On reader responsibility

An introduction

Clara B. Joseph

Williams Ortiz Gaye

pp. 1-12

in: Williams Ortiz Gaye, Clara B. Joseph (eds), Theology and literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

Contemporary theories of reading have been heavily determined by new criticism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, and their influence continues, variously, in New historicism, post-structuralism, as also in postcolonialism and cultural studies. In general, the millennial academic tendency is often marked as "postmodernist," positioning the reader, the author, and the work as "text"—at once constructed and relative. Within this theoretical (and practical) worldview, questioning becomes man engaging and reiterative performance and undecidability the norm. Hence, to resurrect the function of the reader in terms of responsibility, the duty-bound ability to respond, in such a situation becomes more than a simple resurrection of Roland Barthes' structuralist substitution of function of the reader for the reader. Instead, it contemplates the ethics of action and reaction, of dharma (duty) and karma (action-reaction) in short, of consequences for an act done casually reading.

Cited authors

Barthes Roland