USS Dakota del Sur (ACR-9)

The history of the reading is founded on a dichotomy. The text, or traces written, is fixed, durable and transmissible. The reading is transitory, inventive, plural, plurivoque. Moreover, it is always fragmented: on the one hand because it is stuffed with interruptions - one seldom reads a text of only one blow - on the other hand, because dependant on the memory that we keep some. Therefore, never faithful, always with désambiguïser.

The School of Constancy

Since the medium of the Years 1970, the theories of the Reception and Lecture accept this ambivalence like characteristic of the realization and the actualization of the literary texts. Work of Hans Robert Jauss (joined together in For an esthetics of the reception ) and of Wolfgang Iser ( the act of reading and Theory of the esthetic effect ), answers this insufficiency. Accordingly, the School of Constancy (whose Iser and Jauss are principal holding) tries to renew, of absolutiser the history of the literature:

“ The error or the inadequacy communes with the intellectual attitudes that Jauss rejects, it is the ignorance of the plurality of the terms, the ignorance of the report/ratio which is established between them, the will to privilege only one factor between several; from which the narrowness results from the field of exploration: one did not know to recognize all the personæ dramatis, all the actors whose reciprocal action is necessary so that there are creation and transformation in the literary field, or invention of new standards in practice social”.

To clog these breaches of literary historicity, the theories of the reception and the reading propose a relational approach where the third state - public reader/- would be the angular stone of a communication new prospect of the literature. In other words, it is noted recently that the reading and the reception of the literature are also productive direction: one does not make any more the economy of triad AUTEUR-TEXTE-LECTEUR. One notes the importance of the recipient for the history of the literature. Indeed, without reader the text does not exist. It is the Actualisation text by the reading which enables him to enter the history, to play a part, to socialize itself.

Hans Robert Jauss

For Robert Jauss, the literary history “ must; to represent, through the history of the products of its literature, the gasoline of a national entity in search of itself”.

The esthetic variation makes it possible to measure the historicity of a text. This variation is determined by the horizon of waiting (concept which it takes again according to Gadamer and Heidegger) which constitutes a kind of advance or predisposition, objectively formulatable, with the act of reading. This concept concerns three factors:

“presupposes knowledge and the opposition between poetic language and practical language, imaginary world and daily reality”.

The Public gradually thwarts waitings of the reader of tales of chivalry, like Hubert Aquin, with Prochain Episode and Lapse of memory , the fact with the reader of novels with enigmas.

From where the social function of the literature: when work changes our vision of the world, it draws up a relationship (a handing-over in question) between literature and company.

Although already registered in the text, the direction always remains to be brought up to date, role which returns obviously to the public. For better including/understanding the role of the reader, it is necessary to leave the premises Poetic of Aristote which are at the base of the esthetic experiment of Jauss. The Poiesis is specific to the creator: it is the producing dimension of the esthetic experiment.

By this one, the author releases reality of what is not familiar and forms a new reality for him, a fiction which is not opposed to daily reality but informs us about it. The aisthesis indicates the receiving dimension of the esthetic experiment where a third state, the reader, external with the sémiose, takes pleasure with the direction and its value. Last aspect of Poetic of Aristote taken again by Jauss: the Catharsis. This one challenges the reader and causes his adhesion:

“years the direction of fundamental experiment of communicative esthetics, thus corresponds on the one hand to the practice of arts to the service of the social function, which is to transmit the standards of the action, to inaugurate them and to justify them, on the other hand also with the ideal goal of any autonomous art: to release the contemplator of the interests and the practical complications of daily reality to place it, by the pleasure of oneself in the pleasure of the other, an esthetic state of freedom for its judgment”.

In other words, the catharsis is this propensity of the reader to be identified with the characters and the situations conveyed by the text. In this direction, Jauss speaks about communicative effects. It is established a bond, between the text and the reader, who is purely dialogical, where those collaborate in order to base the esthetic experiment on an intersubjectivity.

Wolfgang Iser

At Wolfgang Iser, contrary to Jauss where the direction is to be revealed, the direction is always to build. As at Jauss, this sémiosis is not possible that in the condition which an intention lives the reader, “ the intention to read, also minimal is it, intention which engages the act of reading itself and which seeks its achievement in the reading until the latter takes end”.

The reading, it is the meeting of two poles: one, artistic and clean with the text, other esthetics and specific to the reader. Therefore, the text, bearing in itself the conditions of its realization, speaks to the reader, the guide so that it realizes what is implicit there. What is implicit with the text, it is initially the situation which is used as background with its realization. On the one hand, its situation which surrounds the author, supported its position on the Earth and in the Histoire, supported its Culture, of its values, its experiments, its knowledge and able to articulate a logical artistic bond (the text) between all ceci.
Therefore, he writes a text, also standardized to him by structures and conventions which are at the same time textual and extra-textual.

In addition, this text requires a reader, supported his position on the Earth and in the History, supported its company, of its education, its childhood, its sensitivity and skilful to establish a logical bond (reading) between all that, between all these conventions.

So that the communication is achieved, it must draw up a relationship between text and reader. “ L misses with this report/ratio being defined by a situation common to the one and the other”.

Therefore, to establish such a situation, it is necessary necessarily that the reading is dialogical: “ it can about it be born from now on situation-tallies it where the text and the reader reach with convergence. What, in the common use of the speech, must always be given beforehand, it is a question here of building it”. Therefore, the repertory of the text does not distinguish the fiction from reality but uses of the first to inform us over the second. It is thus a question of establishing a common referent. With this intention, it draws from two types of standards: arts persons and extra-arts persons, or textual and extra-textual. The first recover all that refers to the literary tradition (quotations, intertextualities, etc). The seconds are of social order. They recover all the speeches to which one includes/understands the world. To a certain extent, couldn't one connect the extra-textual standards of Iser to the plurilingualism of Mikhaïl Bakhtine or to the Intertextualité of Kristeva? It is thus in the convergence of these two standards that is formed the background reference frame of the text. “ The elements of the repertory are thus let bring back exclusively neither to their origin, nor with their employment, and it is insofar as those lose their identity that singular contours of work are profiled”. Thus an equivalence, or a distance emerges, between the repertory and the world, a little in the same way of the esthetic variation.

The reader in the center of the literature

Although Jauss and Iser make receiver an authority necessary to the literary experiment, the text remains in the center of their study. It becomes an entity carrying in itself the conditions (structures and systems) of its actualization. Of course, it is the reader “ who is the single person in charge of the starting of the sémiosis”. But it acts only as an operator, a little as a chemist follows the stages of an experiment. Only, in the case of the reader, the stages of significance of the text are not explicit.

Instead of manufacturing some chemical solution starting from heterogeneous elements, it deals with text which relates in itself of the homogeneous elements which inform it, in an implicit and progressive way, to the procedure of its own realization. It is in the sense that we see in Iser and Jauss of the terrorists of the method formelle : terrorists since they defuse, with a great methodology, entity textual while making there enter an intruder, the reader, essential to the literary experiment. However, the public of Jauss and the reader of Iser are not real. They are modelled representations of the receiving authority of the communication and they cannot in no case to be used to represent any reader. Indeed, their theories, to want to include the various types of readers, succeeded has to make there enter none them. However, the mechanism lectorial which it models applies to each one of them. And for theories which they describe as relational, Jauss and Iser succeed all the same, by this paradoxical systematization of the reader, to exclude the Psychologie and the Subjectivité from the reading, activities however paramount to the literary experiment.

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