Complex Representations

In looking at “genres and formulas,” not only within “an encyclopedic catalog” but “as enactments of social conflicts and cleavages,” Denning provides a useful tool to reveal the borrowed costumes of historical struggles and the disguised social and economic divisions, within “the conventional characters of a society, played out in its popular narratives” (Denning 77). For me this approach helps solve some of the issues I have with representations by keeping in mind the preformative aspect of representation. These issues stem from the difficulty brought on by the realization that these representations are not static or created in a vacuum, but created by other humans who are subject to inconstancy, or are unaware of the issues they represent, or who might even disagree with the representations they are creating.

In my analysis of texts I have often struggled with the process of extracting readings and merely converting the text into representations. Denning appears to offer a diagnosis for this uneasiness in the case of dime novels, which I think might be useful for all popular forms of representation: “The figures and characters one sees in dime novels are perhaps not the self-representation of any class, nor are they the class as represented by another; they are a body of representations that are alternately claimed, rejected, and fought over” (Denning 77).

For me this approach allows for possible solutions to the problems of representation that I have been struggling with. One of them is the problem with readership. For the most part it seems like close-readings and genre studies can often lend themselves to a very closed, and highly specialized interpretation of texts that only exist in an academic setting. For one of my own final projects I am considering a very specific film genre but in order for my analysis to have any kind of pertinence I feel like I need to take into account how people might perceive this genre and how they would be viewing these films. I think these aspects should be considered in order to avoid oversimplifying complex relationships, for these representations are “interpreted and not merely consumed” (Denning 69). While in the end it is impossible and unproductive to take every readers opinion into account, I think there should at the very least be an awareness in these kinds of analysis of what typical readers would take from these representations, in order to keep the analysis in check.