Readers and Reading

Andrew Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317893899
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Much literary criticism focuses on literary producers and their products, but an important part of such work considers the end-user, the reader. It asks such questions as: how far can the author condition the response of the reader, and how much does the reader create the meaning of a text? Dr Bennett's collection includes important essays from such writers and critics as Wolfgang Iser, Mary Jacobus, Roger Chartier, Michel de Certeau, Shoshana Felman, Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man and Yves Bonnefoy. It looks in turn at deconstructionist, feminist, new historicist and psychoanalytical response to the school. The book then considers the act of reading itself, discussing such issues as the uniqueness of any reading and the difficulties involved in its analysis.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Longman Critical Readers
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Interaction between Text and Reader
• 2 Reader-Response Criticism
• 3 Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading
• 4 An Unnecessary Maze of Sign-Reading
• 5 Feminism, New Historicism and the Reader
• 6 Labourers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader
• 7 Reading as Poaching
• 8 Wilde's Hard Labour and the Birth of Gay Reading
• 9 Renewing the Practice of Reading, or Freud's Unprecedented Lesson
• 10 Reading
• 11 The Resistance to Theory
• 12 Reading Unreadability: de Man
• 13 Lifting Our Eyes from the Page
• Key Concepts
• Further Reading
• Notes on Authors
• Index