Dunarea de Jos

Dunarea de Jos University of Galati Faculty of Letters
Reception. Theory and Practices

(An Elective Course in English Literature for 1st Year Students)
Associate Professor Steluta Stan, Ph.D.
Galati 2010
Contents
Foreword. Objectives Introduction. Literary Studies Chapter 1 A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram Chapter 2 Reader-Oriented Theories 2.1. Reading Some Definitions and Main Parameters 2.2. Open versus Closed Texts 2.3. Lisible/Readable/Readerly vs Scriptible/Writable/ Writerly Texts 2.4. Reader: Functions, Competences and Constraints 2.5. The Subjective Perspective 2.6. The Nature of Meaning 2.7. Reader-Response Criticism 2.8. A Postscript Glossary of Literary Terms References and Bibliography
5 7 11 20 20 23 23 26 29 30 31 37 39 47
Foreword
Foreword
Cine vorbete n oper? E vorba de relaia dintre creator i oper n gndirea critic din secolul nostru i, cu precdere, de statutul autorului n noile forme de interpretare. Am acceptat i eu, cum au acceptat atia, disocierea lui Proust dintre omul care scrie i omul care triete i m-am bucurat fr rezerve cnd am aflat c, n fine, autorul a fost trimis la plimbare. Apoi am constatat c, sub o form sau alta, autorul revine n text, c ntre omul care scrie i omul care triete nu-i chiar o prpastie de netrecut, c strlucirea operei nu ne vindec de dorina de a ti ceva despre autorul care a scris-o. Autorul e mort, dar moartea lui a lsat un gol care ne face s ne amintim mereu de el. (Simion 1993:1)
The course is designed so as to (re)introduce its possible readers to the vast and old but ever interesting domain of literary studies by getting them familiar with the geography of literary studies from a historical perspective (classic, romantic, and present-day paradigms), and by drawing their attention upon the different interest 20th century critical theories take in the author of a literary text, the text itself and the reader involved in the reading/decoding process. Starting from a series of questions, none of which original (what might be considered original in a world of inter-/ intra-/ trans-textuality?!), the course aims at surveying the main theoretical and critical positions focusing on aspects such as the author and their authority, the text produced, and the beneficiary of the creative act, the reader. We believed that the strategy of starting from questions might be useful because: on the one hand, once the questions asked, they seem to better organize a huge volume of information (not always complementary, and most of the times contradictory), and, in the same time, the reader is invited to develop an opinion, to enter this partnership, that, we are sure by now, exists between the author of a text and its reader (the texts/the authors?).
In defining his own critical method, professor Eugen Simion considers that criticism is no longer a matter of taste, nor should it be an obsession with form; a critical spirit should, nevertheless, be concerned with both, taking interest in the same time in the text and the beyond-text: Critica, aa cum o neleg, este un sistem de lectur; un mod personal de a te apropia de oper, un demers, care, folosind mijloace variate, descoper figura spiritului creator. Figura se poate defini nu numai prin filosofia existenei i calitatea expresiei, dar i printr-o poziie fa de obiectele, fantasmele care intr n oper. n fond, opera exprim numai universul pe care autorul l poart, dar i felul n care acest autor i asum universul de care este purtat. (1993: IX-X)
nu
This definition of a work method seems to include all the terms of the equation that are the beginning point of any approach to any of the actors 5 Reception. Theory and Practices
Foreword performing on the literary stage: the author, the world or the extra-linguistic reality, the authors word (the text), or the one expected to read the word in the world or viceversa, the reader. Depending on the perspective, different critical or theoretical tendencies consider one term or another as unknown, or see them statically or dynamically, as elements that only exist or as the same elements, this time at work. In other words, using a terminology that proves once again, if necessary, to what extent and how often we pay tribute to the universe that we carry and that carries us, the terms of the above-mentioned equation are seen as products or productions (in one of the subchapters of the present study, we shall return to the author seen as the creator of a text or of himself, the work seen as text or textualization, the reader as meaning consumer or meaning producer). When giving the present course the structure it has, we also had in mind Roman Jakobsons diagram, the same as many other authors, probably sourcing in a need for order in a highly dis-ordered (or having a hidden order not any individual is meant to see or understand) universe 1. One cannot but notice how intricate the paths to human knowledge are; overwhelmed with the complexity of the world(s) to be known, man has always tried to organize the huge amount of data according to different criteria, approaching the world but also the text or the world as text (as the post-structuralists see it) from different angles. Then, man compressed the outcome of this sequence of operations into formulas, equations, diagrams, theories or architypes. When he thought he had found the figure in the carpet, as Henry James calls it, after having established the moulds, man set about showing the others how these can be broken, undermined, destructured, de-centred, in other words, did what is so very characteristic of human nature, i.e. tried to encode what had just been decoded. Consequently, the course is intended to offer support to third year students in philology by helping them through the many possible ways to answer a few sets of questions, in an attempt to facilitate a better understanding of the subtle and mysterious relationship between a work and an author trying to discover and re-create himself while writing, and a reader forced to be alert in describing/interpreting a text while inscribing himself onto it. The course comprises an introduction (Literary Studies), an informative section (Chapters 1-2: A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram, and Reader-Oriented Theories) and a tool kit for decoding varied discourse patternings (Glossary of Literary Terms and References).
For a similar example, see Liviu Papadima, Literatur i Comunicare. Relaia autor cititor n proza paoptist i postpaoptist, Ed. Polirom: Bucureti, 1999.
Introduction: Literary Studies A Definition
Introduction: Literary Studies

A Definition
To elaborate a theory of literature is to seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature, the purpose and the value of literature, and see how answers to these questions can be ascertained. As a special branch of literary critical discussion, literary theory has been intellectually fashionable and a source of vigorous dispute in European and American universities, especially from the 1970s onwards. By 1990 literary theory had been institutionalized, now being taught as an academic subject in its own right. Some teachers of theory argue that it is impossible to read a text without a theoretical standpoint (even though readers may be wholly unconscious of what their standpoint is); an obvious counter-argument is that no literary theory can be properly examined and discussed without some prior knowledge of texts. Nevertheless, whatever the stand, literary theory undeniably provides not only a means for dealing with differences in critical opinion, but also the basis for constructing a more rational, adequate and self-aware discipline of literary studies. The connections between literary theory and critical and scholarly practice go in both directions. That is to say, not only does theory illuminate or improve practice, but it also draws heavily on it; the questions that critics and scholars ask of individual texts are ultimately of the same order as those that literary theory asks of literature in general. Literary theory is not something that has developed in a vacuum, but has arisen, for the most part, in response to the problems encountered by readers, critics and scholars in their practical contact with texts. A logical conclusion might be that the goal of literary theory is to draw attention to these questions and to make them more problematic, to show that they can be answered differently, and none of the answers should be taken for granted. At its most basic level, literature is commonly regarded as a kind of communication between author and reader. Just as in ordinary linguistic communication a speaker sends a message to an addressee, so an author sends a literary text to a reader. Filling out this scheme that so much resembles that of the Russian formalist R. Jakobson, which shall be introduced a little later we can add that the message-text is about something (content, reality) and that it is written in language. The first addition is designed to account for the fact that the literary text is assumed to be a specially motivated form of discourse, that it is written because it has something to say; the second serves to distinguish literature from other art forms that do not have language as their medium. Consequently, a preliminary definition of literature might include an author sending a literary text about reality to the reader, in language. If we adopt the addressers viewpoint, we draw attention to the writer and his or her emotive/expressive use of language; if we focus on the context, we isolate the referential use of language and invoke its historical dimension at the point of its production; if we are mainly interested in the addressee, we study the readers reception of the message, hence introducing a different historical context (no longer the moment of a texts production but of its reproduction), and so on. Reception. Theory and Practices 7
Introduction: Literary Studies A Definition The different literary theories also tend to place an emphasis upon one function rather than the other: ROMANTICHUMANIST MARXIST READERFORMALIST ORIENTED STRUCTURALIST
Romantic-humanist theories foreground the writers life and mind as expressed in his or her work; Formalist theories concentrate on the nature of writing itself, in isolation; Marxist criticism considers the social and historical context as fundamental, though it would be only fair to add that not all Marxists hold a strictly referential view of language; Reader-criticism (phenomenological criticism) centers itself on the readers/affective experience; Structuralist poetics draws attention on the codes used to construct meaning. At their best, none of the approaches totally ignores the other dimensions of literary communication.
A Historical Outline
Philosophers, writers, critics and scholars alike have always been inclined to speculate about the theoretical implications of literary practice, and most literary theorists of the 20th century are aware of their belonging to a tradition that goes back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle. a. The classical paradigm Until the end of the 18th century, the reflection upon literature had concentrated on three main directions, in spite of a natural variation in accent according to the historical age: poetics, inaugurated by Aristotle, the study of literary facts from the verbal arts perspective; rhetoric, at first related to public life, analysing the different kinds of discourse as a set of means used to guarantee an effective communication; later on, the literary discourse (fiction and poetry) was to become the main genre analysed; hermeneutics (the theory of interpretation), limited at the beginning only to sacred texts; starting with the Rennaissance, philological criticism replaced the hermeneutics of sacred texts. In a classic study on the Western critical tradition, Orientation of Critical Theories, the opening chapter of The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), the contemporary critic, M. H. Abrams, identified four critical orientations. According to whether the critic focuses on the artist, his work, the reality he refers to, or the audience the work is meant for, Abrams distinguishes: expressive theories, defining the literary work as an expression of the artists subjectivity (beginning with Romanticism), interested in the relationship between the Work and the Artist; objective theories, identifying the literary work with its textual structure (Poetics), interested in close reading of the Work; 8 Reception. Theory and Practices
Introduction: Literary Studies A Definition mimetic theories, foregrounding the relationship between the text and the reality it represents(!), between the Work and the Universe (related to Hermeneutics); pragmatic theories, analyzing the literary work with a view to the effects it produces on the receiver (Rhetoric), interested in the relationship between the Work and the Audience); The present domain of the literary studies was defined in general terms in the 19th century, during the Romantic period. In the classic tradition, Abramss expressive theories did not exist. They began to play a prominent role during Romanticism, while today, the concept of the authors subjectivity is generally accepted without any further debate. Competing with this expressive conception, there is another thesis that Romanticism embraced, that of the works self-referentiality, the fact that the literary work expresses nothing else but itself. This is the foundation of Poetics in our century. This is the reason for Poetics difficulty in getting rid of the confusion between the (debatable) thesis of the literary works autonomy and the methodological principle of the autonomous study of the literary work as an example of verbal art. Romantic hermeneutics had two divergent trends: intentionalist hermeneutics, the basis of modern philology, an interpretative art meant to help understand literary texts, and reconstruct the authors intentions; anti-intentionalist hermeneutics, drawing on the philosophy of M. Heidegger and H. G. Gadamer, stating that what is important to be detected is not the apparent/surface intention, not what the author wanted to say/or show, but what he said/showed without having the intention to (which seems to refer us, to a certain extent, to the previously mentioned expressive theories. Literary history is not that of literature only, but also the evolution of literary genres as indices for the political evolution of society in general. b. Literary studies/theory in the 20th century The aims and conventions of literary criticism, like literature itself, have changed constantly through the ages, and there are many different types of literary approaches. In the above mentioned essay, Abrams explores the diversity of the critical approaches via a simple diagram of the elements involved: UNIVERSE WORK ARTIST AUDIENCE Abrams explains that theories of art can be defined according to the way in which they tend to concentrate on one of the three variables at the corners of the triangle. Thus: mimetic theories see the work of art as reflecting the universe like a mirror; Aristotle, who defined art as imitation in his Poetics (4th century BC), is a prime example; pragmatic theories see the work as a means to an end, teaching or instructing; the focus is changed to the works effects on the audience; Reception. Theory and Practices 9
Introduction: Literary Studies A Definition expressive theories center on the artist. Nearly all Romantic and 19 th century criticism generally regard art as primarily concerned with expressing the poets feelings, imagination, and personality. They tend to judge the work by its sincerity or the extent to which it has successfully revealed the author's state of mind. The New Criticism of the 20th century, and many of the other critical theories which followed it, dominated the study of literature in universities and schools until the 1980s. This type of objective criticism focuses chiefly on the text, the work of art itself, and attempts to regard it as standing free from the poet, the audience and the world; between 1950 and 1980, criticism tended to mean practical criticism; since 1970, the traditional understanding of the relationships between the universe, the writer, the audience and the text has been put into turmoil by the approaches to language known as structuralism and deconstruction, which place in doubt any simple mimetic notion of language itself, and therefore literature; the security that words have meaning because they directly symbolize the things contained in the world outside (the universe) has been attacked. Language has come to be seen as a framework creating truth and reality, rather than simply describing things. The consequences of these ideas for literature and criticism have been wide-ranging. One result has been the proliferation of literary theory as a subject for study in its own right, usually concentrating on the theory of criticism rather than literature itself. Another has been the shift away from the internal mechanisms of texts themselves in order to show them in the context of society and politics, possibly by adopting Marxist or feminist critical perspectives. Both these approaches have attacked the concept of the canon, the idea that literature should be composed of a collection/corpus of special and highly valued texts. The specific disciplines of narratology and reader-response criticism, have also grown out of the ferment caused by structuralism. In spite of a very vast and multifarious typology, four main orientations can be distinguished: evaluative criticism, generally integrated to the mission of teaching literature in schools and universities; historical and institutional analysis of literature as a set of social practices; interpretive disciplines, generally inscribing anti-intentionalist hermeneutics in the present; theories of reading and, more generally, of reception; all types of formal analysis (narratology, thematic criticism, stylistics, rhetoric analysis, literary genres study , etc.), having a synchronic or diachronic orientation; this direction is related to a poetics in the aristotelian sense.
Tasks for the student: 1. Enlarge upon a possible definition of literary theory. 2. What are, in M. H. Abrams view, the main critical approaches of the 20th century? 10 Reception. Theory and Practices
Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram
Chapter 1 A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram

The aims and conventions of literary criticism, as well as those of literature, have constantly changed with time, the result being numerous and varied ways of approaching the literary phenomenon. In the essay, Orientation of Critical Theories, the first chapter of The Mirror and the Lamp, the contemporary critic, M. H. Abrams, explores the diversity of the critical approaches using a simple diagram of the elements involved (Gray, 1992: 42): UNIVERSE WORK ARTIST AUDIENCE Abrams argues that theories of art can be defined according to the way they tend to focus on one of the three variables at the corner of the above imaginary triangle. This way: a mimetic theory will consider the work of art as a mirror of the universe: Aristotle might be considered the first example in this respect, as, in Poetics (4th century B.C.), he defined art as imitation or mimesis; a pragmatic theory sees art as a means to an end, that of instructing or educating; the attention is, this time, moved on the effect art has on its receiver/consumer; expressive theories are centred on the artist, almost the entire criticism of Romanticism and the XIXth century being firstly preocuppied with art as an expression of the feelings, imagination and personality of its creator. Catherine Belsey, another contemporary theorist pertaining to the British academic world, calls this critical approach expressive realism, and sees it focused on the interpretation and evaluation of writings, as more or less vigorous expressions of a unique sensitivity or world outlook (the authors) and, in the same time, as more or less faithful representations of the surrounding reality; what has been called objective criticism (Practical Criticism in Great Britain, Russian Formalism, New Criticism in the United States) dominated the study of literature in schools and universities until the 80s. This critical method lays the stress on the analysis of the text, of the work itself, free from its author, public or the extra-linguistic universe; beginning with the 70s, what was traditionally understood by the relations between the universe, the author, the reader and the work, has been troubled by Structuralism and Deconstructivism, both questionning even the most elementary mimetism of language and, consequently, of literature; even more than that, the structuralists and the deconstructivists attack what was taken for certain, that there is a stable relationship between words, their meaning and the things outside the text that they are a symbol of. Language is no longer only a means that the author uses to tell (his) truth about (his) reality, it Reception. Theory and Practices 11
Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram even creates that truth about that reality. Last but not least, the spoiled child of the last decades, the reader, becomes the main concern of the reception theories. The focus of the present course being the author and the relationship between him and the other terms of the above-mentioned equation, we thought it fit to change the order of the terms and place the author in the centre, trying to make the relations more dynamic and bidirectional. We consider that this might be a useful starting point for the analysis of the central, periferal or no role at all that the different critical and theoretical approaches assigned to the author: universe/extralinguistic reality/ideology author/scriptor/meaning producer work/text/discourse (seen as) product/producing reader/consumer/(re)producer of meaning(s) Running the risk of being considered too didactic in our approach, we still thought it was worth beginning from the scheme above in an attempt to organize, as we have already mentioned, a huge volume of information, offered most of the times in an elitist language, and also to facilitate the access to and the choice of one or another of the theoretical and critical methods meant to help the reader over the threshold that separates the literary text from the world (as text). The position we suggest is a relativistic not a pluralistic one as, in our view, the various theories are not all compatible with one another and, by no means, complementary, adding together to form a single comprehensive vision. The reader, as well as the analyst, is rather confronted with a choice between conflicting theories, too great a variety of alternatives and open questions, and will not find a comfortably easy solution to that choice within the confines of literary theory alone. Taking into account what has already been considered an overtheorizing of literature which seems to undermine reading as an innocent activity, the reader might feel frustrated to lose this innocence. Nevertheless, we strongly believe that a true reader cannot ignore the questions the major literary theories have continually asked during the last decades: questions about the author, the writing, the reader, or what we usually call reality. As it happens with both literary criticism and theory, even the focus is on one of the terms, none of the others is completely forgotten. It has been said so often that the modern spirit is an interrogative one, its dignity and courage lying in the questions it raises, not necessarily in the answers it finds. Consequently, starting from the scheme above, we shall forward several sets of questions, grouped together according to the terms they point at and the relationship between them. As in a previous course for 2nd year students, The Reception of the Literary Text, we focused on the reader, we thought it would be logical that this time we should try to shed some light upon the author, trying to find answers to questions such as:
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Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram
Questions for the student:

1) the relation between author and text: is the text the intentional production of an individual, or an only partially intentional production, the unintended determinants of which being one of or a combination of elements such as: i. the psyche of the author ii. the psyche of the culture iii. the ideology of the culture iv. the particular socio-economic conditions of the production (the placement and role of the artist in the culture, who pays for the production, who consumes it, what are the rewards for successful production, how are they decided and, what are the material conditions of production v. the traditions of writing which pertain to the text vi. the traditions of the treatment of the particular subjectmatter in the culture and in the genre is the text in fact almost entirely the production of the ideological and cultural realm, in which realm the author is merely a function, whose role, aspirations, ideas and attitudes are created by the society in which he lives? In this case, the text is a complex structure of cultural and aesthetic codes, none of which the author has created, arranged around traditional cultural themes or topoi, whereas the author himself, while an existent being (his existence and effort are not denied), has little to do with the meaning of the text, as he himself is simply part of (or, constructed by) the circulation of meanings within the culture. On the other hand, if we take into consideration the expressive function of the literary discourse, we can ask a couple of questions like: how do writers introduce themselves to their readers: as an impersonal instance in the work, or a personal one manifesting itself through the work? to what extent and in what way do writers open or shut to the reader the access to the individuality of the person who produces the text and remains outside it or steps inside? What masks do they take on and why? 2) the relationship between the author and the text, on the one hand, and the society, on the other: as the author is operating within a certain cultural milieu, in what ways does she represent in her text, deliberately and/or unconsciously, the understandings of the world that the culture holds? in what ways does she represent in her text, again deliberately and/or unconsciously, the understandings of what art is and does, the aesthetic ideolog(ies) of the time? Reception. Theory and Practices 13
Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram Moreover, the text not only will be an outcome of this situated imaginative process, but will be structured in its production and in its reception by various material social forces; consequently, one must ask questions such as these: who is the intended audience? who has a say in the text's final form, directly (e.g. editors), or indirectly how is it paid for, and how it is distributed, who has access to it, under what conditions, and what effects might these conditions produce? what status does that kind of writing have in the culture? 3) the relation between author and reader (the communicational mechanisms): what are the status and the role of the authorial voice? how are the different hypostasis of the author/narrator transposed into the text? to what extent does the author intend and succeed to establish a dialogic relation between him and a reader open to such a relation? what is the freedom the reader is left to decode and interpret the text? These are only some of the possible questions raised by the issue of the relationship between what we called the terms of a simple equation, which proves anything but simple. A more detailed presentation of the 20 th century critical theories will start from a set of possible questions that can be asked of any theory of literature: a. How does it define the literary qualities of the literary text? What relation does it propose between text and author? What role does it ascribe to the reader? How does it view the relationship between text and reality? What status does it give to language, the medium of the text? Text as literature
The word literature is (although it should not be) used as if it were precisely and unproblematically definable, but the definitions vary widely in their scope and premises. The so-called institutional definition, which may be characterised as historicist, sees it as essentially similar to any other sort of social or cultural institution, therefore changing its character and function as the society that produces it changes. Instead, most literary theories attempt to devise universal definitions such as poetry, verbal art, etc. Such definitions also vary in a number of ways, out of which the degree of the specificity of literature. The Russian Formalists defined literatures distinctive qualities in relation to ordinary language, whereas certain vulgar Marxists regarded it as just one element of the superstructure, viewing it in relation to ideology. Common to all is that literature is generally regarded as a more patterned and organised kind of message than those of ordinary communication. But again, the function attributed to the formal elements will vary from one theory to another. 14 Reception. Theory and Practices
Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram The New Critics, for example, offer a more complex model and shift the burden of representation (the mimetic function of literature) onto form itself, defining content not only as what is said but as the way in which things are said. Other theories disregard literatures representational function, and privilege formal features, making content as incidental as form is for contentbiased theories. b. Text and author

is the text the intentional production of an individual, or is the text an only partially intentional production whose unintended determinants are one of or a combination of: the psyche of the author, the psyche of the culture, the ideology of the culture, the particular socio-economic conditions of the production (the placement and role of the artist in the culture, who pays for the production, who consumes it, what are the rewards of successful production, how are they decided and, what are the material conditions of production), the traditions of writing which pertain to the text, the traditions of the treatment of the particular subject-matter in the culture and in the genre, or is the text in fact almost entirely the production of the ideological and cultural realm, in which realm the author is merely a function, whose role, aspirations, ideas and attitudes are created by the society in which he lives. In this case, the text is a complex structure of cultural and aesthetic codes, none of which the author has created, arranged around traditional cultural themes or topoi, whereas the author himself, while an existent being (his existence and effort are not denied), has little to do with the meaning of the text, as he himself is simply part of (or, constructed by) the circulation of meanings within the culture.
Biography has traditionally played a large role in literary studies, but ever since the American New Critics raised the issue of the intentional fallacy, it has been thought that biography may actually constitute an obstacle to the study of literary texts. The American New Critics W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley introduced this term for what they regarded as the mistaken critical method of judging a literary work according to the authors intentions, whether stated or implied. They argued that the value and meaning of each literary work resides solely in the text itself, and any examination of presumed intention is merely irrelevant, distracting the critic towards the writers psychology or biography, rather than focusing on the use of language, imagery, tensions, and so on, within the freestanding literary artifice. (The Verbal Icon, 1954) The importance given to the author tends to be in inverse proportion to the one given to specifically literary qualities. Both the New Critics and the Russian Formalists felt it necessary to downgrade the author, in order to 15 Reception. Theory and Practices
Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram guarantee the independence of literary studies, saving them from being merely a second-rate form of psychology or history. On the other hand, those theories for which the author is a central point of reference vary considerably on the question of how far the authorial intentions assumed to govern a text are conscious (Marxists vs. classical Freudians). c. Text and reader

does the text create the reader or does the reader create the text? Is the text a text without a reader, or is it only a text as read (i.e. it becomes a text only the moment it is actualized by a reader while reading)? to what extent are we, as readers, simply following the conventions of reading we have been taught?; to what extent are we reading our own world-view and our own concerns into the text?
Most of the considerations above pertaining to the placement of the author, pertain to the reader as well: to what extent do the purposes of the reading, the social placement of the reader, and the cultural status of the text influence what meaning the reader derives (or produces)?
Until recently the reader was probably the most neglected element in the framework of literary communication. Many critical theories considered this variable factor in subjective responses to literature (viz. the New Criticisms affective fallacy) at odds with the systematic requirements of any rigorous theory. Affective fallacy is the title of an essay by the American critics W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, printed in Wimsatts The Verbal Icon (1954). They argue that judging a poem by its effects or emotional impact on the reader is a fallacious method of criticism, resulting only in impressionistic criticism. Not only the New Critics felt that way, but also the Russian Formalists (with whom, one will have realized so far, they seem to agree to a great extent on a number of issues), who specifically excluded subjective response from their theory because they regarded it as unscientific; therefore, the reader is left passively to observe features of a text the character of which can be established only by objective scientific analysis. A somewhat navely psychological view of the reader is that of I. A. Richards, who makes an attempt at combining an interest in reader response with scientific aims. Through his practical criticism, he encouraged attentive close reading of texts, a kind of democratisation of literary study in the classroom, in which nearly everyone was placed on an equal footing in the face of a blind text (unidentified). A more complex approach is that of the Constance School of phenomenologically-inspired reader theory, where the reader is recognized to have a determined function, assigned to him by culture and history, and also that his own cultural and historical situation becomes a key factor that affects, as R. Barthes showed in his S/Z, the way in which texts are written. 16 Reception. Theory and Practices
Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram In his opinion, the reader does not passively receive the impact that the literary text may make upon him/her, but is involved in a more active, or rather, interactive process. Almost all schools of literary theory place a growing emphasis on reading, even privileging readers and reading for broadly political aims (viz. a Marxist or a feminist reading, highlighting the difference of its interpretation from others, to draw attention to and undermine bourgeois or patriarchal assumptions). As a preliminary conclusion, theories of reading ask questions about the extent to which a text can be said to determine its own meaning or be determined by it, about the reader responding to textual directives or producing, through his interpretative activity, the text himself. d. Text and society

as the author is operating within a certain cultural milieu, in what ways does he represent in his text, deliberately and/or unconsciously, the understandings of the world that the culture holds? in what ways does he represent in his text, again deliberately and/or unconsciously, the understandings of what art is and does, the aesthetic ideologi(es) of the time?
Moreover, the text not only will be an outcome of this situated imaginative process, but will be structured in its production and in its reception by various material social forces; consequently one must ask questions such as these: e. who is the intended audience? who has a say in the texts final form, directly (e.g. editors), or indirectly; how is it paid for, and how is it distributed, who has access to it, under what conditions, and what effects might these conditions produce? what status does that kind of writing have in the culture?
Text and reality
By reality one is to understand, of course, the concrete world of material objects, but also philosophical, psychological and social realities, the existence of which is independent from literature. The theorists task is to formulate the relationship between the text and this reality. Marxist theories assume that, one way or the other, literature is bound to social and political reality; psychoanalytic theories assume that it primarily represents a psychological reality. In addition, Russian Formalism, forwarding the concept of defamiliarization, (ostranenie, making strange), sees reality made strange by the literary text. According to formalist theories, particularly to Victor Shklovsky, one of the early Russian Formalists, literary texts are distinguished from non-literary texts by a variety of special linguistic devices and features, most of them deviations from ordinary usage, which result in defamiliarization, which they define as the capacity of some kinds of writing Reception. Theory and Practices 17
Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram to strip away familiarity from the world about us so that we see things anew, or, to put it differently, it was meant to change our mode of perception from the automatic and practical to the artistic.
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f.
Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram Text and language
The main feature that distinguishes literature from the other arts is its linguistic medium, but theories of literature vary greatly in the importance they ascribe to language. Many of them, concerned with establishing the distinctiveness of literature as an independent category, define literature as a special use of language: for the Russian Formalists it is a deviation from ordinary language, for the New Critics it is a shift from a logical and conventional to an imitative, iconic use of it, whereas the Structuralists take linguistic theory, Saussurean linguistics in particular, as their starting point for literary theory.

is language composed of signs which have their meaning only in reference to, and through difference from other signs, as in the popular Saussurean model? is language an actual indicator of the real world?
Structuralists attack the idea that language is an instrument for reflecting a pre-existent reality or for expressing a human intention. They believe that subjects are produced by linguistic structures which are always already in place. A subjects utterances belong to the realm of parole, which is governed by langue, the true object of structuralist analysis. This systematic view of communication excludes all subjective processes by which individuals interact with others and with society. The poststructuralist critics of structuralism introduce the concept of the speaking subject or the subject in process. Instead of viewing language as an impersonal system, they regard it as always articulated with other systems and especially with subjective processes. They insisted that all instances of language had to be considered in a social context. Every utterance is potentially the site of a struggle: every word that is launched into social space implies a dialogue and therefore a contested interpretation. Language cannot be neatly dissociated from social living; it is always contaminated, interleaved, coloured by layers of semantic deposits resulting from the endless process of human struggle and interaction. This conception of language-in-use is summed up in the term discourse. Do we speak language, that is, is language subject to our will and intention, or does language speak us, that is, are we implicated in a web of meaning located in and maintained by language? To sum up, modern literary theory is anything but monolithic; rather it consists of a multiplicity of competing theories (mainly due to the multiplicity of the subject), which frequently contradict one another, as the previous pages may have already made obvious. Consequently, the position we suggest our students is a relativistic not a pluralistic one, since, in our opinion, these different approaches to literature do not simply relate to the different aspects of the subject, thus adding together to form a single comprehensive vision. Rather than that, the reader is faced with a choice between conflicting theories, with a (too) great variety of alternatives and open questions.
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Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram Questions and tasks for the student: 1. First, an emphasis on theory tends to undermine reading as an innocent activity. If we ask ourselves questions about the construction of meaning in fiction or the presence of ideology in poetry, we can no longer navely accept the realism of a novel or the sincerity of a poem. Some readers may cherish their illusions and mourn the loss of innocence, but, if they are serious readers, they cannot ignore the deeper issues raised by the major literary theorists in recent years. Secondly, far from having a sterile effect on our reading, new ways of seeing literature can revitalize our engagement with texts. Far from deadening the spontaneity of the readers response to literary works, various theories and concepts raise different questions about literature. They may ask questions from the particular point of view of the writer, of the work, of the reader, or of what we usually call reality, although most will, in effect, also involve aspects of the other approaches. How does all this affect our experience and understanding of reading and writing? 2. Enlarge upon Jakobsons model of linguistic communication as applied to literature. 3. Choose one type of relationship (between author and text, between author&text and society, between author and reader, between text and reality, etc.) and write a 3000-word essay (5 pages)
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Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories
2. Reader-Oriented Theories
2.1. Reading (a) Some Definitions, (b) Main parameters and (c) Conventions
Prior to a survey of the various ways in which the readers role in constructing meaning has been theorized, we feel we must ask another set of questions: what is reading? what is a text? who is the reader?
The below-mentioned theoretical approaches have standardized and focused on reading in the past thirty years: sociology of reading: R. Escarpit, J. Lafargue; rhetorics of reading: M. Charles; aesthetics of reception: H. R. Jauss; aesthetics of effect: W. Iser; theories of text production: M. Riffaterre; cognitive semiotics: T. V. Diyk, Serge Baudet; theory of reading: P. Cornea; theories of reading as game: M. Picard.
All of them have as a starting point the idea that the literary work once produced, does not come to life again but through the thaumaturgical activity of reading, in the absence of which writers would remain only word producers. (a) It would be unreasonable to give only one definition of reading. Instead, here follows a set of definitions, each of which, added to the preceding and to the following ones, tries (in a gestaltist manner) to combine into a whole: Reading a set of procedures having as a goal the (re)constitution of the text before our eyes, after its existence as an object, a graphic deposit between the pages of a book Reading and writing cannot be separated, they are reciprocal and complementary. The French narratologist, Gerard Genette, writes in Figures II: The text is that Mebius strip, the two sides of which (internal and external, signifying and signified, writing and reading), twist and change permanently; on this strip, writing never ceases to read itself, and reading never stops writing and rewriting itself; Reading as an intellectual/mental activity consisting of: the visual perception of signs, the abstracting of real, conceptual, or imaginary facts in mental representations, the identification, comprehension, involuntary memorizing, co-textual and con-textual movement for coherence and inter- and extra-textual relationships; 21
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories Reading as a social institution, taught and studied in schools, traded on a special market, a constitutive element of culture; it reveals difference kinds of behaviour, customs, preferences of the readers; it treasures the written memory of humankind; it establishes interpretative norms in accordance with the type of text, the taste of the epoch, the evolution of the reading forms. (b) The main parameters of a reading situation are as follows: reader/reading agent the one to whom the act of writing is addressed. S/he is object to the influences of the text s/he reads, while having his/her own textual and extra-textual field; subject of the reading process, through his multiple possibilities of interpretation, and depending on his linguistic, textual, referential, situational competences; author/object of reading (the type of reader he has in mind), of his own trans-/meta-/extra-textual influences, and of his writing; purpose/motivations/intentions of reading - Reading is a pseudospeech act situation, cumulating different communication intentions: personal/ professional, informing, amusement, scientific/aesthetic, etc.; modalities of restoring the meaning of a text (mechanisms of text understanding): - literal understanding reading of the lines; - implicit understanding reading between the lines; - referential, (inter-)relational understanding reading beyond the lines, achieved through: aiming at the co-textual coherence, establishing the relationship between the text and the systems of reference and the possible worlds; identifying the authorial intention; identifying the intention of the literary work. Thus, the reader does not have complete liberty. The Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco considers the text an organism, a system of internal relations actualising some possible relations and narcotizing some others. Before a text is produced, we could invent any kind of texts; once it was produced, we can make it say a lot of things, but it is impossible/illegitimate to have it say what it actually does not. modalities of assigning new meaning(s) to a text : the reader, according to his competence, wish and ability of co-operation with the author, imposes new meanings, this way making his own contribution to the text. (c) Conventions of reading If an abstract, informed reader becomes the basis for reader-response criticism, are the responses ever likely to be empirically valid? The problem may be that individual readings are given the authority of generalities. This might be considered a right moment to remember Wimsatt and Beardsleys affective fallacy:
The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does) It begins by trying to derive the standards of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1954: 21)
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Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories This statement represents the theory of New Criticism, which dominated the middle part of the 20th century. New Criticism rejected the claims of the author and focused on the words on the page, the meaning of a text being available in the arrangements of the words of the text and not in other factors such as the readers psychology, the authors intention or the historical context: if the effect of the text on the reader is taken into account, impressionism and relativism ensue. We do not judge students simply on what they know about a given work; we presume to evaluate their skills and progress as readers, and that presumption ought to indicate our confidence in the existence of public and generalisable operations of reading it is clear that any literary criticism must assume general operations of reading: all critics must make decisions about what can be taken for granted, what must be explicitly argued for, what will count as evidence for a particular interpretation and what would count as evidence against it. Indeed, the whole notion of bringing someone to see that a particular interpretation is a good one assumes shared points of departure and common notions of how to read. In short, far from appealing to the text itself as a source of objectivity, one must assert that the notion of what the text says itself depends upon common procedures of reading (Culler 1981: 125). Jonathan Culler in this extract focuses not on the individual reader as a source of meaning, but on the reading community. Reading is a learned and interpersonal activity, and because it is so rooted in societal education there are bound to exist common procedures in the reading process. Why, then, no reading ever exhausts a text? Why there never seems to be a final reading? Although there may be common ground among readers, the range of reading groups and personalities seems too large to agree on the interpretation of a text. It is more likely that groups of readers would perform similar interpretative moves, but even those moves would be influenced by the personalities of individual readers, and also by the context in which they are performed. Similarly, readings of texts by cultures seem to change over time, and an interpretation that may have seemed definitive for one generation can be discarded by the next. A writer has a number of forces and constraints acting upon him or her. We thought it might be useful to consider whether the same elements act upon the reader. Author: language imposes its own rules and we have to conform grammatically, to be understood; tradition and genre; unspoken assumptions of the society the author is a part of; unconscious desires; class; race; gender; the process of editing and publication. Reader: language: any articulation of response is subject to the same forces and constraints as any texts; Reception. Theory and Practices 23
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories tradition and genre: we read within traditions of reading, and our assumptions are based on those traditions. Genre expectations create meaning; unspoken assumptions: they are part of the ideology we bring to a text; unconscious desires: we read what we want to read even if we do not realise that; class, race, gender: all are beyond the individuals control; the process of editing and publication: something analogous must take place in the mind between responding, articulating and formally criticising.
2.2. Open vs closed texts

The way a text is read within a culture has political significance. The history of literature is littered with cases of attacks on, and defenses of particular works that seem to threaten the dominant politics of a given time. Meaning is a political variant, and is so precisely because the literary work can never (or rarely) corrected, but only interpreted. The text itself cannot be corrected, but readings of it can. Reception theorists such as Karlheinz Stierle suggest that popular literature serves to perpetuate and produce nave readings: the reader collaborates with the text and the text collaborates with the reader in the production of a self-fulfilling illusion, without using too complex aesthetic procedures. The same Eco makes a distinction between open and closed texts , stressing the fact that the reader as an active principle of interpretation is part of the picture of the generative process of the text. His theory rests upon the assumption of what he calls the model reader. He says:
To organize a text, its author has to rely upon a series of codes that assign given contents to the expressions he uses. To make his text communicative, the author has to assume that the ensemble of codes he relies upon is the same as that shared by the possible reader. The author has thus to foresee a model of the possible reader (hereafter Model Reader) supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the expressions in the same way as the author generatively deals with them. (1979: 7)
In the process of (literary) communication, some authors do not consider the possibility of their texts being interpreted against a background of codes different from that intended by them. They have in mind an average addressee referred to a given social context, in which they intend to arouse a precise response. The interpretive path the reader is propelled along is a predetermined one. Moreover, he is not supposed to be a very performative one. Consider, for example, a Ian Flemmings James Bond kind of novel. If we are, by contrast, to think of the reader James Joyce must have had in mind when writing Ulysses, the profile of a good Ulysses reader can be extrapolated from the text itself, because the pragmatic process of interpretation is not an empirical accident independent of the text as text, but is a structural element of its generative process. Such a reader, or even better, the reader of such a text cannot be an illiterate man or someone unaware of both Homers literary work and Joyces contemporary Ireland, but the reader is strictly defined by the lexical and the syntactical organization of the text. 24 Reception. Theory and Practices
2.3. Lisible/Readable/Readerly vs Scriptible/Writable/Writerly texts

Roland Barthes, undoubtedly the most entertaining, witty and daring of the French theorists of the 1960s and 1970s, repeatedly underlined the conventionality of all forms of representation. He defines literature as a message of the signification of things and not their meaning ( by signification I refer to the process which produces the meaning and not this meaning itself). This way, Barthes stresses the process of signification. The worst sin a writer can commit is to pretend that language is a transparent medium through which the reader grasps a solid and unified truth or reality. The virtuous writer recognizes the artifice of all writing and proceeds to make play with it. Avant-garde writers allow the unconscious of language to rise to the surface: they allow the signifiers to generate meaning at will and to undermine the censorship of the signified and its repressive insistence on one meaning. What might be called Barthes poststructuralist period is best represented by his short essay The Death of the Author (1968, in Barthes 1977), in which he rejects the traditional view that the author is the origin of the text, the source of its meaning, and the only authority for interpretation. He states that the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author. This sounds like a restatement of the familiar New Critical dogma about the literary works autonomy/independence from its historical and biographical background. The New Critics believed that the unity of a text lay not in its author's intention, (remember the concept of intentional fallacy they forwarded), but in its structure, its self-contained unity, this having, nevertheless, subterranean connections with the texts author, corresponding to his intuitions of the world. Structuralism at its turn, though heavily text-centered, paved the way for the reintroduction of the reader as a site of critical interest because it focused on the systems that made meanings possible. If the text is a tissue of quotations, it is the reader who must process and ultimately realise its culture. For the structuralists the reader was less an entity than a function a semiotic, idealized site where meaning ultimately resides. And still, this reader is difficult to define or locate. Barthes wrote:
We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning, the message of the Author-God, but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture. Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher the text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, run (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better now to say writing), by refusing to assign a secret, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text),liberates what might be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refiuse God and his hypostases reason, science, law.
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(1977: 147)
The Author-God here is replaced by an intertextual reader. Barthes pronouncements have a political edge, for he sees the refusal to see meaning as both ultimate and author-centred as a refusal to accept traditional Western power structures. His essay is the locus classicus of antiauthorial statements. Barthes author is stripped of all metaphysical status and reduced to a location (a crossroad), where language, that infinite storehouse of citations, repetitions, echoes and references, crosses and recrosses. The reader is thus free to enter the text from any direction; there is no correct route What is new is the idea that readers are free to open and close the texts signifying process without respect for the signified, taking their pleasure of the text, following at will the defiles of the signifier as it slips and slides evading the grasp of the signified. This kind of text is a poststructuralist one, totally at the mercy of the readers pleasure. The French critic also uses the word jouissance in Le Plaisir du texte (1973) in contrast to plaisir to describe different kinds of reading experience (its one of his sporadic attacks on the tradition of realism). Jouissance is often translated as bliss, which suggests some of the sense of sexual pleasure that the word has in French. Such a feeling is experienced when reading texts which force the reader into some kind of creative, active participation in the act of interpretation. These difficult, thought-provoking texts Barthes calls scriptible/writable/writerly. They encourage the reader to produce meanings. On the other hand, realist texts, that make no demands on the reader, discouraging him from freely reconnecting text and the already written, and allowing the reader only to be a consumer not a producer, because of the familiarity of their conventional aspects, and their being easily read, are lisible/readable/readerly, and only provoke the less intense plaisir which is merely comforting, rather than stimulating. Barthes writes:
what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading. Whence two systems of reading: one goes straight to the articulations of the anecdote, it considers the extent of the text, ignores the play of language. If I read Jules Verne, I go fast: I lose discourse, and yet my reading is not hampered by any verbal loss. The other reading skips nothing; it weighs, it sticks to the text, it reads, so to speak, with application and transport,; it is not (logical) extension that captivates it, the winnowing out of truths, but the layering of significance; as in the childrens game of topping hands, the excitement comes not from a processive haste but from a kind of vertical din (the verticality of language and of its destruction); it is at the moment when each (different) hand skips over the next (and not one after the other) that the hole, the gap, is created and carries off the subject of the game the subject of the text. (Barthes, 1975:11-12)
There are various positions that the critic can take regarding the problem of where meaning resides: the author, the text, the reader. However, there is another approach, adopted by some reader-response theorists, in which meaning is seen as a product of the interrelationship between textual features and reader knowledge.

26 Reception. Theory and Practices
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories 1. The following statements are concerned with the power and authority of the author. With which of them do you agree? 2. The author is the sole source and arbiter of meaning. 3. The author is source of meaning only in the sense that he or she is in a privileged position of knowledge about the text. 4. The author is the source of meaning but cannot always know that meaning. 5. The author is the initial source of meaning, but meaning becomes public at the point of publication. 6. The author is a cultural construction.
2.4. Reader: Functions, Competences and Constraints

It depends on the reader if he allows the text to become a game, or himself turns into that which is attacked, challenged, fought back. Keith Green and Jill LeBihan, in Critical Theory and Practice (1996), begin their examination of the readers role by asking a set of questions that we also suggest for the students.

1. What part does the reader play in the creation and realisation of the meaning of a text? 2. What is the role of the readers own personality in the interpretation of a text? 3. If the meaning of a text is personal, is there an unlimited number of possible readings? 4. How accurate is to speak of interaction between text and reader, or between author and reader? 5. Is there a range of possible meanings which are prescribed in a culture? They are primarily concerned with the reading and interpretative processes. The intention is to look at the personal, social and cultural aspects of constructed readings of texts and at the role of the reader in the situation of meaning. The following quotations, followed by commentaries, analyze the way readers make sense of texts. W. Iser: the gaps in the text The following is an extract from Wolfgang Isers essay Interaction between Text and Reader:
Communication in literature is a process set in motion and regulated, not by a given code, but by a mutually restrictive and magnifying interaction between the explicit and the implicit, between revelation and concealment. What is concealed spurs the reader into action, but this action is also controlled by what is revealed; the explicit in its turn is transformed when the implicit has been brought to light. When the reader bridges the gaps, communication begins. The gaps function as a kind of pivot on which the whole text-reader relationship resolves.Hence, the structured blanks of the text stimulate the process of ideation to be performed by the reader on terms set by the text. There is, however, another place in the textual system where text and reader converge, and that is marked by the various types of negation which arise in the course of the reading. Blanks and negations both control the process of communication in their own different ways: the blanks leave open the connection between textual perspectives, and so spur the reader into coordinating these perspectives and patterns in other words, they induce the
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reader to perform basic operations within the text. The various types of negation invoke familiar and determinate elements or knowledge only to cancel them out. What is cancelled, however, remains in view, and thus brings about modifications in the readers attitude toward what is familiar or determinate in other words, he is guided to adopt a position in relation to the text. (Iser, 1980: 111-2)
The reading process for Iser is characterized by the response to the structures of the text and a realization or actualization of its gaps. Reading is therefore a dynamic process. It is neither predetermined by generic conventions nor open to infinite interpretation. The advantage of Isers theory is that the text is not seen as fixed and absolute, but as a fluid entity, although he does not go as far as Barthes in his assessment of the readers struggle with the text:
This I which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost). Objectivity and subjectivity are of course forces which can take over the text, but they are forces which have no affinity with it. Subjectivity is a plenary image, with which I may be thought to encumber the text, but whose deceptive plenitude is merely the wake of all the codes that constitute me, so that ultimately my subjectivity has the generality of stereotypes. (Barthes, 1974: 10)
Barthes considers the I/the reader to be a compound of other texts, even though not immediately or simply identifiable, not a uniquely experiencing individual. Therefore, the subjectivity with which he is supposed to function in relation to a text is only an image. Thus, the subject that encounters the text is not a stable, unique I, but a stereotype constituted from various other textual codes. One text is potentially capable of several different realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities (Iser, 1974: 271). The text provokes certain expectations that in turn we project onto the text in such a way as to reduce the polysemantic interpretation in keeping with the expectations aroused, thus extracting an individual, configurative meaning (Iser, idem: 279). Here, Iser talks about the text provoking responses. But how can we separate that which the text provokes from that which the readers inscribe on the text?

1. How many realizations are possible? (Iser seems to suggest an infinity because the texts full potential is made possible by an infinite number of readers.) 2. What form might they take? 3. What are the gaps Iser speaks of? H. R. Jauss: horizons of expectations Jauss, an important German exponent of reception theory (Rezeptionsthetik), gave a historical dimension to reader-oriented criticism. He tries to achieve a compromise between Russian Formalism (which ignores history), and social theories (which ignore the text). Writing within a period of social unrest at the end of the 1960s, Jauss and others wanted to question the old canon off German literature and to show that it was perfectly 28 Reception. Theory and Practices
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories reasonable to do so. He borrows from the philosophy of science (T. S. Kuhn) the term paradigm, which refers to the scientific framework of concepts and assumptions operating in a particular period. Ordinary science does its experimental work within the mental world of a particular paradigm, until a new paradigm displaces the old one and establishes new assumptions. Jauss uses the term horizon of expectations to describe the criteria readers use to judge literary texts in any given period. These criteria will help the reader decide how to judge a poem as, for example, an epic, or a tragedy or a pastoral; it will also, in a more general way, cover what is to be regarded as poetic or literary as opposed to un-poetic or non-literary uses of language. Ordinary writing and reading will work within such a horizon. For example, if we consider the English Augustan period, we might say that Alexander Popes poetry was judged according to criteria that were based upon values of clarity, naturalness and stylistic decorum. However, this does not establish once and for all the value of Popes poetry. During the second half of the 18 th century, commentators began to question his status as a poet at all, and to suggest that he was a clever versifier who put prose into rhyming couplets and lacked the imaginative power required of true poetry. Modern readings of Pope work within a changed horizon of expectations: we now value his poems for their wit, complexity, moral insight and renewal of literary tradition. The original horizon of expectations only tells us how the work was valued and interpreted when it appeared, but does not establish its meaning finally. In Jausss view it would be equally wrong to say that a work is universal, that its meaning is fixed forever and open to all readers in any period:
A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue. (Jauss, 1982: 24)
This means, obviously, that we will never be able to survey the successive horizons which flow from the time of a work down to the present day and then, with an Olympian detachment, to sum up the works final value or meaning. To do so would be to ignore our own historical situation. Whose authority should we accept? That of the first readers? The combined opinion of readers over time? The aesthetic judgment of the present? Jausss answers to these questions derive from the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, a follower of Heidegger (hermeneutics was a term originally applied to the interpretation of sacred texts). Gadamer argues that all interpretations of past literature arise from a dialogue between past and present. Our attempts to understand a work will depend on the questions that our own cultural environment allows us to raise. At the same time, we seek to discover the questions that the work itself was trying to answer in its own dialogue with history. Our present perspective always involves a relationship to the past, but at the same time the past can only be grasped through the limited perspective of the present. Put in this way, the task of establishing knowledge of the past seems hopeless. Still, a hermeneutical notion of understanding does not separate knower and object in the familiar manner of empirical science; rather it views understanding as a fusion of past and present: we cannot make our journey into the past without taking the present with us. Reception. Theory and Practices 29
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories Jauss recognizes that a writer may directly affront the prevailing expectations of his or her day. He, himself, examines the case of the French poet Baudelaire whose Les Fleurs du mal created, in the 19th century, uproar and attracted legal prosecution, by offending the norms of bourgeois morality and the canons of romantic poetry. Nevertheless, the poem also immediately produced a new aesthetic horizon of expectations.
2.5. The Subjective Perspective

The 20th century has seen a steady assault upon the objective certainties of 19th century science. Einsteins theory of relativity alone cast doubt on the belief that objective knowledge was simply a relentless and progressive accumulation of facts. The philosopher, T. S. Kuhn, has shown that what emerges as a fact in science depends upon the frame of reference which the scientific observer brings to the object of understanding. Gestalt psychology argues that the human mind does not perceive things in the world as unrelated bits and pieces but as configurations of elements, themes, or meaningful, organized wholes. Individual items look different in different contexts, and even within a single field of vision they will be interpreted according to whether they are seen as figure or ground. These approaches and others have insisted that the perceiver is active and not passive in the act of perception. In the case of the famous duck-rabbit puzzle, only the perceiver can decide how to orient the configuration of lines. Is it a duck looking left, or a rabbit looking right? How does this modern emphasis on the observers active role affect literary theory? Consider once more Roman Jakobsons model of linguistic communication: WRITER CONTEXT WRITING CODE READER
The Russian Formalist, the same as the representatives of the American New Criticism (John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, M. C. Beardsley) and its British counterpart, Practical Criticism (I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis), believed that literary discourse is different from other kinds of discourse by having a set to the message, something to say: a poem is about itself (its form, its imagery, its literary meaning) before it is about the poet, the reader or the world. The two essays The Intentional Fallacy (1946) and the The Affective Fallacy (1949) written by Wimsatt in collaboration with Beardsley, engage with the addresser/writer message/text addressee/reader in the pursuit of an objective criticism which abjures both the personal input of the writer (intention) and the emotional effect on the reader (affect) in order purely to study the words on the page and how the artifact works. However, if we reject this formalist perspective and adopt that of the reader or audience, the whole orientation of Jakobsons diagram changes. From this angle, we can say that the poem has no real existence until it is read; its meaning can only be discussed by its readers. We differ about interpretations only because our ways of reading differ. It is the reader who applies the code in which the message is written and in this way actualises what would otherwise remain only potentially meaningful. The success of this piece of communication depends on the viewers knowledge of the code , 30 Reception. Theory and Practices
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories and the viewers ability to complete what is incomplete , or select what is significant and ignore what is not. Seen in this way the addressee is not a passive recipient of an entirely formulated meaning, but an active agent in the making of meaning. His task is made more difficult if the message is not stated within a completely closed system. The question of meaning can also be addressed by a range of questions that have bothered theorists of language (the literary one included) for a very long time.

Where is meaning? Is it in the authors intentions, in the text, or in the reading? - If it is in the text, is it in the text now, or in the text as a historical, culturally situated document, so that to fully understand the meaning we might best understand the cultural and aesthetic codes and the traditions and the meanings of the particular time of writing? - If it is in the authors intentions, is that in the conscious, or the unconscious intentions? In the intentions before or after the writing, or somewhere in between? Can, in this case, the text have meanings of which the author was not aware? - If the meaning is in the reading, is that an informed reading, or any reading, and what difference does that distinction really signal? Is it in an ideal non-historical reading, or in a historically and culturally placed reading?
2.6. The Nature of Meaning

All literary theories have to account for meaning, whether as that which is communicated directly from author to reader (I. A. Richards), or that which is inherent in the words of a text (New Critics), or that which arises from its structure (structuralism). The approaches considered in this chapter make a special study of the problems that arise when we extract meaning from a text through the process of reading and attempt to validate that meaning as correct. Not all meaning is, however, immediately and unambiguously accessible; this fact has long justified the existence of interpreters and theories of interpretation. Any theory of interpretation has to come to grips with a divergence of views as to its scope: a divergence which is connected to the more general philosophical debate between objectivism and relativism, that is, between the conviction that there is some permanent a-historical matrix or framework to which we can ultimately appeal in determining the nature of rationality, knowledge, truth, reality, goodness or rightness, and the opposing view that there is no such matrix, and that we are irredeemably caught in a jungle of mutually exclusive values and conceptual schemes, none of which can prove its correctness against any other (Bernstein 1984). Any account of interpretation and of reading presupposes a number of assumptions about the nature of meaning, understanding and communication, and this gives rise to a recurring set of problems. Meaning can be conceived of either as that which arises from the words and propositions of the text, constituting its semantic autonomy, or as that which the author or reader as subject means . Reception. Theory and Practices 31
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories The objective fact of the text is considered against the subjective act of intending or making sense (Ricoeur 1976: 12-14). The specific form in which this alternative exists in literary studies is the objectivist/subjectivist debate, the former position arguing that there is one correct meaning inhering in any text, the latter that there are as many meanings as there are readers. These two positions correspond to the logicist and historicist accounts of meaning: - the former argues that meaning is an ideal object which can be identified and reidentified by different individuals at different times, - the latter claims that meaning is an historical event determined by the context in which it occurred and possibly also by the historical situation of its interpreter. Moreover, in dealing with our experience of literary texts, we encounter the question of reference: the fictional nature of literary texts causes them to lose the guarantee of reality as touchstone, and makes the process of legitimizing an interpretation all the more difficult (see Text and reality above). Such assumptions, and such problems, lead on to even vaster philosophical and linguistic questions about the nature of meaning, its relationship to history, and the relationship of semantics to pragmatics (the study of those features of language whose meaning depends on time, person or place), of experience to knowledge, of particulars to universals. The apparently simple question: how far does a text determine its own meaning, and how far is that meaning determined by a reader? is thus anything but simple. Theorists of interpretation, approaching these issues with different methods and starting from different premises, are drawn into wider philosophical, psychological and linguistic debates. At this point in our study, we thought it might be of some interest to have a broader perspective and skim through the positions of the most representative 20th century critical theories concerning the already formulated question of whether or not the text itself triggers the readers interpretation, or whether the readers own interpretive strategies impose solutions upon the problems thrown up by the text.
2.7. Reader-Response Criticism

These are general positions within the understanding that the meaning of a text is what happens when the reader reads it. The positions presuppose various attitudes towards such considerations as: the question of in what sense a text, ink-marks on a page or electrons on a screen, exist, the extent to which knowledge is objective or subjective, the question of whether the world as we experience it is culturally constructed or has an essential existence; how the gap, historically, culturally and semiotically (as reading is a decoding of signs which have varying meanings) between the reader and the writer is bridged, and the extent to which it is bridged, the question of the extent to which interpretation is a public act, conditioned by the particular material and cultural circumstances of the reader, vs. the extent to which reading is a private act governed by a response to the relatively independent codes of the text, Reception. Theory and Practices
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Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories the question of what the process of reading is like, what it entails, and so forth.
The Psychoanalytic view: The reader responds to the core fantasies and the symbolic groundwork of the text in a highly personal way; while the text contributes material for inner realization which can be shared across consciousnesses (as we share fundamental paradigms, symbols, etc), the real meaning of the text is the meaning created by the individual's psyche in response to the work, at the unconscious level and at a subsequent conscious level, as the material provided by the text opens a path between the two, occasioning richer selfknowledge and realization. The Hermeneutic view: The text means differently because the reader decodes it according to his world-view, his horizons, yet having the understanding that the text may be operating within a different horizon; hence there is an interaction between the world of the text as it was constructed and the world of the reader. The reader can only approach the text with his own foreunderstanding, which is grounded in history. However, as the text is similarly grounded in history, and as often there is much in the histories that is shared as well as what is not, there is both identity and strangeness. The Phenomenological view: The text functions as a set of instructions for its own processing, but it is as well indeterminate, needs to be completed, to be concretized. The reality of the text lies between the reader and the text: it is the result of the dialectic between work and reader. The Structuralist view: Decoding the text requires various levels of competence - competence in how texts work, in the genre and tradition of the text, etc., as the work is constructed according to sets of conventions which have their basis in an objective, socially shared reality. The meaning then depends largely on the competence of the reader in responding to the structures and practices of the text and which operate implicitly (i.e. they affect us without our knowing it); the competent reader can make these explicit. The Political or ideological view: Texts include statements, assumptions, attitudes, which are intrinsically ideological, i.e. express attitudes towards and beliefs about certain sets of social and political realities, relations, values and powers. As a text is produced in a certain social and material milieu, it cannot not have embedded ideological assumptions. The reader himself will have ideological convictions and understandings as well, often unrecognized, as is the nature of ideology, which understandings will condition and direct the reading and the application of the reading. A critical reading will demystify the ideologies of the text within the frame of the ideologies of the reader. Without such a critical reading, the text may reinforce (potentially pernicious, even if only because unrecognized) aspects of the readers (culturally produced) ideology, and/or the reader may miss Reception. Theory and Practices 33
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories meanings and connections for want of an understanding of the ideological structure of the text. The Post-structuralist view(s): Meaning is indeterminate, it is not in the text but in the play of language and the nuances of conventions in which the reader is immersed: hence the reader constructs a text as he participates in this play, driven by the instabilities and meaning potentials of the semantic and rhetorical aspects of the text. Stanley Fishs view here is that the reader belongs to an interpretive community which will have taught the reader to see a certain set of forms, topics and so forth; his is one view which refers to the world of discourse of the reader as being the determining factor. Tony Bennett, from a more Marxist position, sees readers as belonging to 'reading formations'. In various sorts of post-structuralist reading the reading process may involve the readers countering and/or re-interpreting prevailing views, depending on various things, including: the force of the direction of the text to the reader; the potential reconceptualization, freeing-up of meaning the text can effect; the openness to the play of language and meaning of the reader. The text may deconstruct itself, i.e. the reader may experience or see that the language of the text implicitly undermines its own assumptions -the real agent here as in all post-structuralist positions being the reader, open to polysemy (multiple meanings and the sliding and interplay of signs) - in her own (socially shared) world of discourse, in a world discursively and socially constructed. Below, we elaborated on some particular postions inside these main directions of approach: Phenomenology: Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer One important basis for many theories of reading is the philosophy of phenomenology. A modern philosophical tendency that stresses the perceivers central role in determining meaning is known as phenomenology. According to Edmund Husserl the proper object of philosophical investigation is the contents of our consciousness and not objects in the world. Consciousness is always of something, and it is the something that appears to our consciousness which is truly real to us. In addition, argued Husserl, we discover in the things which appear in consciousness (phenomena in Greek, meaning things appearing) their universal and essential qualities. Phenomenology claims to show us the underlying nature both of human consciousness and of phenomena. This was an attempt to revive the idea that the individual human mind is the centre and origin of all meaning. In literary theory this approach did not encourage a purely subjective concern for the critics mental structure but a type of criticism which tries to enter into the world of a writers works and to arrive at an understanding of the underlying nature or essence of the writings as they appear to the critics consciousness. The early work of J. H. Miller, the American (later deconstructionist) critic, was influenced by the phenomenological theories of the so-called Geneva School of critics, who included Georges Poulet and Jean Starobinski. For example, Millers first study of Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1970), uncovers the novels pervasive mental 34 Reception. Theory and Practices
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories structures, namely distance and desire. The act of interpretation is possible, because the texts allow the readers access to the authors consciousness, which, says Poulet, is open to me, lets me look deep inside itself, andallows meto think what it thinks and feel what it feels. The shift towards a reader-oriented theory is prefigured in the rejection of Husserls objective view by its pupil Martin Heidegger, who argued that what is distinctive about human existence is its Dasein (givenness): our consciousness both projects the things of the world and at the same time is subjected to the world by the very nature of existence in the world. We find ourselves flung down into the world, into a time and place we did not choose, but simultaneously it is our world in so far as our consciousness projects it. We can never adopt an attitude of detached contemplation, looking down upon thee world as if from a mountain top. We are inevitably merged with the very object of our consciousness. Our thinking is always in a situation and is therefore always historical, although this history is not external and social but personal and inward. It was Hans-Georg Gadamer who, in Truth and Method (1975), applied Heideggers situational approach to literary theory. He argued that a literary work does not pop into the world as a finished and neatly parcelled bundle of meaning; rather meaning depends on the historical situation of the interpreter. Gadamer influenced to a large extent reception theory. Gerald Prince: the narratee A quite natural question has been posed by the narratologist Gerald Prince: why, when we study novels, do we take such pains to identify and discriminate between the various kinds of narrators (omniscient, unreliable, implied author, etc.), but we never ask questions about the person to whom the narrator addresses the discourse. But the question has been asked long before the 20 th century. In his essay, Of the Standard of Taste (1741), Hume describes an ideal reader, who attempts to forget his individual being and peculiar circumstance and consider himself as a man in general in order to rid himself of the distortions of prejudice. Reader-Response Criticism argues that all texts construct, by implication, an imagined reader of which Humes ideal is only one possibility. Other similar terms are super-reader, informed reader and encoded reader. This person Prince calls the narratee. We know a competent reader is not supposed to mistake the author for the narrator; neither should he confuse the narratee with the reader. The narrator may specify a narratee in terms of sex (Dear Madam), class (gentlemen), situation (the reader in his armchair), race (white), or age (mature). Evidently actual readers may or may not coincide with the person addressed by the narrator. An actual reader may be black, male, young factory-worker reading in bed. The narratee is also distinguished from the virtual reader (the sort of reader whom the author has in mind when developing the narrative) and the ideal reader (the perfectly insightful reader who understands the writers every move). How do we learn to identify narratees? There are many signals, direct or indirect, which contribute to our knowledge of the narratee. In every text, a variety of features will point towards the kind of reader for which it is intended. These include the tone, assumptions about what a reader will and will not know, difficulty or simplicity of argument, the diction, jargon, allusions, Reception. Theory and Practices 35
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories irony, and so on. Very complex and difficult texts construct or imply (or require) readers with a high degree of literary competence, as well as intelligence, patience and perseverance, to the point where reading is an imaginative process not dissimilar to the creative act itself. The assumptions of the narratee may be attacked, supported, queried, or solicited by the narrator who will thereby strongly imply the narratees character. When the narrator apologizes for certain inadequacies in the discourse (I cannot convey this experience in words), this indirectly tells us something of the narratees susceptibilities and values. Even in a novel which appears to make no direct reference to a narratee we can pick up tiny signals. The second term of a comparison, for example, often indicates the kind of world familiar to him (the song was as sincere as a TV jingle). Sometimes the narratee is an important character. For example, in A Thousand and One Nights the very survival of the narrator, Scheherazade, depends on the continued attention of the narratee, the caliph; if he loses interest in her stories, she must die. Princes elaborated theory highlights a dimension of narration that had been only intuitively understood by readers: he draws the reader-oriented theorists attention to ways in which narratives produce their own readers or listeners, who may or may not coincide with actual readers. However, many writers ignore this distinction between (actual) reader and narratee. Stanley Fish: the readers experience An American critic of 17th century literature, Stanley Fish developed a readeroriented perspective called an affective stylistics. Like Iser, he concentrates on the adjustments of expectation to be made by readers as they pass along the text, but considers this at the immediately local level of the sentence. He separates his approach from that of all kinds of formalism by denying literary language any special status; we use the same reading strategies to interpret literary and non-literary sentences. His attention is directed to the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words of sentences as they succeed one another in time. For example, he gives special attention to the following sentence by Walter Pater: This at least of flame-like, our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways. He points out that by interrupting concurrence of forces with renewed from moment to moment, Pater prevents the reader from establishing a definite or stable image in the mind, and at each stage in the sentence forces the reader to make an adjustment in expectation and interpretation. The idea of the concurrence is disrupted by parting, but then sooner or later leaves the parting temporally uncertain. The readers expectation of meaning is thus continuously adjusted: the meaning is the total movement of reading. Jonathan Culler has lent general support to Fishs aims, but criticized him for failing to give a proper theoretical formulation of his reader criticism. Fish believes that his readings of sentences simply follow the natural practice of informed readers. In his view, a reader is someone who possesses a linguistic competence, has internalized the syntactic and semantic knowledge required for reading. The informed reader of literary texts has also acquired a specifically literary competence, i.e. knowledge of literary conventions. Culler criticizes Fish for two reasons: he fails to theorize the conventions of reading: that is, he fails to ask the question What conventions do readers follow when they read? His claim to read sentences word by 36 Reception. Theory and Practices
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories word in a temporal sequence is misleading: there is no reason to believe that readers actually do take in sentences in such a piecemeal and gradual way. There is something fictitious about Fishs continual willingness to be surprised by the next word in a sequence. In order to sustain his reader orientation, Fish has to suppress the fact that the actual experience of reading is not the same thing as a verbal rendering of that experience. By treating his own reading experience as itself an act of interpretation, he is ignoring the gap between experience and the understanding of an experience. Therefore, it may be said that what Fish gives us is not a definitive account of the nature of reading but his understanding of his own reading experience. In Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), Stanley Fish justifies the fact that his earlier work treated his own experience of reading as the norm, and goes on to justify this position by introducing the idea of interpretative communities. Of course, there may be many different groups of readers who adopt particular kinds of reading strategies, but, as he argues, the strategies of a particular interpretative community determine the entire process of reading the stylistic facts of the texts and the experience of reading them. This way, by accepting the category of interpretative communities, Fish asks us to reduce the whole process of meaning-production to the already existing conventions of the interpretative community, and, in the same time, seems to abandon all possibility of deviant interpretation or resistances to the norms that govern acts of interpretation. Reader psychology Two American critics have derived approaches to reader theory from psychology. Norman Holland adopts a specific theoryego-psychologyaccording to which every child receives the imprint of a primary identity from its mother. The adult has an identity theme that, like a musical theme, is capable of variation but remains a central structure of stable identity. When we read a text, we process it in accordance with our identity theme: we use the literary work to symbolize and finally replicate ourselves. In other words, we recast the work to discover our own characteristic strategies for coping with the deep fears and wishes that shape our psychic lives. The readers inbuilt defense mechanisms must be placated to allow access to the text. A dramatic example is a case cited by Holland of a boy compulsively driven to read detective stories to satisfy his aggressive feelings towards his mother by allying himself with the murderer. The stories not only took the imprint of his desires but also allowed him to assuage his guilt by associating himself with the victim and also the detective. In this way the boy was able to gratify his instincts and set up defenses against anxiety and guilt. The example raises a number of questions about Holland theory. In more typical instances, readers assert control over texts by discovering unifying themes and structures in them that enable the readers to internalize the text: Putting within yourself and so controlling something that is outside where it cannot be controlled but seeks to control you. Holland emphasizes the interplay between the readers identity theme and the texts unity: the latter is discovered by the reader as an expression of his or her identity theme. David Bleichs Subjective Criticism (1978) is a sophisticated argument in favour of a shift from an objective to a subjective paradigm in critical theory. He argues that modern philosophers of science (especially T. S. Kuhn) have correctly denied the existence of an objective world of facts. Even in science, Reception. Theory and Practices 37
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories the perceivers mental structures will decide what counts as an objective fact: Knowledge is made by people and not found [because] the object of observation appears changed by the act of observation. He goes on to insist that the advances of knowledge are determined by the needs of the community. When we say that science has replaced superstition, we are describing not a passage from darkness to light, but a change in paradigm which occurs when certain urgent needs of the community come into conflict with old beliefs and demand new beliefs. The childs acquisition of language, argues Bleich, enables it to establish a subjective control of experience. We can understand anothers words only as a motivated act. Every utterance indicates an intention and every act of interpreting an utterance is a conferring of meaning. Since this is true of all human attempts to explain experience, we can best understand the arts if we ask: what are the motives of those who create symbolic renderings of experience? what are the individual and communal occasions for their response and creativity? Subjective criticism is based on the assumption that each persons most urgent motivations are to understand themselves. In his classroom experiments, Bleich was led to distinguish between: the readers spontaneous response to a text and the meaning the reader attributed to it. The latter is usually presented as an objective interpretation (something offered for negotiation in a pedagogic situation), but is necessarily developed from the subjective response of the reader. Whatever system of thought is being employed (moralist, Marxist, structuralist, psychoanalytic, etc.), interpretation of particular texts will normally reflect the subjective individuality of a personal response. The final judgment of meaning has an objective appearance but is evidently built upon the initial response. One possible conclusion might be that the two Americans regard reading as a process that satisfies or at least depends upon the psychological needs of the reader. Whatever one thinks of these reader-oriented theories, there is no doubt that they seriously challenge the predominance of the text-oriented theories of New Criticism and Formalism. We can no longer talk about the meaning of a text without considering the readers contribution to it.
2.8. A Postscript.
This chapter, obviously the most consistent one of this course, has concentrated on the READER-TEXT relationship and on the problems of interpretation for reader and critic. Since the mid-1970s, these approaches have tended to be swallowed up by a generalized reader-response criticism. Stanley Fish notes:
The reader in literature is regularly the subject of forums and workshops at the convention of the Modern Language Association; any list of currently active schools of literary criticism includes the school of reader-response,.None of this means that a reader-centered criticism is now invulnerable to challenge or attack, merely that it is now recognized as a competing literary strategy which cannot be dismissed simply by being named. (Fish 1980: 344)
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Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories As one could have already noticed by now, the list of the different perspectives from which the reader/receiver of the literary text is approached, is a very eclectic one: this area of criticism threatens to engulf all the approaches usually described in any survey of modern literary theory. What unites these otherwise incompatible contributors is their interest in such questions as those below, that we also suggest to our students.

what is the reader doing? what is being done to him? and to what end? is reading an act, structured like a pseudo-conversation with the text? is the reader a set of suprapersonal codes? Or a set of symptoms? Or the locus of literary competence? what frames of reference are brought by the reader to the text?
It has always been seen perfectly reasonable for a practicing interpreter (either as reader or as critic) to enquire into the activity in which he or she is engaged. In the case of literature, this has led critics at certain times to stress the separateness and the objective nature of literary texts as did the Formalists and the New Critics; at other times (and certainly since the rise of post-structuralism), this division between literature and other forms of written expression has been called into question, and the role of the historically and culturally situated reader in constituting the meaning of texts has been highlighted. Reader-response criticism has been seen as a consequence of this desire to re-politicize literature and literary criticism. In the present state of the art, the questions asked by phenomenology, hermeneutics and reception theory (if not the answers provided) seem assured of a place in the deliberations of theorists and critics, even if the first two of these approaches do more to justify and describe the process of reading and interpretation than to provide models for critical practice.
Questions and tasks for the student: 1. What do you know on the objectivist/vs/subjectivist debate on the nature of meaning? 2. List the main positions within the understanding that the meaning of a text is what happens when the reader reads it. 3. What distinguishes what Umberto Eco called open texts from closed texts? 4. What does Roland Barthes claim in his famous essay The Death of the Author? 5. What are Isers gaps? 6. What does Jauss understand by readers horizons of expectations? 7. How has the philosophy of phenomenology influenced interpretative theories? 8. Who is Gerald Princes narratee? 9. Readers experience or literary competence? 10. Extend upon the Norman Holland and David Bleichs psychological approach to literature. Reception. Theory and Practices 39
Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories 11. Draw, if possible, your own conclusion with reference to the authority of the author and the role of the reader in a 3000 word essay.
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Glossary of Literary Terms

Affective criticism Affect is a psychological term denoting feeling or emotion attached to an idea. Affective criticism examines literature in terms of the feelings it evokes in the reader, a procedure denounced by the New Critics as liable to be distorted by personal subjectivity (see Affective fallacy).Reader-Response criticism has renewed interest in the affective quality of literature. Close examination of the process of reading as a changing and dynamic experience has shown how the constant modification and manipulation of feeling plays a significant part in the experience of the text. Affective fallacy The title of an essay by the American critics W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, printed in Wimsatts The Verbal Icon (1954). They argue that judging a poem by its effects or emotional impact on the reader is a fallacious method of criticism, resulting only in impressionistic criticism. See also Criticism, Intentional fallacy, New Criticism. Author In the New Criticism it was considered wrong to examine a work in the light of the authors intentions or biography, because the text was supposed to be autonomous. The concept and significance of authorship has been put under attack by French critics like Roland Barthes, in his essay The Death of the Author (1968), and Michel Foucault in What is an Author?(1969). The first argues that the critics obsession with authorship is a way of falsely pining down the meaning of a text and refusing to contemplate it as an infinite tissue of signs. The second places authorship in a historical context to show that the concept is culturally determined, and that different societies at different times have not perceived books necessarily as the original creations of gifted individuals. Those critics who object to a hierarchy of discourses in a text point out that the concept of author relates to the idea of authority. In the view of Deconstructive criticism, to think of the author as a kind of absolute and specially privileged creator of meaning is a falsification of the nature of language: as meaning is constructed by the readers (not the writer), no final meaning is available for any text. To view literary works as mysterious creations of god-like beings, in the view of marxist critics, tends to be a way of ignoring the social and political contexts in which writing is produced. Carnivalisation A literary phenomenon described by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, especially in his work Rabelais and His World (1965). According to him some writers use their works as an outlet for the spirit of carnival, of popular festivity and misrule. They subvert the literary culture of the ruling classes, undermining its claim to moral monopoly. Such forms and genres are open and dialogic. They allow multiple points of view to co-exist (rather than working through a single dominating, monologic voice), and are valued for their availability to plural interpretations. Closure The impression of completeness finality achieved by the ending of some literary works, or parts of literary works: and they all lived happily ever after. During the latter half of the twentieth century critics have tended to prefer open texts, which defy closure and refuse to leave the reader comfortably satisfied; and, by an extension of this predilection, it is argued that criticism itself should avoid closure, leaving the text available to multiple interpretations, and refuse to offer conclusive judgments. See also Readable. Code Structuralism and Semiotics have demonstrated that meaning is inherent in systems of signs shared by a group. These systems operate according to rules and conventions; however familiar the signs, the underlying rules that govern the system may be invisible to their users. In this respect, languages are like codes that require deciphering. Literature also functions according to rules, some obvious, some invisible, that operate between writer and reader, and the critics task may be to explain or catalogue these rules, and decipher literature as if it was a code.
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Competence Knowledge of language is competence: performance is its use. These terms were invented by the linguistic philosopher Noam Chomsky. They echo and extend the fundamental distinction between langue and parole enunciated by Saussure. Critical theorists have borrowed Chomskys terms to suggest that readers must possess literary competence in order to understand the conventions of a narrative or poem. Criticism The interpretation, analysis, classification, and ultimately judgment of works of literature, which has become a kind of literary genre itself. A broad division can be made between practical criticism, which focuses on the examination of individual texts, and theoretical criticism, which discusses the nature of literature, and the relationship between literature, the critic and society. A similar distinction also exists between descriptive criticism, which attempts to describe literature as it is (without reference to any over-riding linguistic, literary or social theory, and without trying to evaluate), and prescriptive criticism, which (sometimes unconsciously) argues how literature ought to be. The aims and conventions of literary criticism, like literature itself, have changed constantly through the ages, and there are many different types of literary approach. In an essay on the Orientation of Critical Theories, the opening chapter of The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), the contemporary critic M. H. Abrams explores the diversity of critical approach via a simple diagram of the elements involved: UNIVERSE WORK ARTIST AUDIENCE Abrams explains that theories of art can be defined according to the way in which they tend to concentrate on any of the three variables at the corners of the triangle, the universe, the artist or the audience. Thus, a mimetic theory of art sees the work of art as reflecting the universe like a mirror: Aristotle, who defined art as imitation in his Poetics (fourth century BC), is the prime example. a pragmatic theory of art sees the work as a means to an end, to teach or instruct: the focus is changed to the works effect on an audience. expressive theories centre on the artist (nearly all Romantic and nineteenth century criticism generally regards art as primarily concerned with expressing the poets feelings, imagination, and personality. It tends to judge the work by its sincerity or the extent to which it has successfully revealed the author's state of mind). The New Criticism of the twentieth century, and many of the other critical theories which followed it, dominated the study of literature in universities and schools until the 1980s. This may be termed objective criticism, which focuses chiefly on the text, the work of art itself, and attempts to regard it as standing free from the poet, the audience and the world. From about 1950 till 1980 criticism tended to mean practical criticism. Since the 1970s traditional understanding of the relationships between universe, writer, audience and text has been put into turmoil by the approaches to language known as structuralism and deconstruction, which place in doubt any simple mimetic notion of language itself, and therefore literature; the security that words have meaning because they directly symbolise the things contained in the world outside (the universe) has been attacked. Language has come to be seen as a framework creating truth and reality, rather than simply describing things. The consequences of these ideas for literature and criticism have been wide-ranging. One result has been the proliferation of LITERARY THEORY as a subject for study in its own right, usually concentrating on the theory of criticism rather than literature itself. Another has been the shift away from the internal mechanisms of texts themselves in order to show them in the context of society and politics, possibly by adopting Marxist or feminist critical perspectives. Both these approaches have attacked the concept of the cannon, the idea that literature should be composed of a collection of special and highly valued texts. The specific disciplines of narratology and reader-response criticism have also grown out of the ferment caused by structuralism. Deconstruction, deconstructive criticism A blanket title for certain radical critical theories that revise and develop the tenets of structuralist criticism. Many of the ideas of deconstruction originate in three books by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, all of which were published in France in 1967 and have been translated in English with the following titles: Speech and Phenomena (1973), Of
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Grammatology (1976), Writing and Difference (1978). Derrida believes that all notions of the existence of an absolute meaning in language (a transcendental signified) are wrong. He argues that even in speech, the idea that the speaker might fully possess the significance of the spoken words, if only for a moment, is unproven and a false assumption. Yet this assumption about speech and writing (where there is not even the consciousness of the speaker to validate meaning) has dominated Western thought, and it should be the aim of the philosopher and critic to deconstruct the philosophy and literature of the past to show this false assumption and reveal the essential paradox at the heart of language. As in structuralist analysis, Derrida sees any individual statement as depending for its meaning on its relationship with its surrounding system of language: it can only derive its meaning by its difference (which he spells difference, which results in more than just ambiguity, which still deals with fixed, if various meanings. The dispersal of meaning, called dissemination, leads to the free play of interpretations) from all the other possible meanings, unlimited in number. No more than the illusory effect of meaning is possible in contact with these unlimited different possible readings : meaning does not reside in the signifier. Interpretation of meaning is then an endless movement that can never arrive at an absolute, ultimate signified. Thus the play of signification is endless (playful was a favourite approving word for criticism in the 1980s). To deconstruct a text is merely to show how texts deconstruct themselves because of this fundamental indeterminateness at the core of language. Deconstruction attacks the very basis of Western scholarship and thought. Derrida's ideas have been taken up, developed and fiercely attacked, especially in America. British criticism, with its strong educational, pragmatic emphasis, is content to re-work and explain ideas that originated in France and the USA. The word deconstruction is now often used merely to refer to the revelation of partially hidden meanings in a text, especially those that illuminate aspects of its relationship with its social and political context, as is common in Marxist criticism. In its weakest use, to deconstruct may mean no more than to reveal the way meaning in any kind of text is a construction by the writer or the reader, open to dissection by the critic, who also has to construct meaning ; it has become another word for analyze or interpret. Dialogic Texts that allow the expression of a variety of points of view leaving the reader with open questions are dialogic. The opposite kind of text is monologic, dominated by a single way of perceiving things, usually presumed to be the authors. It was a vogue word in the 1980s, borrowed from the writings of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Epistemology The philosophical theory of knowledge, how it is acquired and of what it consists. It was a central concern of 18th century empiricism. In the early 19 th century, one aspect of romanticism was a turning away from the notion that writers should aspire towards expressing universal truths. Instead, individual experience and feeling came to be seen as the proper source of knowledge. Hermeneutics (Gk. science of interpretation) Originally a word applied to interpretation of the Bible ; now applied generally to the theory of how, to what extent and by what principles and procedures we can interpret literary or any texts. The New Criticism stressed the impossibility of examining a work by reference to its writers intention (the intentional fallacy), and the modern critical theories of structuralism and deconstruction equally deny the possibility of discovering a determinate reading of a text. By contrast, reception theory analyses the conditions that control textual interpretation. Horizon of expectations A term from reception theory to describe the background network of ideas, attitudes and conventions possessed by readers, and through which they perceive the object of their studies. As such a horizon is constantly changing, readers of different eras cannot avoid interpreting works in radically different ways. Ideology (Gk. discourse about or study of ideas) The collection of ideas, opinions, values, beliefs and preconceptions which go to make up the mind-set of a group of people, that is, the intellectual framework through which they view everything, and which colours all their attitudes and feelings (especially, perhaps, assumptions about power and authority). What we take to be reality is controlled by the ideologies of the era in which we live.
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Implied author Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) defines the way in which every narrative creates a sense of a particular kind of author, which the reader infers from hints and statements in the text. This second self is not the same as the author, but a product of a particular work: it may be quite different in different works by the same author. No novelist can escape this. Even the novel in which no narrator is dramatized creates an implicit picture of an author, who stands behind the scenes, whether as stage manager, as puppeteer, or as an indifferent God, silently paring his fingernails. When a novelist dramatizes him or herself as the narrator, this is still not the same as the implied author, who is the presumed arbiter of all the choices that make up the work, the mouthpiece being just one of those options. Implied reader In his essay Of the Standard of Taste (1741), Hume describes an ideal reader, who attempts to forget his individual being and peculiar circumstance and consider himself as a man in general in order to rid himself of the distortions of prejudice. Reader-response criticism argues that all texts construct by implication an imagined reader of which Humes ideal is only one possibility. Other similar terms are super-reader, informed reader and encoded reader. In every text a variety of features will point towards the kind of reader for which it is intended. These include the tone, assumptions about what a reader will and will not know, difficulty or simplicity of argument, the diction, jargon, allusions, irony, and so on. Very complex and difficult texts construct or imply (or require) readers with a high degree of literary competence, as well as intelligence, patience and perseverance, to the point where reading is an imaginative process not dissimilar to the creative act itself. Impressionistic criticism Criticism that concentrates on the critics personal response to a work and attempts to reproduce these feelings in words, rather than to examine a literary work in the light of some theory of literature. Much of the criticism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was impressionistic. The New Criticism and Practical Criticism sought to bring a more exact rigour into the evaluation of response. Intentional fallacy The American New Critics W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley introduced this term for what they regarded as the mistaken critical method of judging a literary work according to the authors intentions, whether stated or implied. They argued that the value and meaning of each literary work resides solely in the text itself, and any examination of presumed intention is merely irrelevant, distracting the critic towards the writers psychology or biography, rather than focusing on the use of language, imagery, tensions, and so on, within the freestanding literary artifice (The Verbal Icon, 1954). Interpretation It is the act of explaining the meaning and effects of a literary text. Ostensibly, one of the traditional aims of studying literature (or made so after literary history and textual scholarship were ousted by the New Criticism in Britain and the USA). Interpretation is now a vexed issue. Writers in the 20th century have often resented paraphrase, and argued that the meaning of a particular work cannot be expressed with any exactness in any way other than its own unique combination of form and content in words. Interpretation, in so far as it arrives at no more than boiled down meanings, may seem to deprive the artwork of mystery and energy, and the desire to defy this loss lies behind movements in the arts from DADA onwards. The worldwide professionalisation of literature teaching has lead to incessant interpretative acts being conducted on an ever-widening body of texts. Since the early 1970s the possibility of interpretation has been attacked in literary and linguistic theories (structuralism and deconstruction), which argue that meaning is not ultimately inherent in language, and that texts are, in a philosophical sense, unknowable. Intersubjective A word sometimes used in the attempt to solve the problem of subjectivity versus objectivity of interpretation: objectivity may be a human impossibility, in so far as we can only ever approach a text with our judgment coloured by unique personal experience. However, a group of people sharing the same cultural background are very likely to agree about the interpretation or judgment of a text. They will arrive at a shared response that may
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not be objective, but will however be intersubjective, thereby escaping the lonely prison of self by pooling their subjectivities. Intertextuality Structuralism argues that a text is a system in which language does not refer to reality but only to itself and the patterns created within the text. Literature as a whole is also perceived as a self-referential system or structure. Intertextuality is a term invented by the French critic Julia Kristeva to refer to the many and various kinds of relationship that exist between texts, such as adaptation, translation, imitation, allusion, plagiarism and parody. Jouissance A word used by the French critic Roland Barthes in Le Plaisir du texte (1973) in contrast to plaisir to describe different kinds of reading experience (its one of his sporadic attacks on the tradition of realism). Jouissance is often translated as bliss, which suggests some of the sense of sexual pleasure that the word has in French. Such a feeling is experienced when reading texts which force the reader into some kind of creative, active participation in the act of interpretation. These difficult, thought-provoking texts Barthes calls scriptible/writable/writerly. On the other hand, realist texts, that make no demands on the reader, because of the familiarity of their conventional aspects, texts that can be read easily are lisible/readable/readerly, and only provoke the less intense plaisir which is merely comforting, rather than stimulating. Feminists use the word to designate and celebrate the joy of being female. Literariness According to the theories of Russian Formalism literary texts are distinguished from nonliterary texts by a variety of special linguistic devices and features, most of them deviations from ordinary usage, which result in defamiliarization (making strange - the capacity of some kinds of writing to strip away familiarity from the world about us, so that we see things anew. Departures from linguistic norms lead to the foregrounding of unusual features, which is common in literary language.). The object of criticism is not literature itself, but literariness, and its purpose is the description and definition of all those features that make a text literary rather than non-literary. Literary theory To elaborate a theory of literature is to seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature, purpose and value of literature, and how answers to these questions can be ascertained. As a special branch of literary critical discussion, literary theory has been intellectually fashionable and a source of vigorous dispute in European and American universities, especially from the 1970s onwards. By 1990, literary theory had been institutionalized, now being taught as an academic subject in its own right. Some teachers of theory argue that it is impossible to read a text without a theoretical standpoint, a counterargument being that no literary theory can be properly examined and discussed without some prior knowledge of texts. In the twentieth century certain critical movements have tended towards the current emphasis on theory: the Russian formalists (formulating views of literary language that led away from the study of individual texts to defining literariness), structuralists (also shifting interest away from individual texts on to the relationship between language and the world of things and the conditions by which meaning is understood or created), marxists (interested in politics and sociology, theorising about literature as a social institution, and its relationships with non-literary forms of artistic expression, and with the structures of power prevailing in society). Logocentrism Logos in Christianity is equated with God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, and has a special force as a centre and origin of religious belief (St. Johns gospel begins with: In the beginning was the Word). The philosophy of language called deconstruction regards Western culture as essentially logocentric, that is, organized around the belief or hope that there is meaning in language, and even some ultimate final meaning, such as God or Truth, rather than the endless play of difference. New Criticism A major critical movement of the 1930s and 1940s in America (John Crowe Ransom, Alen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren). The autonomy of literature is a vital tenet of the new critics, who defined various wrongful ways of looking at literature (the intentional and the affective fallacies ), the close reading of texts becoming the
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only legitimate critical procedure, seeing the work as a linguistic structure in which all the parts are held in a tension of paradox, irony and ambiguity , words, symbols and images.
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Objective criticism A term which can be applied to much of the criticism since the 1920s, including the new critics, which examines the work of literature as an autonomous creation, free from the poet, the reader and the world, for its intrinsic complexity, balance, pattern, coherence, in order to reveal the relationships between its parts, and not because it adds to our biographical knowledge of the poet, our understanding of literary history, or any of its other extrinsic features. Over-reading The danger of ingeniously working subtleties of meaning out of a literary passage that do more credit to the critics capacity for fantasy or pedantry than common sense. The critical practice of deconstruction insists that the reader produces meanings that will always be indeterminate, and that there can be no fixed and absolute meaning in language: according to this view, over-reading is a theoretical impossibility. Phenomenology A phenomenon (Gk. appearing) is an object or occurrence perceived by the senses. Phenomenology is the method of enquiry promoted by the German philosopher E. Husserl, which begins with the investigation of ones own consciousness and intellectual processes. All prior conceptions, whether from philosophy or common sense, have to be laid aside in a suspension of all existing ideas about the nature of experience. Thus, even the reality of the objects of consciousness has to be held in doubt (bracketed). Husserls views were developed by Merleau-Ponty in France and Heidegger in Germany. Phenomenology has influenced several different approaches to literature, notably the Geneva School of Criticism, Reader-Response Criticism and Reception Theory. Pluralism, pluralist, plurality A term much used in post-structuralist criticism to indicate the desirable openness of texts to many different interpretations that the insights of deconstruction allow. As language has no verifiable and absolute meaning, no transcendental signified, all texts are open to the play of innumerable meanings, rendering the search for meaning infinitely extendable and, it might be argued, therefore pointless, though deconstructionists continue to pursue their own kinds of meaning in texts. Postmodernism A vague term but much in vogue in the 1980s, and of disputed meaning and value, not least because it refers both to intellectual concepts and to style. Cultural philosophers involve themselves in arguments of bewildering abstraction about the nature of the postmodern condition, while a fashion writer may breezily refer to a pair of shoes as postmodern. Modernism broke with the artistic traditions and conventions that had prevailed for many centuries. But, in time, the experiments of modernism itself came to look familiar and even conventional, and often to endorse very traditional attitudes to society under the guise of experimental forms. Some contemporary artists have gone back to pre-modernist writings and reshaped them in new ways (witty and clever magpie borrowings of former styles are a characteristic of postmodernist style, making a statement about pluralism, tolerance and eclecticism, as well as revealing limitations in the assumptions inherent in former literary conventions and methods). Some literature is postmodern in this sense of knowingly making use of methods and techniques of former ages in the spirit of serious pastiche. Novels like John Barths Giles Goat-Boy (1966), written in the form and style of an eighteenth-century work, predated the invention of the term postmodern. John Fowless The French Lieutenants Woman (1969) self-consciously recreates aspects of 18 th century novel, mixed with experiments (a double, indeterminate ending), and authorial intervention. Magic realism creates bewildering mixtures of the plausible and the impossible. Salman Rushdies Midnights Children (1981) gives the same status to the historical and the whimsically fantastic. One conclusion inherent in this intersection of different literary styles and modes is the insight common to many strands of post-structuralism, that meaning is neither inherent in language, nor in the world of things, but is constructed by conventional frameworks of thought and language. Even our most cherished concepts, such as individuality, human character, freedom, are subject to the dissolving perspective that far from being universal truths, they are constructs of a particular culture and time, and therefore have no absolute authenticity. According to the philosophy of deconstruction, language itself is doomed to perpetual non-meaning in the endless play of difference. This challenge to meaning as well
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as social and political factors (the persistence of war, the constant possibility of nuclear holocaust, a new sense of the despoiling of the environment and the planet) have all combined to create a sense of despair and disillusion. In the face of meaninglessness we can only play with styles and values that used to have meaning. In this respect, postmodernist style shares and extends aspects of the modernist movement called the absurd. Postmodern texts are often organized to reveal the instability of language, and to show the reader how particular meanings and values are temporary and selfgenerated constructions. Judgment may be suspended, for example, between multiple narrative possibilities. In capitalist society the multiplicity of images and signs, now equally perceived as disconnected and empty of meaning, in ads, television and other media, adds to a sense of being bombarded with reminders of our inauthenticity. The new disciplines of cultural and media studies have analyzed these phenomena from poststructuralist perspectives. Many intellectuals rejoice in the freedom of interpretation that postmodernist ideas allow, particularly the promise of pluralism. The distinctions between high and low art have been thrown aside, allowing graffiti to be examined with the same scrupulosity as King Lear since both are cultural and social constructs and may be equally revealing about the nature of meaning and the political and cultural realities of our existence, or about the nature of non-meaning and inauthenticity. As a means of re-examining the nature and history of present-day capitalist and consumerist society in terms of poststructuralist attitudes to meaning, the concept of postmodernism has been defined and redefined by cultural historians and political philosophers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1986) and Frederic Jameson in essays like Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984). Post-structuralism A term covering the bundle of different approaches to language and literature (and other fields) which share the common feature of building and refining the attitudes to knowledge and culture initiated by the linguistic theories of Saussure, which led to the development of the network of ideas called structuralism. A basic and shared tenet is that meaning is not inherent in words, but depends on their mutual relationships within the system of language, a system that is based on difference. The single most significant poststructuralist development is the linguistic philosophy developed in the 1970s and the 1980s in France, chiefly by Jacques Derrida, called deconstruction, which has strongly influenced literary and critical theory. Pragmatic criticism Pragmatic may be applied to those kinds of criticism that see literature as designed to achieve effects on its audience (instruction, aesthetic pleasure, etc.) and judge it according to the successful achievement of this assumed aim. Readable Usually a term of praise for a book, suggesting willingness and delight on the part of the reader. However, amongst adherents of the criticism of Roland Barthes it has a special meaning: a readable/readerly text text is one that is easily and worthlessly assimilated, because it reflects a conventional and anodyne ideology that does not stimulate the reader. Reader-Response criticism A general label for a number of different literary approaches and theories common in the 1980s that share a focus on the active relationship of the reader with a text. Aspects of psychoanalytic criticism and structuralism can be assimilated here, in so far as they consider the readers role in interpreting literature. What is shared among these different approaches is a rejection of the assumptions of the new critics about the autonomy of the text, and the fixity and objectivity of evaluation and meaning. Rather they see the meaning of a text as created or produced by readers, and therefore as an unstable or changeable entity. The many exponents of reader-response criticism differ in the emphasis that they place on aspects of the reading process, and in the degree to which they allow any objectivity in an interpretation of a text: is it possible, for example, to prove that a reading is wrong? The German critic Wolfgang Iser (The Act of Reading, 1978) examines the writers control of the readers responses particularly in terms of the indeterminate elements in texts, the gaps and absences which the reader must fill in, a process of anticipation, guesswork, creation, frustration and reconstruction. In the USA Stanley Fish has developed a close examination of developing reader-response which he calls affective stylistics. He also
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examines the nature of mistakes critics have made in dealing with texts to suggest that different reading strategies are adopted by different interpretive communities, and that no single reading can be authoritative (Is there a Text in This Class?, 1980). Reception theory A specific branch of reader-response criticism developed by Hans Robert Jauss, that focuses on the changing history of the reaction to texts by readers (Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory, 1967). Readers bring to the text the aesthetic horizon of their time a collection of expectations, prejudices and tolerances, that is constantly shifting and evolving, not least because it encompasses and absorbs into itself the tradition of interpretations that build up in relation to a particular text, and become a part of its meaning. There is no fixed value or meaning in texts, but only that which is produced by the dialogue between the horizons of different generations of readers and the text. Rhetorical criticism A term sometimes used for the work of critics of the 1960s and 1970s who analyzed literature in terms of the many authorial devices used by the narrator to develop a particular relationship with the reader. The American Wayne Booths study of the novel, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), was a seminal study of this kind. Stock response Unthinking and uncritical response to a work of art; usually used in a pejorative sense to label a crude reaction unilluminated by sensitivity, intelligence or understanding. Structuralism, structuralist criticism It examines aspects of human society, including language, literature and social institutions, as integrated structures or systems in which the parts have no real existence on their own, but only derive meaning and significance from their place within the system. Structuralist critics often explore individual works of literature by analyzing them in terms of linguistic concepts and concentrate on examining the conventions and expectations which a knowledgeable reader understands implicitly when reading the work (literary competence). Certain aspects of structuralist thought run counter to ordinary notions about the relationship between language, the writer and the reader. Writing (criture) is conceived as an activity governed solely by its own codes and conventions, and these have no reference to any reality beyond or outside the system. Many structuralists, particularly Barthes, deny that there is any communication between author and reader: the persona projected by the writer is merely a literary construction, and reading itself is merely an impersonal making sense of the literary conventions within the system. Subjective Often used in contrast to objective to distinguish two methods of perception, meaning the private and personal point of view, as opposed to the explicit, verifiable and agreed objective treatement of things. The subjective is the inner, biased, visionary world, rather than the outer real world. Various critics, notably R. Langbaum in The Poetry of Experience (1957), have argued that such a distinction is an oversimplification of the way literature apprehends the world, and that all writing, whatever its appearance, is neither simply objective nor subjective, but is in fact a meeting point between the outer and the inner worlds. Sympathy Often used in literary discussion to express the readers feelings towards a character in a book: a writer may be said to manipulate the readers sympathies by the depiction of a good or bad character. Weltanschauung A philosophical view of the world, perhaps expressed by a single writer, or typical of a whole period. Zeitgeist The spirit or intellectual atmosphere of an age or period.
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References
References
Anghelescu Irimia, M. Dialoguri Postmoderne, Ed. Fundaiei Culturale Romne, Bucureti, 1999 Barthes, R. The Death of the Author in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds) Modern Literary Theory, OUP, 1989 Brooker, P. (ed.), Modernism/Postmodernism, Longman, London and New York, 1992 Cuddon, J. A., Dictionary of Literary Terms, Penguin Books, London, 1982 Cunningham, V. In the Reading Gaol postmodernity, texts, and history , Ed. Blackwell, Oxford UK & Cambridge USA, 1994 Federman, R. Take It or Leave It, New York, Fiction Collective, 1976 Foucault, M. What is an author?, in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory, Longman, New York, 1998, pp.196-210 Foucault, M. The Order of Discourse, in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds) Modern Literary Theory, OUP, 1989 Fowles, J. Iubita locotenentului francez, Ed. Univers, Bucureti, 1994 Fowles, J. Mantissa, Boston, Little Brown, 1982 Harrison, B. Rhetoric and the Self, n Inconvenient Fictions. Literature and the Limits of Theory, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1991 Jefferson, A., D. Robey (eds.), Modern Literary Theory, B. T. Batsford Ltd., London, 1988 Lodge, D. After Bakhtin. Essays on Fiction and Criticism , Routledge, London, 1990 Lodge, D. The Art of Fiction, Penguin Books, England, 1992 Mavrodin, I. Poietic i Poetic, Ed. Scrisul Romnesc, Craiova, 1998 McEvan, N. The Survival of the Novel. British Fiction in the Later Twentieth Century , MacMillan Press, 1981 McHale, B. Postmodernist Fiction, Routledge, London and New York, 1987 Papadima, L. Literatur i Comunicare. Relaia autor cititor n proza paoptist i postpaoptist, Ed. Polirom, Bucureti, 1999 Parrinder, P. Authors & Authority: English and American Criticism 1750-1990 , MacMillan, London, 1991 Pease E., D. Author, in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds.), Critical Terms for Literary Study, The University of Chicago Press, USA, 1995, pp.105-116 Selden, R., P. Widdowson (eds.), A Readers Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, Harvester-Wheatsheaf, Hertfordshire, 1993 Simion, E. Ficiunea jurnalului intim, vol. I, Exist o poetic a jurnalului?, Ed. Univers Enciclopedic, Bucureti, 2001 Simion, E. ntoarcerea autorului. Eseuri despre relaia creator oper , Biblioteca pentru toi, Ed. Minerva, Bucureti, 1993 Sukenick, R. The Death of the Novel, in The Death of the Novel and Other Stories, New York, The Dial Press, 1969 Sukenick, R. Thirteen digressions, n In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction , Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1985 Sukenick, R. Out, Chicago, Swallow Press, 1973 Vianu, L. At the Gates of Commonsense, in British Desperadoes at the Turn of the Millennium, Ed. All, Bucureti, 1999 Vonnegut, K. Slaughterhouse-Five, New York, Dell, 1971 Wimsatt, W., M. Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy. The Affective Fallacy, in David Lodge (ed.), 20th Century Literary Criticism A Reader, Longman, London, 1972.
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Bahtin, M. Probleme de literatur i estetic, Bucureti: Univers, 1982. Barthes, R. Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, London: Routledge, 1981 Bellinger, L. Les methodes de lecture, Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 1989
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Corbea, A. Despre teme. Explorri n dimensiunea antropologic a literaritii , Iai: Ed. Universitii Al. I. Cuza, 1995 Corbea, A. Lesthetique de la reception comme theorie du dialogue, in Cahiers roumains detudes litteraires, nr.3/ 1986 Cornea, P. From Readers Fiction to the Reality of Reading, in Cahiers roumains detudes litteraires, nr.3/1986 Cornea, P. Introducere n teoria lecturii, Iai: Polirom, 1998 Corti, M. Principiile comunicrii literare, Bucureti: Univers, 1981 Dima S. Lectura literar un model situaional, Iai: Ars Longa, 2000 Ducrot, O. and J.M. Schaeffer. Noul Dicionar al tiinelor Limbajului , Bucureti: Babel, 1996 Eco, U. Lector in fabula, Bucureti: Univers, 1991 Fish, S. Is There a Text in this Class? in The Authority of Interpretive Communities , Cambridge, 1980 Fokkema, D. and W. Literary History, Modernism and Postmodernism , Amsterdam&Philadelphia, 1984 Green K. and Jill LeBihan. Critical Theory and Practice. A Coursebook , New York&London: Routledge, 1996 Holub, R. Reception Theory. A Critical Introduction, London&New York, 1984 Jauss, H. R. Experiena estetic i hermeneutica literar, Bucureti: Univers, 1983 Jefferson, A. and David Robey (eds.). Modern Literary Theory, London: Routledge, 1986 Leenhard, J. Les instances de la comptence dans lactivit lectrice in Acres du colloque de Reims. La lecture littraire, Paris, 1984 Lodge, D. (ed.). Modern Criticism and Theory, New York, 1988 Lupu, A.-M. Le theatre romantique roumain: du modele a la replique , Bucureti: Logos, 1999 Maingueneau, D. Pragmatique pour le discours littraire , Paris: Bordas, 1990 Marian, V. Textul poetic i orizontul de ateptare in Evoluia artei i exigenele receptrii, Bucureti: Meridiane, 1985 Marino, A. Hermeneutica ideii de literatur, Cluj, 1987 Selden, R. and Peter Widowson. A Readers Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, London, 1985 Stroia, Gh. Estetica receptrii in Evoluia artei i exigenele receptrii, Bucureti: Meridiane, 1985 Suleiman, S. and I. Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, Princeton, 1980 Tompkins, J. P. (ed.). Reader-Response Criticism: from Formalism to PostStructuralism, Baltimore, 1980 Vianu, L. British Desperadoes at the Turn of the Millenium, Bucureti: All, 1999
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Dunarea de Jos University of Galati Faculty of Letters

Reception. Theory and Practices

Associate Professor Steluta Stan, Ph.D.

Reception. Theory and Practices

Reception. Theory and Practices

Introduction: Literary Studies A Definition

Introduction: Literary Studies

Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram

Chapter 1 A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram

Reception. Theory and Practices

Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram

Questions for the student:

Questions for the student:

Questions for the student:

Questions for the student:

Text and reality

Reception. Theory and Practices

Chapter 1 - A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram Text and language

Questions for the student:

Reception. Theory and Practices

Reception. Theory and Practices

Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories

Reception. Theory and Practices

Reception. Theory and Practices

2.2. Open vs closed texts

Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories

2.3. Lisible/Readable/Readerly vs Scriptible/Writable/Writerly texts

Reception. Theory and Practices

Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories

Questions for the student:

2.4. Reader: Functions, Competences and Constraints

Questions for the student:

Reception. Theory and Practices

Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories

Questions for the student:

2.5. The Subjective Perspective

Questions for the student:

2.6. The Nature of Meaning

2.7. Reader-Response Criticism

Reception. Theory and Practices

Questions for the student:

Reception. Theory and Practices

Glossary of Literary Terms

Glossary of Literary Terms

Reception. Theory and Practices

Glossary of Literary Terms

Reception. Theory and Practices

Glossary of Literary Terms

Reception. Theory and Practices

Glossary of Literary Terms

Reception. Theory and Practices

Glossary of Literary Terms

Reception. Theory and Practices

Glossary of Literary Terms

Reception. Theory and Practices

Glossary of Literary Terms

Reception. Theory and Practices

Glossary of Literary Terms

Reception. Theory and Practices

Glossary of Literary Terms

Reception. Theory and Practices

Glossary of Literary Terms