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doozy floop - It's called reception! Or reader-response theory!
Charles Martindale's book Redeeming the Text: Latin poetry and the hermeneutics of reception is a very good introduction with an overview of the main theorists in the field, and reading it will orient you in what's going on at the moment (it's ten years old, but things haven't changed much). Andrew Bennett's edited collection Readers and Reading collects a lot of the most influential primary sources (Iser, Fish, Michel de Certeau etc).
There are three main strands of reception theory: the one that's called Reception Theory (or 'Receptionaesthetik' or something, it's a German word), which is associated with 'the Constance school' and/or 'The Konstanz School', particularly Hans-Georg Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, who were disciples of Georg Gadamer (who wrote a book called, I think, Truth and Method). On this you could read anything by Wolfgang Iser and/or Hans-Georg Jauss's The Aesthetics of Reception.
The second tradition is deconstruction, mostly influenced by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Stanley Fish is the guy that brought this into the Anglophone tradition and you could read his book Is There A Text In This Class? though I don't like it hugely. I'd recommend Barthes, as previously mentioned, especially the essays 'The Death of the Author', 'Writing Reading', 'Brecht and Discourse', 'From Work to Text', 'Change the Object Itself', 'The Grain of the Voice', 'Musica Practica', 'Outcomes of the Text' and 'The Theory of the Text'. All but the last are in either The Rustle of Language or Image - Music - Text: 'The Theory of the Text' is in a collection edited by Robert Young entitled Untying the Text. You could also read Barthes' incredibly beautiful short book The Pleasure of the Text.
The third is mostly focussed around pop culture, and looks at queer and/or resistant readings. I don't have quite such a bibliography in my head for this one, but there are lots of introductory readers for the study of pop culture. You could also read Alexander Doty's Making Things Perfectly Queer, Janice Radway's Reading the Romance and/or Tania Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women, and Michel de Certau's The Practice of Everyday Life. Or there's Stuart Hall's essay on 'Coding/Decoding' (? can't remember the title) and Erica Rand's book Barbie's Queer Accessories. Work on fan fiction by Henry Jenkins and/or Constance Penley is also interesting in this regard.
If you get interested in this stuff, I understand Bristol University is launching an MA specifically in reception in 2007/8, so you could go and study it for a whole year! |
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