The role of the reader and its increasing importance in current French literary criticism

Abstract

The end of the last century witnessed a debate in the field of literary theory around the limits of interpretation: on the one hand, scholars like Umberto Eco maintained that text has a system of internal coherence that limits the number of possible interpretations; on the other, American authors like Rorty or Culler proclaimed the total freedom of readers in the process of meaning creation. During the first two decades of the 21st Century, most theorists in the French-speaking world seem to lean towards the latter option. The influence of Michel Charles’ and Stanley Fish’s works has given rise to new critical approaches like the Theory of the Possible Texts (Michel Charles and Fabula Group), the interventionist critique (Pierre Bayard) or Post-textualism (Franc Schuerewegen), which agree on the view that the properties of the text (coherence, meaning, literariness) are in reality readers’ contributions. From this perspective, the critic’s goal is not so much to interpret the text as to update it through a new and creative reading which ultimately identifies with rewriting.