STUART HALL theory of readings

Reception theory

It was suggested by Stuart Hall that a producer encodes specific meaning into a text, and the audience decodes it (preferably) in the way the creator intended. If the audience does not decode the text in the way intended, their reading is not inherently wrong - different audiences react differently based on who they are.

Some audiences may not be able to decode some texts based on things like cultural background, gender, age etc.

Different audiences pick up on different levels of reading:

• Preferred reading
• the audience is able to understand the text in the way the creator intended
• Negotiated reading
• the audience is able to understand some of the text, but not all of it
• Oppositional reading
• the audience rejects the intended meaning and creates their own, maybe because they disagree with the content, or they are not able to understand the text (it is not accessible to them)

If a text has multiple possible meanings, it is polysemic

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