More Reading Theory

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More Reading Theory
Dale Sullivan dale.sullivan_at_ndsu.edu
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In reading great literature, I become a thousand
men and yet remain myself. C. S. Lewis
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• Review of reader theory
• DEFTing, reader response theory
• Reading cultural codes and signs, semiotics
• Author as creator of secondary worlds
• Author as creator of reader
• The model and implied readers in a role
• Filling gaps inferential walks
• Aesthetic reader as creator of structure
• Virtual dimension of text
• Reader as conventional you, shared seeing

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A Collection of Comments on the Reading, Seeing,
and Criticism Lewis reading the poiema and the
logos Scholes reading, interpreting,
criticizing Hanson seeing and theory Fish
demonstration and persuasion
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A work of literary art can be considered in two
lights. It both means and is. It is both Logos
(something said) and Poiema (something made). As
Logos it tells a story, or expresses an emotion,
or exhorts or pleads or describes or rebukes or
excites laughter. As Poiema, by it aural beauties
and also by the balance and contrast and the
unified multiplicity of its successive parts, it
is an objet dart, a thing shaped so as to give
great satisfaction (132). C. S. Lewis, An
Experiment in Criticism, Cambridge University
Press, 1961.
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The parts of the Poiema are things we ourselves
do we entertain various imaginations, imagined
feelings, and thoughts in an order, and at a
tempo, prescribed by the poet (133). And if
the Poiema . . . is devised by a master, the
rests and movements, the quickenings and
slowings, the easier and the more arduous
passages, will come exactly as we need them we
shall be deliciously surprised by the
satisfaction of wants we were not aware of till
they were satisfied (134). C. S. Lewis, An
Experiment in Criticism, Cambridge University
Press, 1961.
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A work has form in so far as one part of it
leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be
gratified by the sequence (124). The arrows of
our desires created by the narrative form are
turned in a certain direction, and the plot
follows the direction of the arrows
(124). Burke, Kenneth. Couter-Statement. 1931.
Berkeley U of California P, 1968.
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The mark of strictly literary reading . . . is
that we need not believe or approve the Logos
(136). It is no use . . . locating the whole
goodness of a literary work in its character as
Poiema, for it is out of our various interests in
the Logos that the Poiema is made (137). We
want to see with other eyes, to imagine with
other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as
well as with our own (137). C. S. Lewis, An
Experiment in Criticism, Cambridge University
Press, 1961.
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. . . we become these other selves. Not only
nor chiefly in order to see what they are like
but in order to see what they see, to occupy, for
a while, their seat in the great theatre, to use
their spectacles and be made free of whatever
insights, joys, terrors, wonders or merriment
those spectacle reveal (139). Logos . . .
admits us to experiences other than our own. C.
S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, Cambridge
University Press, 1961.
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. . . rhetoric may be defined in many ways and
on many levels, it is in the deepest and most
fundamental sense the advocacy of realities (31,
emphasis in the original). Brummett, Barry.
Some Implications of Process or
Intersubjectivity Postmodern Rhetoric.
Philosophy Rhetoric 9.1 (1976) 21-51.
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The ideal reader shares the authors codes and
is able to process the text without confusion or
delay. Such a reader constructs a whole world
from a few indications, fills in gaps, makes
temporal correlations, performs those essential
activities that Umberto Eco has called writing
ghost chapters and taking inferential walks
(22). Scholes, Robert. Textual Power Literary
Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven
Yale UP, 1985.
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The move from a summary of events to a
discussion of the meaning or theme of a work of
fiction is usually a move from reading to
interpretation (22). From the point of view of
interpretation, stories are better than essays
because essays say what they mean and stories
do not, leaving that job for the interpreter
(22). Scholes, Robert. Textual Power Literary
Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven
Yale UP, 1985.
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In a trivial sense, criticism involves a claim
that a certain literary work fails to achieve the
purely literary norms of its mode or genre. This
is the field of taste (23). For our
purposes, a more consequential sort of criticism
involves a critique of the themes developed in a
given fictional text, or a critique of the codes
themselves, out of which a given text has been
constructed (23). Scholes, Robert. Textual
Power Literary Theory and the Teaching of
English. New Haven Yale UP, 1985.
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. . . criticism is always made on behalf of a
group (24). . . . we must open the way between
the literary or verbal text and the social text
in which we live. It is only by breaking the
hermetic seal around the literary text . . . that
we can find our proper function as teachers once
again (24). Scholes, Robert. Textual Power
Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New
Haven Yale UP, 1985.
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This does not mean that one is always a prisoner
of his present perspective. It is always possible
to entertain beliefs and opinions other than
ones own but that is precisely how they will be
seen, as beliefs and opinions other than ones
own, and therefore as beliefs and opinions that
are false, or mistaken, or partial, or immature,
or absurd. That is why a revolution in ones
beliefs will always feel like a progress, even
though, from outside, it will have the appearance
merely of a change (emphasis in originial,
361). Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This
Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities.
Cambridge Harvard UP, 1980.
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In short, we try to persuade others to our
beliefs because if they believe what we believe,
they will, as a consequence of those beliefs, see
what we see the facts to which we point in order
to support our interpretations will be as obvious
to them as they are to us. Indeed, this is the
whole of critical activity, an attempt on the
part of one party to alter the beliefs of another
so that the evidence cited by the first will be
seen as evidence by the second (emphasis in
original, 365). Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text
in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities. Cambridge Harvard UP, 1980.
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In the more familiar model of critical activity
. . . the procedure is exactly the reverse
evidence available apart from any particular
belief is brought in to judge between competing
beliefs, or, as we call them in literary studies,
interpretations. This is a model . . . of
demonstration in which interpretations are either
confirmed or disconfirmed by facts that are
independently specified (emphasis in original,
365). Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This
Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities.
Cambridge Harvard UP, 1980.
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The model I have been arguing for, on the other
hand, is a model of persuasion in which the facts
that one cites are available only because an
interpretation (at least in its general and broad
outlines) has already been assumed (emphasis in
original, 365). Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text
in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities. Cambridge Harvard UP, 1980.
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. . . we have readers whose consciousnesses are
constituted by a set of conventional notions
which when put into operation constitute in turn
a conventional, and conventionally seen, object
(332). Of course poems are not the only objects
that are constituted in unison by shared ways of
seeing (332). Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in
This Class