hello sir,
This disjunction between professional concerns and the interests of the ordinary reader seems profound. We would also suggest that it is dangerous and ultimately self-defeating. If the gap is to be narrowed, it will be by focusing once again on the formal aspects of the literary text through which, we will propose, the ordinary reader’s concerns can primarily be located. However, in contrast to earlier, now discredited versions of formalism that explicitly forbade interest in readers, we argue that the formalist dimension of reading can be examined effectively only in cooperation with actual readers. By studying readers’ experiences of literary reading and its outcomes, we will begin to map the structures of interaction between reader and text and discover what formal structures are created in common among readers of a given text. From this perspective too, we will develop a more ecologically valid approach to understanding the role and functions of literature in general. Why have all cultures, as far we know, developed a literary culture, whether oral or print? Why do people seek out and read novels and poems, or go to watch plays? And what place is there for literature, in the late twentieth century, after all, when other forms of media have become so prevalent
