Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy by Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie, and Kathryn H. Fuller (review)

HUMANITIES 277 course offerings of an introductory seminar (with the possible exception of Uwe Johnson's Two Views, arguably one of his weaker works). Engaging as G'Neill's critical interpretations are to read, they will also serve as excellent starters for anyone who is going to research these texts outside the classroom . Compiling such a list of the greatest hits of modern German literature might run the danger of unnecessarily repeating dated insights and belabouringthe obvious. Acts ofNarrative does not fall into this trap for one second. The narratological problem that serves as a guiding principle for analysis is clearly described and always captures one of the main interpretative perspectives. O'Neill keeps close to the textand applies his narratological categories only after he has extracted their significance from the text. In this he excels in giving lucid descriptions of analytical problems that he ties in with the results of earlier investigations, so that each of his chapters not only offers the spark of a new insight but also presents the most pertinent findings of earlier research, incorporated into his own analytical perspective. Thus, O'Neill accounts for the ambiguities in Kafka1s Trial by analysing the strategies of narrator-vs-character focalization, and similarly he utilizes the distinction between story and discourse to re-evaluate the irony in Hesse's Steppenwolj. Other chapters deal with questions of unreliability and description as a narrative tool. This book is written in a dear and intelligible language that does not yield to simplistic generalizations. Acts of Narrative is a multifaceted work that enlightens the common reader along with the specialist; it is a book that may be equally enjoyed by the specialistin narratology and the undergraduate student, and thatbuilds intelligently on existing research in order to highlight its own findings and give these texts a yet deeper meaning. (ANDREAS SOLBACH) Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie, and Kathryn H. Fuller. Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fllnd Controversy Cambridge University Press. xxiii, 415. us $54.95 As the foreword to Children and the Movies reminds us, cultural policy disputes have only increased in intensity since the advent of the electronic media. When the Payne Fund Studies (hereafter PFS) were initiated in the late 19205, film was the medium most likely to generate anxiety about the adverse effects of mass culture. Designed to gauge the response of young movie-goers to the cinema, the PFS also represented the first broad-based attempt to develop adequate social research models to measure the impact of the mass communication era's media. For these reasons, claim the authors of Children and the Movies, the PFS deserve special attention from film and mass corrununications scholars alike. But addressing the needs of these two scholarly communities proves to be nearly as difficult a project as that given to the original PFS researchers; despiteprovid:inga painstaking 278 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 account ofthe genesis, preparation, and reception ofthe studies, buttressed by extensive archival research, Children and the Movies will likely fail to convince those unfamiliar with the PFS of the studies' centrality to either discipline. For specialists, the merits of Children and the Movies should be obvious. TypicallyI studies ofthe censorship pressures facing Hollywood during the 19205 and 1930S focus on the industry's own well-publicized attempts at self-regulation rather than the efforts of those groups devoted to proving Hollywood's negative influence. Children and the Movies carefully illuminates the problems confronting one such group, the Motion Picture Research Council, bankrolled by the Payne Fund. By reconstructing the process through which the PFS came into existence, Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller reveal the degree to which the studies' architects were compromised in their efforts at opposing the American film industry. Unfortunately, the authors are not content to provide a historically useful investigation of the PFS as a representative instrument of public opposition to movie content. Intent on stressing how the studies inaugurated a new era of social science research, they must also justify the PFS'S importance to the field of mass communications. This dual focus of Children and the Movies - at least in its current form - results in some undesirable compromises of its own...