The Reader :: Literature Literary Text Papers

The Reader In the academic study of literature very little attention has been paid to the ordinary reader, the subjective individual who reads a particular text. David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, in their paper The form of reading: Empirical studies of literariness state, Almost no professional attention is being paid to the ordinary reader, who continues to read for the pleasure of understanding the world of the text rather than for the development of a deconstructive or historicist perspective. The concerns that an ordinary reader seems likely to have about a literary text, such as its style, its narrative structure, or the reader's relation to the author, the impact on the reader's understanding or feelings - such concerns now seem of little interest. In this paper I should like to study a few kinds of reader and the subjectivity of their responses to the objectivity found within literary texts, quoting some views found within reader-response criticism. Before I begin, I should like to consider what is meant by the term 'literary text', and what is meant by the objectivity of it. According to Terry Eagleton, [1] the definition of 'literary', as advanced by the Russian formalists, (who included in their ranks are Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Osip Brik, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Eichenbaum and Boris Tomashevsky), is the peculiar use of language. Literature is said to transform and intensify ordinary language, deviating from the everyday colloquial tongue. The literariness of the language spoken could be determined by the texture, rhythm and resonance of the words used. There is a kind of disproportion between the signifier and the signified, by virtue of the abstract excesses of the language, a language that flaunts itself and evokes rich imagery. Eagleton argues that what distinguishes the literary language from other forms of discourse is the way it 'deforms' ordinary languages in various ways. Under the pressure of literary devices, ordinary language is intensified, condensed, twisted, telescoped, drawn out and turned on its head. [1] According to Wolfgang Iser, [2] a literary work has two poles; the aesthetic and the artistic. The artistic pole is the author's text, and the aesthetic is the realisation accomplished by the reader. Hence the literary work cannot be considered as the actualisation of, or identical to, the text, but is situated somewhere between the two. Iser speaks of the text as a virtual character that cannot be reduced to the reality of text or to the subjectivity of the reader, and it derives its dynamism from that virtuality.