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56 Communication Theory & Research
(Palmgreen and Rayburn, 1985; Babrow, 1989). This step is reminiscent of similar
developments in effects research hinted at above.
As a matter of fact, the recent developments in effects and U&G research
may well mark a final confluence between these two traditions. Such a conflu-
ence has been on its way for quite some time, and it has often been called for by
a number of scholars, sometimes under the heading of ‘uses and effects research’
(cf. Belson, 1972; Klapper, 1960; Rosengren and Windahl, 1972; Trenaman, 1967;
Windahl, 1981). This dynamic body of research is matched by the heterogeneous
forms of enquiry which grew out of the humanistic tradition in the area.

Literary Criticism

For some 2500 years or more, the development of arts and sciences in the west
has been closely related to the emergence of literate forms of communication
(Havelock, 1963; Ong, 1982). A great deal of importance has traditionally been
attached to the exegesis of texts carrying cognitive and/or aesthetic experience.
Rules of interpretation have been a shaping force of social life and cultural prac-
tices generally, also in cultures with a relative separation of religious, cultural
and other societal sectors. In the Christian tradition, of course, the interpretation
of the Bible and other canonical texts has resulted in controversies which could
make or break individuals as well as whole societies. (Actually, the potentially
fatal implications of such a controversy in eighteenth-century Sweden helped to
transform traditional textual interpretation into a very early case of quantitative
content analysis; cf. Rosengren, 1981: 9)
With the development of the modern social order came the redefinition
of literature as a form of communication addressing readers primarily as
private individuals in a sphere of leisure (Watt, 1957). While this entailed a com-
plex process of redefining also the purpose of literary criticism (Williams, 1977;
Eagleton, 1983), one result was an emphasis on attempts at demonstrating
that, and explaining how, literature, as mastered by specific historical authors,
may give rise to aesthetic experiences supposed to transcend historical time
and place. These efforts further implied a normative approach to the educa-
tion of readers, at least to the extent that readers must learn appropriate
responses to the literary tradition, thus, in a sense, learning the effects of literary
communication. [...]

Cultural Studies

The borderland of textual and social research has been given a distinctive,
if often eclectic, articulation within cultural studies. Combining structuralist
assumptions about the nature of society under industrial capitalism with cultur-
alist assumptions about the relative autonomy of cultural forms and their con-
tribution to social change (Hall, 1980), much work in this tradition proposes to