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3 Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art |
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During the last decades we have witnessed a change of paradigm in the theories of textual interpretation. In a structuralistic framework, to take into account the role of the addressee looked like a disturbing intrusion since the current dogma was that a textual structure should be analyzed in itself and for the sake of itself, to try to isolate its formal structures. In contrast, during the 1970s literary theorists, as well as linguists and semioticians, have focused on the pragmatic aspect of reading. The dialectics between Author and Reader, Sender and Addressee, Narrator and Narratee has generated a crowd, indeed impressive, of semiotic or extrafictional narrators, subjects of the uttered utterance (énonciation énoncée), focalizers, voices, metanarrators, as well as an equally impressive crowd of virtual, ideal, implied or implicit, model, projected, presumed, informed readers, metareaders, archireaders, and so on. |
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Many different theoretical approaches (hermeneutics, the aesthetics of reception, reader-response criticism, semiotic theories of interpretative cooperation, until the scarcely homogeneous archipelago of deconstruction) have in common an interest in the textual roots of the interpretative phenomenon. This means that they are not focusing on the empirical results of given personal or collective acts of reading (studied by a sociology of reception) but rather on the very function of construc- |
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Early versions of this chapter were "Theorien Interpretativer Kooperation," a lecture given at Konstanz University, May 1986 (now in Eco 1987); and "Intentio Lectoris," a lecture for the Queens College Visiting Humanist Series, New York, Fall 1987 (see Differentia 2 [Spring 1988]). |
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