Act Of Reception Research Articles

Fiction and Justice

Fictional texts have played a key role in Western societies in broadening the definition of what constitutes justice from issues of distribution to questions of recognition. In its first part, this essay describes three major reasons why fictional texts have gained central cultural importance in articulating claims for recognition: a) fiction is an important part of modernity, if not, in fact, one of its driving engines; b) fiction invites symbolic transfer processes; c) because fictional texts only gain meaning in the act of reception, they can function as extension of the recipient’s interiority in ways that open up new possibilities of public recognition. Fictional texts are therefore especially well suited to respond to the challenge created by democratic societies of how to gain attention, find recognition, and establish self-respect. However, in contrast to models of reading based on concepts of empathy (Nussbaum) or misrecognition (poststructuralism), it is argued that this “recognition-effect” is created by means of a transfer (Iser). Hence, it is not dependent on mimetic modes of representation, but can also result from such forms of expression as popular culture and experimental modernism. In conclusion, the question is raised whether and how claims for recognition articulated by fictional texts can still be related to the idea of justice as a commonly shared goal.

Quand L'écriture D'une Préface Se Dédouble. L'"Avertissement" Et Le "Prologue" Des Contes Drolatiques De Balzac

The romantic writing employed by Balzac to represent the real world in Contes drolatiques requires that the reader is given directions. That is what Balzac achieves in a dual preface "Avertissement" and "Prologue", published at the same time as the first "dixain" (1833). We can see the author manipulate identity, relying on the pragmatics of the grammar of the preface, in order to suggest a displacement, which is also a coalescence, of the past and the present, the remote and the nearby, the same and the other, the positive and the negative. The setting of the speech act – literary, turned into "droll" – is first of all a questioning of the act of reception.

Receiving Les Atrides Productively: Mnouchkine's Intercultural Signs as Intertexts

In her analysis of interculturalist theatre practice, Erika Fischer-Lichte has developed a theory of productive reception, in which the subsuming of a source culture's codes and conventions into a target culture's production has a telos of solving problems (political, aesthetic, cultural) and/or of filling gaps. In The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre Own and Foreign, Fischer-Lichte sites the practice's operation: ‘An intercultural performance productively receives the elements taken from the foreign theatre traditions and cultures according to the problematic which lies at the point of departure’. The theory also extends to the act of reception by the spectator in that it implies a reading which is non-oppositional between source and target cultures, which demands the interculturalist performance be read as a monoculturalist product. The Théâtre du Soleil's Greek tetralogy Les Atrides (1990–3), directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, is an example of intercultural performance with which one can engage Fischer-Lichte's theory in relation to the reading and classification of signs.

Engendering inspiration: visionary strategies in Rilke, Lawrence, and H.D

In a culture where passivity and receptivity are stereotypically deemed feminine traits, while authority and power are typically associated with maleness, the idea of poetic inspiration--which invests an individual with authority through the act of reception--sets up a conflict between traditional gender roles. In Engendering Inspiration, Helen Sword explores this conflict in the visionary poetics of three important modernist poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, D. H. Lawrence, and H.D. Sword argues that these three poets were paradigmatic in their struggle to come to terms with the fundamentally gendered paradoxes of inspiration, whether by appealing to ancient prophetic traditions, by subverting existing cultural stereotypes, or by engaging in revisionist mythmaking.The first three chapters of the book present a broad overview of the visionary poetry and poetics of each writer. The final two chapters, in contrast, employ closer reading and a more comparative analysis, discussing how Rilke, Lawrence, and H.D., through their poetic revisions of the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice and Leda and Zeus, rendered these two ancient tales of gender conflict into modern metaphors for poetic inspiration. In addition, a substantial introductory section traces connections between inspiration and gender in ancient and medieval prophetic and mystical traditions as well as in the works of other twentieth-century poets.The subjects of inspiration, gender, and modernist literature have not yet been examined together in any major critical study. This book will be important reading for students and scholars of literary theory, feminist theory, and literary modernism.Helen Sword is Assistant Professor of English, Indiana University.

Montaigne Among the Moderns: Receptions of the "Essais" (review)

Reviewed by: Montaigne Among the Moderns: Receptions of the “Essais” Patrick Henry Montaigne Among the Moderns: Receptions of the “Essais,” by Dudley M. Marchi; xiii & 334 pp. Providence, Rhode Island: Berghahn Books, 1994, $49.95. This ambitious project is not a study of the Essais per se, but rather an analysis of their receptions from the seventeenth century to the present. Written by a comparativist with access to German, French, and English literature and philosophy, it deals with authors from diverse backgrounds and time periods and pays careful attention throughout both to intertextuality and to the particular “horizons-of-experience” in which the Essais were received. “Reception” here does not mean some un-Mont aigne-like passive acceptance, but rather the assimilation and reactivation of the essayist’s concept of literature, writerly project, and theories of reading and writing in the works of later writers, mainly “premodernists” (Emerson and Nietzsche), “high modernists” (Pater and Woolf), and “postmodernists” (Butor, Chaillou, Sollers). In the most general sense, what Montaigne shares with all these authors is the need to make central in the form and substance of his work the paradox of a rupture with the pa st and its simultaneous continuation. Here modernism is less a period concept than a recurring literary phenomenon whereby the essayist not only influences the moderns and the postmoderns but is one of them. This enables us, finally, to perceive in the Essais a dialogical process that resists closure and reenacts the literary and philosophical debates of our own historical situation. Chapter One schematizes the history of the receptions of the Essais in France from 1580 to 1950 focusing mainly on the stylistic and religious readings of major figures in French literature. While much of this has already been done, Marchi syn thesizes well, makes his own original points, and offers us exceedingly interesting pages on the essayist’s covenant daughter and most active literary executrix, Marie le Jars de Gournay. Throughout he depicts how the shifting nature of the Essais’ textuality (their “hermeneutic undecidability” [p. 74]) allows them to assume various identities in the minds of different interpreters through the ages, thus problematizing the very act of reception and granting the reader a role in the production of me aning. The next chapters constitute the most original parts of the study and analyze the reception of the Essais in the works of Emerson, Nietzsche, Pater, Woolf, Butor, Chaillou, and Sollers. In Emerson and Nietzsche, we find reactivated the Montaig nean dialogue between the unique self and cultural tradition. Emerson read the Essais in the Cotton translation and wrote about Montaigne in Representative Men but only relied on the essayist to help him reach his own intellectual independen ce, finally moving from a more ego-centered position to the security of past models and rejecting skepticism in favor of dialectical resolution. Nietzsche read Montaigne in the original and knew him through Emerson. Marchi finds “an active inter textual Montaignean dimension” (p. 124) [End Page 140] in Nietzsche’s work and underscores their mutual preoccupation with radical skepticism, self-cultivation, self-portraiture, mutability, the instability of language, and the crisis of representa tion. He discovers two sides to Nietzsche’s reception of the Essais: the Apollonian “Socrantic optimism” and the Dionysian “libertine transgression” (p. 165) and indicates how the essayist’s concreteness and acceptance of human limitations tempered respectively Nietzsche’s propensity toward abstract metaphysics and Schopenhaurean pessimism. The third chapter unveils the aesthetic and thematic elements of the Essais in the critical and creative works of Pater and Woolf who went beyond the philosophical essaying of Emerson and Nietzsche, were the first to extend aspects of the E ssais in narrative works since Marie de Gournay, and created Montaigne the modernist “by insisting on the qualities of his textuality most akin to their own” (p. 186). The most interesting pages here delineate, on the one hand, Pater’s failed attempt to reconcile the religion of Pascal and the aesthetics of Montaigne and the essayist’s presence in Pater’s Gaston de Latour and, on the other, Woolf’s Montaigne-like essayistic techniques of weighing probabilities, suspending dogmatic judgment, and breaking of narrative sequentiality and her concomitant assimilation...

Audience research: What the humanistic and the social science approaches could learn from each other

The paper starts out with the systematization offered by Jensen and Rosengren (1990), who distinguish between five different (meta)theoretical approaches in audience research. On this basis we raise the question whether audience research as a whole might profit if these different approaches were to pay greater attention to each other. We then elaborate and give reasons for our thesis that in this case the humanistic tradition within audience research should learn from the social science tradition in particular to focus on the act of reception (including its entertaining aspects); complementarily, the humanistic might teach the social science tradition to qualify their hypotheses according to the historical and social context. Finally, we point out metatheoretical and methodological perspectives for further differentiations as well as for overcoming superfluous dichotomies in the field.

JFK: The Author and the Text

The 25th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy brought yet more evidence of his continuing force in American culture. In addition to the numerous television specials that appeared in 1988, nearly 30 new or reissued books joined more than 100 volumes of Kennedy literature already in print. Perhaps even more telling were the efforts of several 1988 presidential aspirants to align their textual constructions in the media with Kennedy's image. The full power of the Kennedy image ultimately revealed itself when Lloyd Bentsen, responding to a factually correct comparison Dan Quayle made between his own congressional experience and Kennedy's, pronounced, Senator, you're Jack Kennedy. Bentsen used this sally with devastating effect despite the revelations, gossip, and revisionist analyses which had told the public for nearly two decades that Jack Kennedy himself was no Jack Kennedy. The relation between the man and the myth, between the facts of Kennedy's personal and political life and the fiction of his public image, can be comprehended only by putting aside literal-minded, positivist notions of perception and representation. No actual person can be fully present to the perception of the reader/viewer. Any representation of a person in public discourse necessarily involves selection, repression, and addition. That necessity is doubled in the act of reception as readers/ viewers depend upon familiar texts to decipher the new representation before them. In the late 1940s Randall Jarrell observed that celebrities had become our fictional (qtd. in Raeburn 10). His statement suggests the transformation of living people into constructed representations and the centrality of these representations in the fantasy life of a society in which the cultural work of the novel and even the film is superseded by people constructed as characters in the media. Kennedy must be reProfiles in Courage (Commemorative Edition) By John F. Kennedy Harper and Row, 1988