T. Venediktova. Literature as experience, or ‘The bourgeois reader’ as a cultural hero

Abstract

T. Venediktova’s ‘The Bourgeois Reader’ As Literary Hero [‘Burzhuazniy chitatel’ kak literaturniy geroy] is a largely revolutionary book, documenting the shift in critics’ focus from the text to its recipient, a trend which became obvious over the past three decades. Venediktova blends her analytical methods into the social and phenomenological tradition of the humanities and calls them sociological poetics. The author contemplates the concept of ‘the bourgeois reader’, cleared of any negative connotations. A bourgeois is upwardly mobile, socially active to a great extent, highly flexible, learns fast and excels in dialogue. Venediktova notes the keen interest on the part of the bourgeois in the idea of exchange and language as a communication tool. She also remarks on the U-turn in literature, traceable since the 18th c., which marks a radical change in the purpose of fiction. While it used to rely on the established taste, aesthetical values, and rhetorical rules, its current goal is to showcase individual experiences and offer their exchange. Venediktova considers principally new strategies of the conversation with the reader, similar to those of Wordsworth, Baudelaire, E. Poe, Whitman, Balzac, Flaubert, and G. Eliot.