on deep-seated intuitions within myself, the nature of which I don't fully understand."
So here's my first thought: I have quite consciously attempted to maintain a certain affiliation with the popular audiences of the art I study, which is to say, geeks and nerds. I've steadfastly insisted on calling the form 'comics' because that's the word most commonly used in English, and for all its faults, it reveals the bumpy history of the medium in the Anglo-American tradition, rather than papering over it with a shift in terminology. I am very much interested in mapping popular reactions to literature and actively comparing them to what critics think, to what academics, educators, librarians, politicians, clergy, and even parents of young audiences think. The popular reaction, the reaction exhibited by the most people, is more influential, more important, but it exists within a network of reactions, all of which feed into each other. There is no monolithic 'mass'; to study the reactions of the most people is to study something inherently heterogeneous, even if there are very large-scale trends.
Now, the nature of that reaction could, very well, be the result of manipulation by other forces (government propaganda, the profit motive of the culture industry, the ideological dictates of religion, etc.), but in studying the popular reaction I hope that we can discover what its origins might be. Rather than setting out to 'reveal' that propaganda controls us all, I'd like to 'discover' where our relationship with the art form comes from. [It is ironic that 'reveal' and 'discover' mean essentially the same thing, but have very different connotations in this context.]
So that's point #1 of my method: retain the perspective of the fan, the popular audience, in my case, the geek.
Posted by orion at July 25, 2006 4:06 PM