< previous page page_46 next page >

Page 46
will be worthwhile to debate the problem of textuality where the very notion of text seems to dissolve into a whirl of individual readings.
1. Archaeology
Undoubtedly the universe of literary studies has been haunted during the last years by the ghost of the reader. To prove this assumption it will be interesting to ascertain how and to what extent such a ghost has been conjured up by different theorists, coming from different theoretical traditions. The first who explicitly spoke of an "implied author" ("carrying the reader with him") was certainly Wayne Booth (1961). After him we can isolate two independent lines of research, which until a certain moment ignored each other, namely, the semiotico-structural and the hermeneutic.
The first line stems from Communications 8. In this now "historical" issue, Barthes (1966) spoke of a material author that cannot be identified with the narrator; Todorov (1966) evoked the opposition "image of the narratorimage of the author" and recovered the previous theories of the point of view (from H. James, Percy Lubbock, and Forster until Pouillon); Genette (1966) started to elaborate the categories (definitely dealt with in 1972) of voice and focalization. Then, through some observations of Kristeva (1970) on "textual productivity," certain lucid pages of Lotman (1970), the still empirical concept of "archilecteur" by Riffaterre (1971), and the discussions about the conservative stand-point of Hirsch (1967), the debate developed through the most elaborated notions of implied reader in Corti (1976) and Chatman (1978).
It is interesting that the last two authors drew their definition directly from Booth, ignoring the similar definition proposed by Iser in 1972. Likewise, I elaborated my notion of Model Reader along the mainstream of the semiotic-structuralistic line (Eco 1979a), matching these results with some suggestions borrowed from various discussions on the modal logic of narrativity (mainly van Djik and Schmidt) as well as from some hints furnished by Weinrichnot to speak of the idea of an "ideal reader" designed by Joyce in Finnegans Wake. It is also interesting that Corti (1976) traces the discussion on the nonempirical author back to Foucault (1969), where, in a poststructuralistic atmosphere, the problem of the author is posited as a "way of being within the discourse," as a field of conceptual coherence, as a stylistic unity, which as such could not but elicit the corresponding idea of a reader as a way of recognizing such a being-within-the-discourse.
The second lineage is represented by Iser, who starts from the pro-

 
< previous page page_46 next page >