Questioning Intra-category Variation

Abstract

In Lanser’s (1986) paper, she suggested that structuralist narratology be rewritten in a way that ‘takes into account the contributions of women as both producers and interpreters of texts’ (p. 343, emphasis added). As I have indicated in earlier chapters, some considerable work has gone into recouping the value of texts written by women. In comparison, relatively little analysis of the role of gender in the reception of texts has taken place in feminist narratology. The feminist critique of reader response theory that runs contemporary to Lanser’s paper did do just this, arguing that gender made a difference to the way in which texts were read (summarized in Caughie, 1988). The apparently universal nature of the various readers constructed by Barthes (1977), Iser (1978) and Fish (1980) were exposed as models of reading that dealt in ‘male terms’ and favoured erotic paradigms derived from masculine metaphors (Rivkin, 1987: 11–12). In finding alternatives to these, the identity of the reader as a woman and/or as a feminist was then interpreted as a political practice. However, I question whether these studies could be classed as narratological as such, for they did not really deal with the interaction between gender, reader response and the formal operations of narrative texts, nor did they reflect on narratological theory.KeywordsMale StudentActual ReaderGender BehaviourLinguistic ApproachReader ResponseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.