Reading Theory

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Reading Theory
Dale Sullivan dale.sullivan_at_ndsu.edu
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Something in the actual text triggers an
interpretation of genre in in the reader, an
interpretation that then dominates the readers
own creation of what Wolfgang Iser calls a
virtual text. Jerome Bruner
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• Review
• writing about texts and integrating texts
• entering into a scholarly conversation
• absorbing and responding to texts
• summarizing and springboarding
• seeing genres as typified responses to recurrent
  situations
• DEFTing, reader response theory
• reading cultural codes and signs, semiotics

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Semiotics/Structuralism in a nutshell A method
of reading individual texts as reflecting a tacit
set of cultural codes and as governed by ways of
seeing the world. A sequence of events is a
story, but the telling of the sequence of events
is and artificial structuring based on available
patterns and character types. The telling is
discourse. The further the telling of the story
is from a co-present, straightforward comment on
shared perception, the more literary it is. A
piece of literature can always be analyzed by
mapping its population of binary oppositions. A
piece of literature can always be analyzed in
terms of its narrative structure and character
types. Literature is a self-referencing,
intertextual system, so a piece of literature
can always be analyzed by discovering its
intertextual references.
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A Collection of Comments on the Readers
Construction of Meaning by Interacting with Cues
in the Text Booth authorial intentions and
indwelling Tolkien authors as makers of
secondary worlds Ong the fictionalized
reader Eco inferential walks Rosenblatt the
aesthetic reader Iser the virtual dimension of
the text Fish
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When someone paints a picture . . . recounts the
Passion according to St. Matthew in a Gospel
oratorio, I can sometimes come to understand and
share his intentions and the shared intentions of
others participating with me and I sometimes
know them with a sureness that has often been
overlooked. That the resulting knowledge is a
kind of indwelling . . . , that it includes
subjective states not provable or demonstrable by
ordinary hard tests should not trouble us . .
. Wayne Booth
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The Author makes a Secondary World which your
mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is
true it accords with the laws of that world.
You therefore believe it, while you are, as it
were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the
spell is broken the magic, or rather art, has
failed. You are then out in the Primary world
again, looking at the little abortive Secondary
World from the outside. J. R. R. Tolkien
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. . . the writer must construct the reader in
his imagination . . . the audience must
correspondingly fictionalize itself. A reader
has to play the role in which the author has
cast him, which seldom coincides with his role
in the rest of of actual life. Walter Ong
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In order to make forecasts which can be approved
by the further course of the fabula, the Model
Reader resorts to intertextual frames. The
reader is encouraged to activate this
hypothesis by a lot of already recorded
narrative situations (intertextual frames). To
identify these frames the reader has to
walk, so to speak, outside the text, in order
to gather intertextual support. I call these
interpretative moves inferential walks (32). The
type of cooperation requested of the reader, the
flexibility of the text in validating (or at
least in not contradicting) the widest possible
range of interpretative proposals--all this
characterizes narrative structures as more or
less open (33). Umberto Eco, The Role of
the Reader
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Louise Rosenblatt . . . only a reader in
aesthetic transaction with the text can
synthesize the parts into a whole or structure
which is a work of art. The reader draws on his
own reservoir or past life experience he has
notions of what to expect of a novel or poem or
satire. But he has to use whatever he brings to
the text and build out of his responses to the
patterned verbal cues a unifying principle. The
structure of the work of art corresponds
ultimately to what he perceives as the
relationships that he has woven among the various
elements or parts of his lived-through
experience. Instead of thinking of the structure
of the work of art as something statically
inherent in the text, we need to recognize the
dynamic situation in which the reader, in the
give-and-take with the text, senses or organizes
a relationship among the various parts of his
lived-through experience.
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The fact that completely different readers can be
differently affected by the reality of a
particular text is ample evidence of the degree
to which literary texts transform reading into a
creative process that is far above mere
perception of what is written. The literary text
activates our own faculties, enabling us to
recreate the world it presents. The product of
this creative activity is what we might call the
virtual dimension of the text, which endows it
with its reality. This virtual dimension is not
the text itself, nor is it the imagination of
the reader it is the coming together of text
and imagination (279). Wolfgang Iser, The
Implied Reader
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. . . all objects are made and not found, and
that they are made by the interpretive
strategies we set in motion. This does not,
however, commit me to subjectivity because the
means by which they are made are social and
conventional. That is, the you who does the
interpretative work that puts poems and
assignments and lists into the world is a
communal you and not an isolated your (331). .
. . we have readers whose consciousnesses are
constituted by a set of conventional notions
which when put into operation constitute in turn
a conventional, and conventionally seen, object
(332). Of course poems are not the only objects
that are constituted in unison by shared ways of
seeing (332). Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in
This Class