reception. theory & practices - the course

7/29/2019 Reception. Theory & Practices - The Course

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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.

Galati2010


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Contents

Foreword. Objectives 5

Introduction. Literary Studies 7

Chapter 1 A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram 11

Chapter 2 Reader-Oriented Theories 20

2.1. Reading Some Definitions and Main Parameters 20

2.2. Open versus Closed Texts 23

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

Writerly Texts 23

2.4. Reader: Functions, Competences and Constraints 26

2.5. The Subjective Perspective 29

2.6. The Nature of Meaning 30

2.7. Reader-Response Criticism 31

2.8. A Postscript 37

Glossary of Literary Terms 39

References and Bibliography 47

Reception. Theory and Practices 3


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Foreword

Foreword

Cine vorbete n oper? E vorba de relaia dintre creator i oper ngndirea critic din secolul nostru i, cu precdere, de statutul

autorului n noile forme de interpretare. Am acceptat i eu, cum auacceptat atia, disocierea lui Proust dintre omul care scrie i omulcare 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 formsau alta, autorul revine n text, c ntre omul care scrie i omul caretriete nu-i chiar o prpastie de netrecut, c strlucirea operei nu nevindec de dorina de a ti ceva despre autorul care a scris-o. Autorule mort, dar moartea lui a lsat un gol care ne face s ne amintimmereu 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 familiarwith the geography of literary studies from a historical perspective (classic,romantic, and present-day paradigms), and by drawing their attention uponthe different interest 20th century critical theories take in the author of aliterary text, the text itself and the reader involved in the reading/decodingprocess.

Starting from a series of questions, none of which original (what mightbe considered original in a world of inter-/ intra-/ trans-textuality?!), thecourse aims at surveying the main theoretical and critical positions focusingon aspects such as the authorand theirauthority, the textproduced, and thebeneficiary of the creative act, the reader.

We believed that the strategy of starting from questions might beuseful because:

- on the one hand, once the questions asked, they seem to betterorganize 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, toenter this partnership, that, we are sure by now, exists between theauthor of a text and its reader (the texts/the authors?).

In defining his own critical method, professor Eugen Simion considersthat criticism is no longer a matter of taste, nor should it be an obsession withform; a critical spirit should, nevertheless, be concerned with both, takinginterest in the same time in the text and the beyond-text:

Critica, aa cum o neleg, este un sistem de lectur; un mod personalde a te apropia de oper, un demers, care, folosind mijloace variate,descoper figura spiritului creator. Figura se poate defini nu numaiprin filosofia existenei i calitatea expresiei, dar i printr-o poziie fade obiectele, fantasmele care intr n oper. n fond, opera exprim

nu numai universul pe care autorul l poart, dar i felul n care acest

autor i asum universul de care este purtat. (1993: IX-X)

This definition of a work method seems to include all the terms of theequation that are the beginning point of any approach to any of the actors



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Foreword

performing on the literary stage: the author, the world or the extra-linguisticreality, the authors word (the text), or the one expected to read the word inthe world or viceversa, the reader.

Depending on the perspective, different critical or theoreticaltendencies consider one term or another as unknown, or see them staticallyor dynamically, as elements that only exist or as the same elements, this timeat work. In other words, using a terminology that proves once again, ifnecessary, to what extent and how often we pay tribute to the universe thatwe carry and that carries us, the terms of the above-mentioned equation areseen as products orproductions (in one of the subchapters of the presentstudy, 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 ormeaning producer).

When giving the present course the structure it has, we also had inmind Roman Jakobsons diagram, the same as many other authors, probablysourcing in a need for order in a highly dis-ordered (or having a hidden ordernot any individual is meant to see or understand) universe1.

One cannot but notice how intricate the paths to human knowledgeare; overwhelmed with the complexity of the world(s) to be known, man hasalways tried to organize the huge amount of data according to differentcriteria, approaching the world but also the text or the world as text (as thepost-structuralists see it) from different angles. Then, man compressed theoutcome of this sequence of operations into formulas, equations, diagrams,theories or architypes. When he thought he had found the figure in thecarpet, as Henry James calls it, after having established the moulds, manset about showing the others how these can be broken, undermined, de-structured, de-centred, in other words, did what is so very characteristic ofhuman nature, i.e. tried to encode what had just been decoded.

Consequently, the course is intended to offer support to third yearstudents in philology by helping them through the many possible ways toanswer a few sets of questions, in an attempt to facilitate a betterunderstanding of the subtle and mysterious relationship between a work andan author trying to discover and re-create himself while writing, and a readerforced to be alert in describing/interpreting a text while inscribing himself ontoit.

The course comprises an introduction (Literary Studies), aninformative section (Chapters 1-2: A Dynamic View of Jakobsons Diagram,and Reader-Oriented Theories) and a tool kit for decoding varied discoursepatternings (Glossary of Literary Terms and References).

1For a similar example, see Liviu Papadima, Literatur i Comunicare. Relaia autor cititor nproza paoptist i postpaoptist, Ed. Polirom: Bucureti, 1999.

Reception. Theory and Practices6


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Introduction: Literary Studies A Definition

Introduction: Literary Studies

A Definition

To elaborate a theory of literature is to seek answers to fundamentalquestions about the nature, the purpose and the value of literature, and seehow answers to these questions can be ascertained.

As a special branch of literary critical discussion, literary theory has beenintellectually fashionable and a source of vigorous dispute in European andAmerican universities, especially from the 1970s onwards. By 1990 literarytheory had been institutionalized, now being taught as an academic subjectin its own right. Some teachers of theory argue that it is impossible to read atext without a theoretical standpoint (even though readers may be whollyunconscious of what their standpoint is); an obvious counter-argument is thatno 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 thebasis for constructing a more rational, adequate and self-aware discipline ofliterary studies. The connections between literary theory and critical andscholarly practice go in both directions. That is to say, not only does theoryilluminate or improve practice, but it also draws heavily on it; the questionsthat critics and scholars ask of individual texts are ultimately of the sameorder as those that literary theory asks of literature in general.

Literary theory is not something that has developed in a vacuum, buthas arisen, for the most part, in response to the problems encountered by

readers, critics and scholars in their practical contact with texts. A logicalconclusion might be that the goal of literary theory is to draw attention tothese questions and to make them more problematic, to show that they canbe answered differently, and none of the answers should be taken forgranted.

At its most basic level, literature is commonly regarded as a kind ofcommunication between author and reader. Just as in ordinary linguisticcommunication a speaker sends a message to an addressee, so an authorsends a literary text to a reader. Filling out this scheme that so muchresembles that of the Russian formalist R. Jakobson, which shall beintroduced a little later we can add that the message-text is aboutsomething (content, reality) and that it is written in language. The firstaddition is designed to account for the fact that the literary text is assumed tobe a specially motivated form of discourse, that it is written because it hassomething to say; the second serves to distinguish literature from other artforms that do not have language as their medium.

Consequently, a preliminary definition of literature might include anauthor sending a literary text about reality to the reader, in language. If weadopt the addressers viewpoint, we draw attention to the writer and his orher emotive/expressive use of language; if we focus on the context, weisolate the referential use of language and invoke its historical dimension at

the point of its production; if we are mainly interested in the addressee, westudy the readers reception of the message, hence introducing a differenthistorical context (no longer the moment of a texts production but of itsreproduction), and so on.



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The different literary theories also tend to place an emphasis upon onefunction rather than the other:

ROMANTIC- MARXIST READER-HUMANIST FORMALIST ORIENTED

STRUCTURALIST

Romantic-humanisttheories foreground the writers life and mindas expressed in his or her work;

Formalist theories concentrate on the nature of writing itself, inisolation;

Marxist criticism considers the social and historical context asfundamental, though it would be only fair to add that not allMarxists hold a strictly referential view of language;

Reader-criticism (phenomenological criticism) centers itself on thereaders/affective experience;

Structuralist poetics draws attention on the codes used toconstruct meaning.

At their best, none of the approaches totally ignores the otherdimensions of literary communication.

A Historical Outline

Philosophers, writers, critics and scholars alike have always been inclined tospeculate about the theoretical implications of literary practice, and mostliterary theorists of the 20th century are aware of their belonging to a traditionthat goes back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle.

a. The classical paradigmUntil the end of the 18th century, the reflection upon literature hadconcentrated on three main directions, in spite of a natural variation in accentaccording to the historical age:

poetics, inaugurated by Aristotle, the study of literary facts from theverbal arts perspective;

rhetoric, at first related to public life, analysing the different kinds ofdiscourse as a set of means used to guarantee an effectivecommunication; later on, the literary discourse (fiction and poetry) wasto become the main genre analysed;

hermeneutics (the theory of interpretation), limited at the beginningonly to sacred texts; starting with the Rennaissance, philologicalcriticism replaced the hermeneutics of sacred texts.

In a classic study on the Western critical tradition, Orientation of CriticalTheories, the opening chapter of The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), thecontemporary critic, M. H. Abrams, identified four critical orientations.

According to whether the critic focuses on the artist, his work, thereality he refers to, or the audience the work is meant for, Abramsdistinguishes:

expressive theories, defining the literary work as an expression of

the artists subjectivity (beginning with Romanticism), interested in therelationship between the Work and the Artist;

objective theories, identifying the literary work with its textualstructure (Poetics), interested in close reading of the Work;



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mimetic theories, foregrounding the relationship between the textand the reality it represents(!), between the Work and the Universe(related to Hermeneutics);

pragmatic theories, analyzing the literary work with a view to theeffects it produces on the receiver (Rhetoric), interested in therelationship between the Work and the Audience);

The present domain of the literary studies was defined in general terms in the19th century, during the Romantic period. In the classic tradition, Abramssexpressive theories did not exist. They began to play a prominent role duringRomanticism, while today, the concept of the authors subjectivity is generallyaccepted without any further debate.

Competing with this expressive conception, there is another thesis thatRomanticism embraced, that of the works self-referentiality, the fact thatthe literary work expresses nothing else but itself. This is the foundation ofPoetics in our century. This is the reason for Poetics difficulty in getting rid ofthe confusion between the (debatable) thesis of the literary works autonomyand the methodological principle of the autonomous study of the literary work

as an example of verbal art. Romantic hermeneutics had two divergenttrends:

intentionalist hermeneutics, the basis of modern philology, an

interpretative art meant to help understand literary texts, andreconstruct the authors intentions;

anti-intentionalist hermeneutics, drawing on the philosophy of M.Heidegger and H. G. Gadamer, stating that what is important to bedetected is not the apparent/surface intention, not what the authorwanted to say/or show, but what he said/showed without having theintention to (which seems to refer us, to a certain extent, to thepreviously mentioned expressive theories.

Literary history is not that of literature only, but also the evolution of literarygenres as indices for the political evolution of society in general.

b. Literary studies/theory in the 20th centuryThe aims and conventions of literary criticism, like literature itself, havechanged constantly through the ages, and there are many different types ofliterary approaches. In the above mentioned essay, Abrams explores thediversity of the critical approaches via a simple diagram of the elementsinvolved:

UNIVERSEWORK

ARTIST AUDIENCE

Abrams explains that theories of art can be defined according to the way inwhich they tend to concentrate on one of the three variables at the corners ofthe triangle. Thus:

mimetictheories 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; pragmatictheories see the work as a means to an end, teaching or

instructing; the focus is changed to the works effects on the audience;



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expressive theories center on the artist. Nearly all Romantic and 19 th

century criticism generally regard art as primarily concerned withexpressing the poets feelings, imagination, and personality. They tendto judge the work by its sincerity or the extent to which it hassuccessfully 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 schoolsuntil the 1980s. This type ofobjective 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 tomean practical criticism; since 1970, the traditional understanding of therelationships between the universe, the writer, the audience and the text hasbeen put into turmoil by the approaches to language known asstructuralismand deconstruction, which place in doubt any simple mimeticnotion of language itself, and therefore literature; the security that words havemeaning because they directly symbolize the things contained in the worldoutside (the universe) has been attacked. Language has come to be seen as

a framework creating truth and reality, rather than simply describingthings.

The consequences of these ideas for literature and criticism havebeen wide-ranging. One result has been the proliferation of literary theory asa subject for study in its own right, usually concentrating on the theory ofcriticism rather than literature itself. Another has been the shift away from theinternal mechanisms of texts themselves in order to show them in the contextof society and politics, possibly by adopting Marxist or feminist criticalperspectives. Both these approaches have attacked the concept of thecanon, the idea that literature should be composed of a collection/corpus ofspecial and highly valued texts. The specific disciplines of narratologyand

reader-response criticism, have also grown out of the ferment caused bystructuralism.

In spite of a very vast and multifarious typology, four main orientationscan be distinguished:

evaluative criticism, generally integrated to the mission of teachingliterature in schools and universities;

historical and institutional analysis of literature as a set of socialpractices;

interpretive disciplines, generally inscribing anti-intentionalisthermeneutics in the present;

theories of readingand, more generally, ofreception; all types of formal analysis (narratology, thematic criticism,

stylistics, rhetoric analysis, literary genres study, etc.), having asynchronic or diachronic orientation; this direction is related to apoetics 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 the20th century?



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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 variedways of approaching the literary phenomenon.

In the essay, Orientation of Critical Theories, the first chapter ofTheMirror and the Lamp, the contemporary critic, M. H. Abrams, explores thediversity of the critical approaches using a simple diagram of the elementsinvolved (Gray, 1992: 42):

UNIVERSE

WORK

ARTIST AUDIENCE

Abrams argues that theories of art can be defined according to the way theytend to focus on one of the three variables at the corner of the aboveimaginary triangle. This way:

a mimetic theory will consider the work of art as a mirror of theuniverse: Aristotle might be considered the first example in thisrespect, as, in Poetics (4th century B.C.), he defined art as imitation ormimesis;

apragmatic theorysees art as a means to an end, that of instructingor educating; the attention is, this time, moved on the effect art has onits receiver/consumer;

expressive theories are centred on the artist, almost the entirecriticism of Romanticism and the XIXth century being firstlypreocuppied with art as an expression of the feelings, imagination andpersonality of its creator. Catherine Belsey, another contemporarytheorist pertaining to the British academic world, calls this criticalapproach expressive realism, and sees it focused on the interpretationand evaluation of writings, as more or less vigorous expressions of aunique 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 the80s. This critical method lays the stress on the analysis of the text, ofthe work itself, free from its author, public or the extra-linguisticuniverse;

beginning with the 70s, what was traditionally understood by therelations between the universe, the author, the reader and the work,has been troubled by Structuralism and Deconstructivism, bothquestionning even the most elementary mimetism of language and,consequently, of literature; even more than that, the structuralists andthe deconstructivists attack what was taken for certain, that there is a

stable relationship between words, their meaning and the thingsoutside the text that they are a symbol of. Language is no longer onlya means that the author uses to tell (his) truth about (his) reality, it



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even creates that truth about that reality. Last but not least, the spoiledchild of the last decades, the reader, becomes the main concern of thereception theories.

The focus of the present course being the author and the relationshipbetween him and the other terms of the above-mentioned equation, wethought it fit to change the order of the terms and place the author in thecentre, trying to make the relations more dynamic and bidirectional. Weconsider that this might be a useful starting point for the analysis of thecentral, periferal or no role at all that the different critical and theoreticalapproaches 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, westill thought it was worth beginning from the scheme above in an attempt toorganize, as we have already mentioned, a huge volume of information,offered most of the times in an elitist language, and also to facilitate theaccess to and the choice of one or another of the theoretical and criticalmethods meant to help the reader over the threshold that separates theliterary 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 nomeans, complementary, adding together to form a single comprehensivevision. The reader, as well as the analyst, is rather confronted with a choicebetween conflicting theories, too great a variety of alternatives and openquestions, and will not find a comfortably easy solution to that choice withinthe confines of literary theory alone.

Taking into account what has already been considered anovertheorizing of literature which seems to undermine reading as aninnocent activity, the reader might feel frustrated to lose this innocence.Nevertheless, we strongly believe that a true reader cannot ignore thequestions the major literary theories have continually asked during the last

decades: questions about the author, the writing, the reader, or what weusually call reality. As it happens with both literary criticism and theory, eventhe 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, itsdignity and courage lying in the questions it raises, not necessarily in theanswers it finds. Consequently, starting from the scheme above, we shallforward several sets of questions, grouped together according to the termsthey point at and the relationship between them. As in a previous course for2nd year students, The Reception of the Literary Text, we focused on thereader, we thought it would be logical that this time we should try to shedsome light upon the author, trying to find answers to questions such as:



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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 ofelements such as:

i. the psyche of the authorii. the psyche of the cultureiii. the ideology of the cultureiv. the particular socio-economic conditions of the

production (the placement and role of the artist in theculture, who pays for the production, who consumes it,what are the rewards for successful production, how arethey decided and, what are the material conditions ofproduction

v. the traditions of writing which pertain to the textvi. the traditions of the treatment of the particular subject-

matter in the culture and in the genre

is the text in fact almost entirely the production of theideological and cultural realm, in which realm the author ismerely a function, whose role, aspirations, ideas and attitudesare created by the society in which he lives? In this case, thetext is a complex structure of cultural and aesthetic codes, noneof which the author has created, arranged around traditionalcultural themes or topoi, whereas the author himself, while anexistent being (his existence and effort are not denied), haslittle to do with the meaning of the text, as he himself is simplypart of (or, constructed by) the circulation of meanings withinthe culture.

On the other hand, if we take into consideration the expressivefunction of the literary discourse, we can ask a couple of questionslike:

how do writers introduce themselves to their readers: as animpersonal instance in the work, or a personal one manifestingitself through the work?

to what extent and in what way do writers open or shut to thereader the access to the individuality of the person whoproduces the text and remains outside it or steps inside? Whatmasks 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/orunconsciously, 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, theaesthetic ideolog(ies) of the time?



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Moreover, the text not only will be an outcome of this situated imaginativeprocess, but will be structured in its production and in its reception by variousmaterial 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), orindirectly

how is it paid for, and how it is distributed, who has access to it, underwhat 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 communicationalmechanisms):

what are the status and the role of the authorial voice?

how are the different hypostasis of the author/narrator transposed intothe 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 therelationship between what we called the terms of a simple equation, whichproves anything but simple.

A more detailed presentation of the 20th century critical theories willstart from a set of possible questions that can be asked of any theory ofliterature:

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?

a. Text as literature

The word literature is (although it should not be) used as if it were preciselyand unproblematically definable, but the definitions vary widely in their scopeand premises. The so-called institutional definition, which may be

characterised as historicist, sees it as essentially similar to any other sort ofsocial or cultural institution, therefore changing its character and function asthe society that produces it changes. Instead, most literary theories attemptto devise universal definitions such as poetry, verbal art, etc. Such definitionsalso vary in a number of ways, out of which the degree of the specificity ofliterature.

The Russian Formalists defined literatures distinctive qualities inrelation to ordinary language, whereas certain vulgar Marxists regarded it asjust one element of the superstructure, viewing it in relation to ideology.Common to all is that literature is generally regarded as a more patternedand organised kind of message than those of ordinary communication. But

again, the function attributed to the formal elements will vary from one theoryto another.



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The New Critics, for example, offer a more complex model and shiftthe burden of representation (the mimetic function of literature) onto formitself, defining content not only as what is said but as the way in which thingsare said. Other theories disregard literatures representational function, andprivilege formal features, making content as incidental as form is for content-biased theories.

b. Text and author


is the text the intentional production of an individual, or

is the text an only partially intentional production whose unintendeddeterminants 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 theproduction

(the placement and role of the artist in the culture, who pays forthe production, who consumes it, what are the rewards ofsuccessful production, how are they decided and, what are thematerial 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, whoserole, aspirations, ideas and attitudes are created by the society inwhich he lives. In this case, the text is a complex structure of culturaland aesthetic codes, none of which the author has created, arrangedaround traditional cultural themes or topoi, whereas the author himself,while an existent being (his existence and effort are not denied), haslittle 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 eversince the American New Critics raised the issue of the intentional fallacy, ithas been thought that biography may actually constitute an obstacle to thestudy of literary texts.

The American New Critics W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsleyintroduced this term for what they regarded as the mistaken critical method ofjudging a literary work according to the authors intentions, whether stated orimplied. They argued that the value and meaning of each literary workresides solely in the text itself, and any examination of presumed intention ismerely irrelevant, distracting the critic towards the writers psychology orbiography, 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 theRussian Formalists felt it necessary to downgrade the author, in order to



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guarantee the independence of literary studies, saving them from beingmerely a second-rate form of psychology or history.

On the other hand, those theories for which the author is a centralpoint of reference vary considerably on the question of how far the authorialintentions assumed to govern a text are conscious (Marxists vs. classicalFreudians).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. itbecomes a text only the moment it is actualized by a reader whilereading)?

to what extent are we, as readers, simply following the conventions ofreading we have been taught?; to what extent are we reading our ownworld-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 ofthe reader, and the cultural status of the text influence what meaningthe reader derives (or produces)?

Until recently the reader was probably the most neglected element in theframework of literary communication. Many critical theories considered thisvariable factor in subjective responses to literature (viz. the New Criticismsaffective fallacy) at odds with the systematic requirements of any rigoroustheory.

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 thereader is a fallacious method of criticism, resulting only in impressionisticcriticism.

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 greatextent on a number of issues), who specifically excluded subjective response

from their theory because they regarded it as unscientific; therefore, thereader is left passively to observe features of a text the character of whichcan 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 responsewith scientific aims. Through his practical criticism, he encouraged attentiveclose reading of texts, a kind of democratisation of literary study in theclassroom, in which nearly everyone was placed on an equal footing in theface of a blind text (unidentified).

A more complex approach is that of the Constance School ofphenomenologically-inspired reader theory, where the reader is recognized to

have a determined function, assigned to him by culture and history, and alsothat 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.



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In his opinion, the reader does not passively receive the impact that theliterary text may make upon him/her, but is involved in a more active, orrather, interactive process.

Almost all schools of literary theory place a growing emphasis onreading, even privileging readers and reading for broadly political aims (viz. aMarxist or a feminist reading, highlighting the difference of its interpretationfrom others, to draw attention to and undermine bourgeois or patriarchalassumptions).

As a preliminary conclusion, theories of reading ask questions aboutthe extent to which a text can be said to determine its own meaning or bedetermined by it, about the reader responding to textual directives orproducing, through his interpretative activity, the text himself.

d. Text and society


as the author is operating within a certain cultural milieu, in what waysdoes he represent in his text, deliberately and/or unconsciously, theunderstandings of the world that the culture holds?

in what ways does he represent in his text, again deliberately and/orunconsciously, the understandings of what art is and does, theaesthetic ideologi(es) of the time?

Moreover, the text not only will be an outcome of this situated imaginativeprocess, but will be structured in its production and in its reception by variousmaterial social forces; consequently one must ask questions such as these:

who is the intended audience?

who has a say in the texts final form, directly (e.g. editors), orindirectly;

how is it paid for, and how is it distributed, who has access to it,under what conditions, and what effects might these conditionsproduce?

what status does that kind of writing have in the culture?

e. Text and reality

By reality one is to understand, of course, the concrete world of materialobjects, but also philosophical, psychological and social realities, theexistence of which is independent from literature. The theorists task is toformulate the relationship between the text and this reality.

Marxist theories assume that, one way or the other, literature is boundto social and political reality; psychoanalytic theories assume that it primarilyrepresents a psychological reality.

In addition, Russian Formalism, forwarding the concept ofdefamiliarization, (ostranenie, making strange), sees reality made strangeby the literary text. According to formalist theories, particularly to VictorShklovsky, one of the early Russian Formalists, literary texts aredistinguished from non-literary texts by a variety of special linguistic devicesand features, most of them deviations from ordinary usage, which result indefamiliarization, which they define as the capacity of some kinds of writing



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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 fromthe automatic and practical to the artistic.



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f. Text and language

The main feature that distinguishes literature from the other arts is itslinguistic medium, but theories of literature vary greatly in the importancethey ascribe to language.

Many of them, concerned with establishing the distinctiveness ofliterature as an independent category, define literature as a special use oflanguage: 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, Saussureanlinguistics in particular, as their starting point for literary theory.


is language composed of signs which have their meaning onlyin reference to, and through difference from other signs, as inthe popular Saussurean model?

is language an actual indicator of the real world?

Structuralists attack the idea that language is an instrument for reflecting apre-existent reality or for expressing a human intention. They believe thatsubjects are produced by linguistic structures which are always already inplace. A subjects utterances belong to the realm of parole, which isgoverned by langue, the true object of structuralist analysis. This systematicview of communication excludes all subjective processes by whichindividuals interact with others and with society. The poststructuralist critics ofstructuralism introduce the concept of the speaking subject or the subject in

process. Instead of viewing language as an impersonal system, they regardit as always articulated with other systems and especially with subjectiveprocesses. They insisted that all instances of language had to be consideredin a social context.

Every utterance is potentially the site of a struggle: every word that islaunched into social space implies a dialogue and therefore a contestedinterpretation. Language cannot be neatly dissociated from social living; it isalways contaminated, interleaved, coloured by layers of semantic depositsresulting from the endless process of human struggle and interaction. Thisconception 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 ofmeaning 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 multiplicityof the subject), which frequently contradict one another, as the previouspages may have already made obvious.

Consequently, the position we suggest our students is a relativistic nota pluralistic one, since, in our opinion, these different approaches to literaturedo not simply relate to the different aspects of the subject, thus addingtogether to form a single comprehensive vision. Rather than that, the readeris faced with a choice between conflicting theories, with a (too) great variety

of alternatives and open questions.



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Questions and tasks for the student:

1. First, an emphasis on theory tends to undermine reading as an innocentactivity. If we ask ourselves questions about the construction of meaning infiction 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 maycherish their illusions and mourn the loss of innocence, but, if they areserious readers, they cannot ignore the deeper issues raised by the majorliterary theorists in recent years.

Secondly, far from having a sterile effect on our reading, new ways ofseeing literature can revitalize our engagement with texts. Far fromdeadening the spontaneity of the readers response to literary works, varioustheories and concepts raise different questions about literature. They mayask questions from the particular point of view of the writer, of the work, ofthe 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 readingand writing?

2. Enlarge upon Jakobsons model of linguistic communication asapplied to literature.

3. Choose one type of relationship (between author and text, betweenauthor&text and society, between author and reader, between text andreality, 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 inconstructing meaning has been theorized, we feel we must ask another set ofquestions:

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 onceproduced, does not come to life again but through the thaumaturgical activityof reading, in the absence of which writers would remain only wordproducers.(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 andto 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 anobject, a graphic deposit between the pages of a book

Reading and writing cannot be separated, they are reciprocaland complementary. The French narratologist, Gerard Genette, writes inFigures II: The text is that Mebius strip, the two sides of which (internaland external, signifying and signified, writing and reading), twist andchange permanently; on this strip, writing never ceases to read itself, andreading never stops writing and rewriting itself;

Reading as an intellectual/mental activity consisting of: thevisual perception of signs, the abstracting of real, conceptual, orimaginary facts in mental representations, the identification,

comprehension, involuntary memorizing, co-textual and con-textualmovement for coherence and inter- and extra-textual relationships;



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Reading as a social institution, taught and studied in schools,traded on a special market, a constitutive element of culture; it revealsdifference kinds of behaviour, customs, preferences of the readers; ittreasures the written memory of humankind; it establishes interpretativenorms in accordance with the type of text, the taste of the epoch, theevolution 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, whilehaving his/her own textual and extra-textual field; subject of the readingprocess, through his multiple possibilities of interpretation, and dependingon his linguistic, textual, referential, situational competences;

author/object of reading (the type of reader he has in mind), of hisown trans-/meta-/extra-textual influences, and of his writing;

purpose/motivations/intentions of reading - Reading is a pseudo-speech act situation, cumulating different communication intentions:

personal/ professional, informing, amusement, scientific/aesthetic,etc.;

modalities of restoring the meaning of a text (mechanisms of textunderstanding):- literal understanding reading of the lines;- implicit understanding reading between the lines;- referential, (inter-)relational understanding reading beyond thelines, achieved through: aiming at the co-textual coherence,establishing the relationship between the text and the systems ofreference 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 andnovelist Umberto Eco considers the text an organism, a system of internalrelations actualising some possible relations and narcotizing some others.Before a text is produced, we could invent any kind of texts; once it wasproduced, we can make it say a lot of things, but it is impossible/illegitimateto 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 theauthor, imposes new meanings, this way making his own contributionto the text.

(c) Conventions of reading

If an abstract, informed reader becomes the basis for reader-responsecriticism, are the responses ever likely to be empirically valid? The problemmay be that individual readings are given the authority of generalities. Thismight be considered a right moment to remember Wimsatt and Beardsleysaffective fallacy:

The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and whatit 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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This statement represents the theory of New Criticism, which dominated themiddle part of the 20th century. New Criticism rejected the claims of theauthor and focused on the words on the page, the meaning of a text beingavailable in the arrangements of the words of the text and not in other factorssuch as the readers psychology, the authors intention or the historicalcontext: 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 thatpresumption ought to indicate our confidence in the existence of public andgeneralisable operations of reading it is clear that any literary criticismmust assume general operations of reading: all critics must make decisionsabout what can be taken for granted, what must be explicitly argued for, whatwill count as evidence for a particular interpretation and what would count asevidence against it. Indeed, the whole notion of bringing someone to see thata particular interpretation is a good one assumes shared points of departureand 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 thetext says itself depends upon common procedures of reading (Culler 1981:125).

Jonathan Culler in this extract focuses not on the individual reader as asource of meaning, but on the reading community. Reading is a learned andinterpersonal activity, and because it is so rooted in societal education thereare bound to exist common procedures in the reading process. Why, then,no reading ever exhausts a text? Why there never seems to be a finalreading?

Although there may be common ground among readers, the range ofreading groups and personalities seems too large to agree on the

interpretation of a text. It is more likely that groups of readers would performsimilar interpretative moves, but even those moves would be influenced bythe personalities of individual readers, and also by the context in which theyare performed. Similarly, readings of texts by cultures seem to change overtime, and an interpretation that may have seemed definitive for onegeneration 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 actupon the reader.

Author:

language imposes its own rules and we have to conformgrammatically, 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 forcesand constraints as any texts;



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tradition and genre: we read within traditions of reading, and ourassumptions are based on those traditions. Genre expectations createmeaning;

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 takeplace in the mind between responding, articulating and formallycriticising.

2.2. Open vs closed texts

The way a text is read within a culture has political significance. The historyof 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 isa political variant, and is so precisely because the literary work can never (orrarely) corrected, but only interpreted. The text itself cannot be corrected, butreadings of it can. Reception theorists such as Karlheinz Stierle suggest thatpopular literature serves to perpetuate and produce nave readings: thereader collaborates with the text and the text collaborates with the reader inthe production of a self-fulfilling illusion, without using too complex aestheticprocedures.

The same Eco makes a distinction between open and closed texts ,stressing the fact that the reader as an active principle of interpretation is partof 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 givencontents to the expressions he uses. To make his text communicative, the author has toassume 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 (hereafterModel Reader) supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the expressions in the sameway as the author generatively deals with them.

(1979: 7)

In the process of (literary) communication, some authors do not consider thepossibility of their texts being interpreted against a background of codes

different from that intended by them. They have in mind an averageaddressee referred to a given social context, in which they intend to arouse aprecise response. The interpretive path the reader is propelled along is apredetermined one. Moreover, he is not supposed to be a very performativeone. Consider, for example, a Ian Flemmings James Bond kind of novel. Ifwe are, by contrast, to think of the reader James Joyce must have had inmind when writing Ulysses, the profile of a good Ulysses reader can beextrapolated from the text itself, because the pragmatic process ofinterpretation is not an empirical accident independent of the text as text, butis a structural element of its generative process. Such a reader, or evenbetter, the reader of such a text cannot be an illiterate man or someone

unaware of both Homers literary work and Joyces contemporary Ireland, butthe reader is strictly defined by the lexical and the syntactical organization ofthe text.



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2.3. Lisible/Readable/Readerly vsScriptible/Writable/Writerly texts

Roland Barthes, undoubtedly the most entertaining, witty and daring of theFrench theorists of the 1960s and 1970s, repeatedly underlined the

conventionality of all forms of representation. He defines literature as amessage of the signification of things and not their meaning (by significationI refer to the process which produces the meaning and not this meaningitself).

This way, Barthes stresses the process of signification. The worst sin awriter can commit is to pretend that language is a transparent mediumthrough which the reader grasps a solid and unified truth or reality. Thevirtuous writer recognizes the artifice of all writing and proceeds to make playwith it.

Avant-garde writers allow the unconscious of language to rise to thesurface: they allow the signifiers to generate meaning at will and to

undermine the censorship of the signified and its repressive insistence onone meaning.

What might be called Barthes poststructuralist period is best representedby his short essay The Death of the Author (1968, in Barthes 1977), inwhich 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 statesthat 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 theliterary works autonomy/independence from its historical and biographicalbackground. The New Critics believed that the unity of a text lay not in itsauthor'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, correspondingto his intuitions of the world.

Structuralism at its turn, though heavily text-centered, paved the way forthe reintroduction of the reader as a site of critical interest because it focusedon the systems that made meanings possible. If the text is a tissue ofquotations, it is the reader who must process and ultimately realise itsculture.

For the structuralists the reader was less an entity than a function asemiotic, idealized site where meaning ultimately resides. And still, thisreader is difficult to define or locate. Barthes wrote:

We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning, themessage 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 frominnumerable centres of culture. Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher thetext becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, tofurnish 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 nothingbeneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly positsmeaning 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 astext),liberates what might be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is trulyrevolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refiuse God and hishypostases reason, science, law.



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Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theories(1977: 147)

The Author-God here is replaced by an intertextual reader. Barthespronouncements have a political edge, for he sees the refusal to seemeaning as both ultimate and author-centred as a refusal to accepttraditional Western power structures. His essay is the locus classicus of anti-authorial statements.

Barthes author is stripped of all metaphysical status and reduced to alocation (a crossroad), where language, that infinite storehouse of citations,repetitions, echoes and references, crosses and recrosses. The reader isthus free to enter the text from any direction; there is no correct route What isnew is the idea that readers are free to open and close the texts signifyingprocess 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 thegrasp of the signified. This kind of text is a poststructuralist one, totally at themercy of the readers pleasure. The French critic also uses the wordjouissance in Le Plaisir du texte (1973) in contrast to plaisir to describe

different kinds of reading experience (its one of his sporadic attacks on thetradition of realism). Jouissance is often translated as bliss, which suggestssome of the sense of sexual pleasure that the word has in French. Such afeeling is experienced when reading texts which force the reader into somekind of creative, active participation in the act of interpretation. These difficult,thought-provoking texts Barthes calls scriptible/writable/writerly. Theyencourage the reader to produce meanings. On the other hand, realist texts,that make no demands on the reader, discouraging him from freelyreconnecting text and the already written, and allowing the reader only to bea consumer not a producer, because of the familiarity of their conventionalaspects, and their being easily read, are lisible/readable/readerly, and only

provoke the less intense plaisir which is merely comforting, rather thanstimulating. Barthes writes:

what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather theabrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip again. Whichhas 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 thetext, ignores the play of language. If I read Jules Verne, I go fast: I lose discourse, andyet my reading is not hampered by any verbal loss. The other reading skips nothing; itweighs, it sticks to the text, it reads, so to speak, with application and transport,; it isnot (logical) extension that captivates it, the winnowing out of truths, but the layering ofsignificance; as in the childrens game of topping hands, the excitement comes notfrom a processive haste but from a kind of vertical din (the verticality of language andof 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 thesubject of the game the subject of the text.

(Barthes, 1975:11-12)

There are various positions that the critic can take regarding the problem ofwhere meaning resides: the author, the text, the reader.However, there is another approach, adopted by some reader-responsetheorists, in which meaning is seen as a product of the interrelationshipbetween textual features and reader knowledge.




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1. The following statements are concerned with the power and authority ofthe 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 aprivileged position of knowledge about the text.4. The author is the source of meaning but cannot always know thatmeaning.5. The author is the initial source of meaning, but meaning becomes public atthe 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, orhimself turns into that which is attacked, challenged, fought back.

Keith Green and Jill LeBihan, in Critical Theory and Practice (1996), begintheir 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 themeaning of a text?2. What is the role of the readers own personality in the interpretation of atext?3. If the meaning of a text is personal, is there an unlimited number ofpossible readings?

4. How accurate is to speak of interaction between text and reader, orbetween 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 ofmeaning.

The following quotations, followed by commentaries, analyze the wayreaders make sense of texts.

W. Iser: the gaps in the textThe following is an extract from Wolfgang Isers essay Interaction betweenText and Reader:

Communication in literature is a process set in motion and regulated, not by a givencode, but by a mutually restrictive and magnifying interaction between the explicit and theimplicit, between revelation and concealment. What is concealed spurs the reader intoaction, but this action is also controlled by what is revealed; the explicit in its turn istransformed when the implicit has been brought to light. When the reader bridges thegaps, communication begins. The gaps function as a kind of pivot on which the wholetext-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 ismarked by the various types of negation which arise in the course of the reading. Blanksand negations both control the process of communication in their own different ways: theblanks leave open the connection between textual perspectives, and so spur the readerinto coordinating these perspectives and patterns in other words, they induce the



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Chapter 2 - Reader-Oriented Theoriesreader to perform basic operations within the text. The various types of negation invokefamiliar and determinate elements or knowledge only to cancel them out. What iscancelled, however, remains in view, and thus brings about modifications in the readersattitude 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 thestructures of the text and a realization or actualization of its gaps. Reading istherefore a dynamic process. It is neither predetermined by genericconventions nor open to infinite interpretation. The advantage of Isers theoryis 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 readersstruggle with the text:

This I which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes whichare infinite or more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost). Objectivity and subjectivity are ofcourse forces which can take over the text, but they are forces which have no affinity withit. 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 thatultimately my subjectivity has the generality of stereotypes. (Barthes, 1974: 10)

Barthes considers the I/the reader to be a compound of other texts, eventhough not immediately or simply identifiable, not a uniquely experiencingindividual. Therefore, the subjectivity with which he is supposed to function inrelation to a text is only an image. Thus, the subject that encounters the textis not a stable, unique I, but a stereotype constituted from various othertextual 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 inthe 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 textin such a way as to reduce the polysemantic interpretation in keeping withthe expectations aroused, thus extracting an individual, configurativemeaning (Iser, idem: 279). Here, Iser talks about the text provokingresponses. But how can we separate that which the text provokes from thatwhich the readers inscribe on the text?


1. How many realizations are possible? (Iser seems to suggest an infinitybecause the texts full potential is made possible by an infinite number ofreaders.)2. What form might they take?3. What are the gaps Iser speaks of?

H. R. Jauss: horizons of expectationsJauss, 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 (whichignores history), and social theories (which ignore the text). Writing within aperiod of social unrest at the end of the 1960s, Jauss and others wanted toquestion the old canon off German literature and to show that it was perfectly



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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 andassumptions operating in a particular period. Ordinary science does itsexperimental work within the mental world of a particular paradigm, until anew paradigm displaces the old one and establishes new assumptions.

Jauss uses the term horizon of expectations to describe the criteriareaders use to judge literary texts in any given period. These criteria will helpthe reader decide how to judge a poem as, for example, an epic, or a tragedyor a pastoral; it will also, in a more general way, cover what is to be regardedas 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 saythat Alexander Popes poetry was judged according to criteria that werebased upon values of clarity, naturalness and stylistic decorum. However, thisdoes not establish once and for all the value of Popes poetry. During thesecond half of the 18 th century, commentators began to question his status asa 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: wenow value his poems for their wit, complexity, moral insight and renewal ofliterary tradition.

The original horizon of expectations only tells us how the work was valuedand 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, thatits 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 toeach reader in each period. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in amonologue.

(Jauss, 1982: 24)

This means, obviously, that we will never be able to survey the successivehorizons which flow from the time of a work down to the present day andthen, with an Olympian detachment, to sum up the works final value ormeaning. To do so would be to ignore our own historical situation. Whoseauthority should we accept? That of the first readers? The combined opinionof readers over time? The aesthetic judgment of the present?

Jausss answers to these questions derive from the philosophicalhermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, a follower of Heidegger(hermeneutics was a term originally applied to the interpretation of sacredtexts).

Gadamer argues that all interpretations of past literature arise from adialogue between past and present. Our attempts to understand a work willdepend 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 wastrying to answer in its own dialogue with history. Our present perspectivealways involves a relationship to the past, but at the same time the past canonly be grasped through the limited perspective of the present. Put in thisway, the task of establishing knowledge of the past seems hopeless. Still, ahermeneutical notion of understanding does not separate knower and object

in the familiar manner of empirical science; rather it views understanding as afusion of past and present: we cannot make our journey into the past withouttaking the present with us.



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Jauss recognizes that a writer may directly affront the prevailingexpectations of his or her day. He, himself, examines the case of the Frenchpoet Baudelaire whose Les Fleurs du malcreated, in the 19th century, uproarand attracted legal prosecution, by offending the norms of bourgeois moralityand the canons of romantic poetry. Nevertheless, the poem also immediatelyproduced a new aesthetic horizon of expectations.

2.5. The Subjective Perspective

The 20th century has seen a steady assault upon the objective certainties of19th century science. Einsteins theory of relativity alone cast doubt on thebelief that objective knowledge was simply a relentless and progressiveaccumulation of facts. The philosopher, T. S. Kuhn, has shown that whatemerges as a fact in science depends upon the frame of reference whichthe scientific observer brings to the object of understanding. Gestaltpsychology argues that the human mind does not perceive things in the worldas unrelated bits and pieces but as configurations of elements, themes, or

meaningful, organized wholes. Individual items look different in differentcontexts, and even within a single field of vision they will be interpretedaccording to whether they are seen as figure or ground. These approachesand others have insisted that the perceiver is active and not passive in theact of perception. In the case of the famous duck-rabbit puzzle, only theperceiver can decide how to orient the configuration of lines. Is it a ducklooking left, or a rabbit looking right? How does this modern emphasis on theobservers active role affect literary theory?

Consider once more Roman Jakobsons model of linguisticcommunication:

WRITER CONTEXT READERWRITING

CODE

The Russian Formalist, the same as the representatives of the AmericanNew 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 ofdiscourse by having a set to the message, something to say: a poem isabout itself (its form, its imagery, its literary meaning) before it is about thepoet, the reader or the world. The two essays The Intentional Fallacy (1946)and the The Affective Fallacy (1949) written by Wimsatt in collaboration withBeardsley, engage with the

addresser/writer message/text addressee/readerin the pursuit of an objective criticism which abjures both the personal inputof the writer (intention) and the emotional effect on the reader (affect) inorder purely to study the words on the page and how the artifact works.

However, if we reject this formalist perspective and adopt that of thereader or audience, the whole orientation of Jakobsons diagram changes.From this angle, we can say that the poem has no real existence until it isread; its meaning can only be discussed by its readers. We differ about

interpretations only because our ways of reading differ. It is the reader whoapplies the code in which the message is written and in this way actualiseswhat would otherwise remain only potentially meaningful. The success of thispiece of communication depends on the viewers knowledge of the code,



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and the viewers ability to complete what is incomplete, orselect what issignificant and ignore what is not.

Seen in this way the addressee is not a passive recipient of an entirelyformulated meaning, but an active agent in the making of meaning. His taskis made more difficult if the message is not stated within a completely closedsystem.

The question of meaning can also be addressed by a range of questionsthat have bothered theorists of language (the literary one included) for a verylong time.


Where is meaning? Is it in the authors intentions, in the text, or in thereading?

- 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 meaningwe 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, orsomewhere in between? Can, in this case, the text have meanings ofwhich the author was not aware?

- If the meaning is in the reading, is that an informed reading, or anyreading, and what difference does that distinction really signal? Is it inan ideal non-historical reading, or in a historically and culturally placedreading?

2.6. The Nature of Meaning

All literary theories have to account for meaning, whether as that which iscommunicated directly from author to reader (I. A. Richards), or that which isinherent in the words of a text (New Critics), or that which arises from itsstructure (structuralism).

The approaches considered in this chapter make a special study of theproblems that arise when we extract meaning from a text through the processof 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 ofinterpretation. Any theory of interpretation has to come to grips with adivergence of views as to its scope: a divergence which is connected to themore general philosophical debate between objectivism and relativism, thatis, between the conviction that there is some permanent a-historical matrix orframework to which we can ultimately appeal in determining the nature ofrationality, knowledge, truth, reality, goodness or rightness, and the opposingview that there is no such matrix, and that we are irredeemably caught in ajungle of mutually exclusive values and conceptual schemes, none of whichcan prove its correctness against any other (Bernstein 1984).

Any account of interpretation and of reading presupposes a number ofassumptions about the nature of meaning, understanding and

communication, and this gives rise to a recurring set of problems. Meaningcan be conceived of either as that which arises from the words andpropositions of the text, constituting its semantic autonomy, or as thatwhich the author or reader as subject means.



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The objective fact of the text is considered against the subjective act ofintending or making sense (Ricoeur 1976: 12-14). The specific form in whichthis alternative exists in literary studies is the objectivist/subjectivist debate,the former position arguing that there is one correct meaning inhering in anytext, the latter that there are as many meanings as there are readers. Thesetwo positions correspond to the logicist and historicist accounts of meaning:- the former argues that meaning is an ideal object which can be identifiedand reidentified by different individuals at different times,- the latter claims that meaning is an historical event determined by thecontext in which it occurred and possibly also by the historical situation of itsinterpreter.

Moreover, in dealing with our experience of literary texts, we encounter thequestion of reference: the fictional nature of literary texts causes them to losethe guarantee of reality as touchstone, and makes the process of legitimizingan interpretation all the more difficult (see Text and reality above).

Such assumptions, and such problems, lead on to even vasterphilosophical and linguistic questions about the nature of meaning, its

relationship to history, and the relationship of semantics to pragmatics (thestudy of those features of language whose meaning depends on time, personor place), of experience to knowledge, of particulars to universals. Theapparently simple question: how far does a text determine its own meaning,and how far is that meaning determined by a reader? is thus anything butsimple. Theorists of interpretation, approaching these issues with differentmethods and starting from different premises, are drawn into widerphilosophical, psychological and linguistic debates.

At this point in our study, we thought it might be of some interest to have abroader perspective and skim through the positions of the mostrepresentative 20th century critical theories concerning the already formulated

question of whether or not the text itself triggers the readers interpretation, orwhether the readers own interpretive strategies impose solutions upon theproblems thrown up by the text.

2.7. Reader-Response Criticism

These are general positions within the understanding that the meaning of atext is what happens when the reader reads it. The positions presupposevarious attitudes towards such considerations as:

the question of in what sense a text, ink-marks on a page orelectrons on a screen, exist,

the extent to which knowledge is objective or subjective,

the question of whether the world as we experience it isculturally constructed or has an essential existence; how thegap, historically, culturally and semiotically (as reading is adecoding of signs which have varying meanings) between thereader and the writer is bridged, and the extent to which it isbridged,

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 aprivate act governed by a response to the relativelyindependent codes of the text,



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the question of what the process of reading is like, what itentails,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 innerrealization which can be shared across consciousnesses (as we sharefundamental paradigms, symbols, etc), the real meaning of the text is themeaning created by the individual's psyche in response to the work, at theunconscious level and at a subsequent conscious level, as the materialprovided by the text opens a path between the two, occasioning richer self-knowledge and realization.

The Hermeneutic view:The text means differently because the reader decodes it according to hisworld-view, his horizons, yet having the understanding that the text may be

operating within a different horizon; hence there is an interaction between theworld of the text as it was constructed and the world of the reader. Thereader can only approach the text with his own foreunderstanding, which isgrounded in history. However, as the text is similarly grounded in history, andas 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 aswell indeterminate, needs to be completed, to be concretized. The reality ofthe 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 inhow texts work, in the genre and tradition of the text, etc., as the work isconstructed according to sets of conventions which have their basis in anobjective, socially shared reality. The meaning then depends largely on thecompetence of the reader in responding to the structures and practices of thetext 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 intrinsicallyideological, i.e. express attitudes towards and beliefs about certain sets ofsocial and political realities, relations, values and powers. As a text isproduced in a certain social and material milieu, it cannot not haveembedded ideological assumptions. The reader himself will have ideologicalconvictions and understandings as well, often unrecognized, as is the natureof ideology, which understandings will condition and direct the reading andthe 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 mayreinforce (potentially pernicious, even if only because unrecognized) aspectsof the readers (culturally produced) ideology, and/or the reader may miss



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meanings and connections for want of an understanding of the ideologicalstructure of the text.

The Post-structuralist view(s):Meaning is indeterminate, it is not in the text but in the play of language andthe nuances of conventions in which the reader is immersed: hence thereader constructs a text as he participates in this play, driven by theinstabilities and meaning potentials of the semantic and rhetorical aspects ofthe text.

Stanley Fishs view here is that the reader belongs to an interpretivecommunity 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 ofthe reader as b

reception. theory & practices - the course

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