Reader and the Deinition of Literature
... My experience, whether it be physically, mentally and psychologically or even in the literary world, affects the way I as the reader judges texts. ... ” Yet my experience in reading texts may be different from another reader’s experience and so this other reader may come to a completely different conclusion about a text. This has led me to explore the idea that the reader gives meaning to the text and how different readers with different experiences will give different meanings to the same text. This paper aims to answer “How have current understandings of reading practices and of what literature can be called into question that literature is a corpus of highly regarded texts” and that “whatever literature is, it is dependant on how, when, where and for what purposes it is read”. This question and statement led to the exploration into how literature is defined, who defines literature, when and where literature is defined and for what purpose literature is defined. Basically the aim of this piece is to explore the idea that the reader defines what literature is and what literature isn’t. Throughout the piece an example of two pieces of literature will be analysed and explored. ... There will also be references to the idea of the reader that can in all respects view a film or read a text or for that matter any piece of literature. ... For example, Gladiator can be referred to as a text and the person who views it could be called a reader. What is literature? ... Is literature “a value term, a medal to be awarded to those works that please me [the reader]”? ... Whatever literature is it can only be determined by the reader since, as Wolfgang Iser (1978 p20) said “the text could only have meaning when it was read.” This is an interesting statement in itself as it effectively makes obsolete the idea that either the author or the text itself gives meaning since both disregard the point of view of the reader. As such, in Iser’s mind the reader is the alpha and the omega in the deciphering of text and thus determining what is literature. ... This makes the meaning of a text less concrete and almost impossible to fathom since every reader is different and therefore making infinite readings of one text. But it is possible to narrow these infinite readings into the reader’s “horizon of expectations” that was developed by the literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss. This “horizons of expectations” referred to the reader’s expectations of what would and could happen in a text. This horizon is built by the reader’s experience in the physical and the literary worlds. Experience refers to the reader’s individual and unique experience physically and psychologically in the course of his or her life and each new experience that this reader experiences will continually reshape the way in which this reader will read new texts. ... “Meaning…lies in the adjustments and revisions to expectations which are brought about in the reader’s mind in the process of making sense of his or her dialectical relationship to the text” (Brooker P.