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A Comparative Analysis of the Reception of Domestic and US Fiction 73

could argue that if involvement with the message is high, the dependence and
impact are too. [...]

Essentialist, Decontextualized Positions

A third problem, which calls into question the relevance of existing reception
analytical studies on the problematic, deals with central theoretical and analyti-
cal concepts, such as audience activity, (symbolic) resistance and textual poly-
semy and openness. Recently some of these concepts have been criticized
virulently. The ‘mythologized’ status and the imperial resistant power of the
audience in the process of meaning production have been under especially
severe attack (Condit, 1989: Curran, 1990; Morris, 1988; Silverstone, 1990: 177–8).
A certain exaggeration of the ‘impermeability of audiences to media influence’
(Curran, 1990: 151) has been described as a ‘romanticizing and romanticist
tendency in much work that emphasizes resistance’ (Ang, 1990: 246). Following
James Curran (1990) these tendencies even hold a real danger for the increasing
incorporation of cultural relativism within the critical/cultural tradition. [...]
Summarizing this central position, Morley and Robins argue that American
commercial television drama operates:

... at a very high level of abstraction, and the price of this approach to a
universality of appeal is a higher level of polysemy or multi-accentuality.
The research of Ang and Katz and Liebes reminds us just how open these
types of programmes are to re-interpretation by audiences outside their
country of origins’. (Morley and Robins, 1990: 29)

Of course, one can make several criticisms of this perspective. Among them is
the point that these studies neglect economic, historical and production factors,
in explaining why American drama is so successful (e.g., Gripsrud, 1990).
But even if one concentrates on the inherent qualities of US fiction, we can
strongly question such statements on the text and spectator–text relationship.
This article argues that the concentration on the reception of US fiction alone
(exemplified in the number of studies on the soap opera Dallas) has stimulated
an essentialist and a decontextualized position on the characteristics, the func-
tioning, the decoding and thus the appeal and impact of US drama. By essen-
tialist we mean that, in the past, differentiated nuances have rarely been drawn
with respect to these issues. In order to study the impact of a text, one should
not unquestioningly accept its potential characteristics or dissociate it from the
manifestation of its decoding in specific contexts.
In order to understand the functioning, the polysemic potential and the decod-
ing of mass-produced US fiction abroad, one must pay attention not simply to
US fiction alone. A comparison of its decoding with the decoding of other types
of television fiction, with which audiences have different kinds of relationships
(e.g. non-commercial drama, fiction from another origin or tradition), can open
new perspectives to an understanding of the cross-cultural appeal of US televi-
sion programmes. [...]