Phenomenology and Reader ‘Redefined

Reading Research Journal, 2017

Background: Reader-oriented approach met its climax in cultural and literary theory in the late 1970s. Its origins could be traced back to the early 1930s when attention to the reading process emerged as a reaction against the rejection of the reader’s role in creating meaning. From a philosophical view, reader-oriented criticism has its roots in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. As with Husserl’s ‘bracketing’ of the real object, the actual historical context of the text, its author, conditions of production and readership are ignored; however, phenomenological criticism aims at a wholly ‘immanent’ reading of the text, thoroughly unaffected by anything outside it. Purpose: The present study, while demonstrating the critical concepts and methodology of the reception theory, seeks to shed light on the significant role played by the reader in the corresponding approaches. Method: The present study compatibly provides a close analysis which consists of selection and discussion of theoretical and descriptive material as well as a detailed comparison of theories in terms of their applicability. The research method of the present paper is thus library-based and categorized as theoretical study; correspondingly, the present paper will be entirely literature-based in that, in the academic library research, the conclusions are based on the analysis of data of a particular area. Findings: Louise M. Rosenblatt’s categorization of Efferent and Aesthetic Readings, and her concepts of Determinate and Indeterminate Meanings proved to be of central significance to the reader-oriented approach. Similarly, Hans Robert Juass’s ‘Horizons of Expectation’ and his idea concerning three ways of reaction to the texts including Negation, Assimilation, and Creation, together with Wolfgang Iser’s dichotomy of the Implied and Actual Reader and his innovative concepts of Concretization and Gaps played a highly influential role in the development of this approach. Moreover, attention should be paid to major contemporary figures including Stanley Fish and his notion of Affective Stylistics and Interpretive Community, Norman Holland and the idea of threefold stages of reading including Defense-Fantasy-Transformation, David Bleich and his definition of Experience-Oriented Interpretations, and Gerald Prince with his concept of triplet Real-Virtual-Ideal Readers. Results: Reader-response theory could be categorized into several modes including: 1) “Transactional” approach used by Louise Rosenblatt and Wolfgang Iser 2) “Historical context” favored by Hans Robert Juass 3) “Affective stylistics” presented by Stanley Fish 4) “Psychological” approach employed by Norman Holland 5) “Subjective” approach in the work of David Bleich 6) “Social” approach in the mature works of Stanley Fish 7) “Textual” approach in the work of Gerald Prince Implications: The mechanism of the process of reading could be more elaborated if explored in terms of the main concepts of the approaches of the reception theory. Originality: The present study emphasizes the role played by the “reader” in the reading process and the significance of the reader in the construction of meaning, which has been argued for in all the approached investigated.

IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2013

A literary work used to be looked at and received as the product of the writer's own horizon, imagination and aesthetic creativity. This conception of the text focused on and tried to understand a single meaning allocated to the text and that fixed and final meaning is nothing but the intention of the author of the text. It was claimed that responses to the same text would necessarily have to be the same albeit at different times and by different readers. The text was doomed to a pregiven and single meaning and unchangeable reality prior to it. Yet, twentieth century criticism has drawn a considerable attention and critical importance to the possibility that responses and interpretations to a given text evolve and develop from time to time and from reader to another reader. The approach of this theory which is called reader response theory in the phenomenology of reading revolves around the text and the reader and argues that the relationship between them is ontological in its nature. Ontological in the sense that a written text must have a reader and that the reader lends genuine value to the text. This paper is going to explore how, according to this theory, a text is open to meanings and is capable of producing different responses.

The Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2017

ABSTRACT: The differences and difficulties found upon doing literary research are analyzed. The fact that researchers also interpret is highlighted as well as the need for sufficient time and freedom to do their research. The use of adequate selection criteria, the subjectivity and intuition of the exegete, as well as the use of concepts such as respect for the literal meaning (Umberto Eco) and the analogy of proportion (Inger Enkvist) are proposed as appropriate guidelines for establishing renovated, but systematic reading of texts. Keywords: literary theory, hermeneutics, research strategies, reading.

2020

The interpretation of a reading is a dialogical act, a meeting place of different voices that converge in the reader’s mind. Among those voices, are the ones that the reader recognises in the work itself—characters, narrator, author—as well as the others that he invokes and whose origin lies in previous experiences and knowledge—his own voices, voices of close people, voices of other authors and characters, etc. All of them model the thoughts and decisions of the reader and guide him in his interpretation and understanding of the work. But those voices do not always live in harmony and can be in conflict, confronted, opposed. It is in this dialogical dynamic where the most central voices that integrate others become especially relevant since the final interpretation of the reader will depend on them. The study we present aims to offer an integral and comprehensive explanation of the process of literary interpretation based on a review of the dialogic perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin (...

Beckett and Phenomenology. Ed. Matthew Feldman, Ulrika Maude. (London: Continuum Press, 2009). 177-193., 2009

This chapter examines and extends the interaction between Beckett and the phenomenological study of aesthetic response in reading. Posing the question of what occurs when one reads The Unnamable, the chapter first places Beckett within the framework of the two leading phenomenologically-derived theories of aesthetic response; those of Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser. Following Husserl, Ingarden divides the literary work and its correlates in consciousness into interdependent strata which are concretized in a “polyphonic harmony” by the reader. It is argued that, according to such criteria, Beckett’s work fails to achieve such an aesthetic synthesis and therefore Ingarden’s theory does not so much capture what reading a Beckett text might involve as delineate Beckett’s divergences from classical texts. Taking up the challenge of creating a theory that would encompass the nature of Beckett’s work, Iser does allow for the many frustrations and so-called ‘minus functions’ of the text, but, as Iser is overtly indebted to Beckett in the formation of his theory, the difficulty arises whereby rather than being a theoretical account of what the reader undergoes when reading The Unnamable, Iser’s work amounts to a description of what occurs in the text itself. This difficulty – that The Unnamable stages its own reading, and therefore places the actual reader elsewhere – forms the basis for the tentative phenomenological reading of the reader’s response to the text. As the reading is already staged within the work the text not only pre-empts the reading act but also thereby heighten awareness of that act and leaves the reader within a shifting amalgam of his or her own consciousness and those consciousness which are adopted and rejected by the Unnamable.

Orbis Litterarum, 1979

Some critics see the recent interest in readers and reading as a threat not only to authorship but to the very notion of text. This paper contends that no such threat exists since contemporary concepts of the reader are rather the result of a displacement which works to extend the privileges of literariness and authorship.

Chapter 3: Schleiermacher's Historical Hermeneutics Dilthey traces the origins of modern hermeneutics to the Renaissance and the Reformation, that is, to the recovery of classical texts which could not be regarded as transparent, and to the breakdown of clerical authority and the consequent democratization of reading practices. On the one hand the sheer remoteness of Graeco-Roman texts from the (then) present called for new and more self-conscious interpretative methodologies. On the other, the pluralism of the Protestant revolution which generated a new kind of reader of biblical texts required a spelling out of interpretative principles so as to create a degree of order in a potentially chaotic cultural and political situation. But I would like to take the argument further by focussing on the immense historical changes taking place from the later eighteenth century onwards, changes which in a startlingly short time generated the technological, economic and cultural face of European modernity. In the first decade of the twenty-first century these changes are still in train, only operating still faster with the e-revolution. The contemporary term for the process, theorized by Ihab Hassan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey and others, is postmodernity. But, as the German theorist Jürgen Habermas has argued, the "post" simply represents a further phase of the larger project of modernization. In short, we are still living out the massive historical transition initiated, let's say, two to three hundred years ago. My interest here is in one aspect only of modernity: its capacity to generate crisis, what has been termed the shock of the new. Modernization, change accelerating much too fast, creates an unprecedented historical, that is, cultural rupture. It means all too suddenly losing touch with your past, something Europeans had perhaps never before experienced on the same scale. When you lose touch with your past, that is, when settled traditions collapse, you become specifically aware of the past as something in its own right, i.e. as different from the present-and from you in the present. This produces, in the nineteenth century, theories of "alienation" which would have been incomprehensible a little earlier-because alienation from one's own past, which amounts to a self-alienation, is a strange and deeply disturbing phenomenon, psychologically and socially unsettling, requiring a complete revision of systems of belief, ways of behaving and so on. In this situation it becomes necessary to thematize the past, to foreground the idea of the past. In short, to become conscious of something called "history". The birth of historical consciousness by the beginning of the nineteenth century goes hand in hand with industrialization, the gradual failure of church authority, the rapid decline of feudal aristocracy following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars which spread the principles of the revolution throughout Europe and, finally, the coming to dominance

How would a phenomenologist read literature? This paper looks at the way key phenomenological philosophers provide insights into how to interpret literary works.

2017

The article is devoted to the problem of approaches to the interpretation of the text. It highlights the viewpoints of both Russian and foreign scholars on the text analysis to promote readers’ relevant assessment and interpretation. The authors research the text from the view point of genre, history, context and individual aspects. They maintain that due consideration of the work from different angles is the cornerstone of a comprehensive analysis.