Mateja Pezdirc Bartol
Vloga bralca v poglavitnih literarnoteoretičnih smereh 20. stoletja
The Role of the Reader in Major 20th-century Literary Theories
Slovenski sinopsis
English synopsis
English summary
Slovenski sinopsis
Članek skuša sistematično predstaviti najpomembnejše literarnoteoretične
smeri 20. stoletja, in sicer glede na to, kako v svoj metodološki
pristop vključujejo bralca, kakšno funkcijo mu pripisujejo pri tvorbi
pomenov besedila, kako opredeljujejo status literarnega dela ipd. Čeprav
bralca kot predmet literarne vede upoštevajo vse smeri, pa postane
središčna kategorija raziskovanja šele konec 60. let z razvojem
recepcijske estetike in teorije bralčevega odziva.
English synopsis
The study is a survey of major 20th-century literary theories in terms
of their treatment of the reader, the function they assign to the reader
in the creation of a text's meanings, their views on the status of a
literary text, etc. Although the reader is recognized as a relevant
category by all literary schools, he becomes the focus of research only
in the late 1960s with the development of the Reception Aesthetics and
the Reader-Response Criticism.
English summary
Though both writers and literary theoreticians have been aware of the
reader's importance for centuries, in the past his role was little
studied. In literary studies, the reader has been present from the
beginning, but always at the margin of research. In the 19th century it
was entirely overshadowed by the interest in the author, and in the
first half of the 20th century by the interest in the text itself. Thus
the reader became the central category of research only in the late
1960s, independently in two different parts of the world: in Germany
with the development of the Reception Aesthetics at the University of
Konstanz (H. R. Jauss, W. Iser) and in the United States with the
Reader-Response Criticism (S. Fish, J. Culler, N. Holland). Both
theories challenged the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the literary
text and assigned the reader an active role in the creation of literary
meaning. However, reader-centred theory is not a uniform and systematic
field of research; it includes a number of different views and methods
aimed at exploring questions like: does a literary text have an
objective meaning; what conditions need to be fullfilled for a text to
become meaningful for the reader; does the reader's understanding of a
literary text depend on the historical situation; what processes are
happening in the reader's mind during reading, etc.
The article surveys the major authors and texts of the Reception
Aesthetics and the Reader-Response Criticism. Since the two theories
developed as a response to earlier schools and theories and also
significantly marked later ones, the role assigned to the reader in
other relevant literary theories is also reviewed, thus in the British
literary criticism of the 1920s and 1930s, the American New Criticism,
the Russian formalism, structuralism, psychoanalytical theories and
deconstruction.
