The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation

by Susan Rubin Suleiman (Editor), Inge Crosman (Editor)

A reader may be "in" a text as a character is in a novel, but also as one is in a train of thought-both possessing and being possessed by it. This paradox suggests the ambiguities inherent in the concept of audience. In these original essays, a group of international scholars raises fundamental questions about the statusbe it rhetorical, semiotic and structuralist, phenomenological, subjective and psychoanalytic, sociological and historical, or hermeneutic-of the audience in relation to a literary or artistic text. Susan Suleiman's introduction shows how the nature and function of the audience have come to the forefront of American and Continental criticism in recent years. On the one hand is a belief in the text as an organic, autonomous, and identifiable entity; on the other are various attempts to deconstruct the notion of textual unity and authority. Inge Crosman's annotated bibliography of works from America and Europe underscores the importance of audience-oriented criticism. Other contributors are: Jonathan Culler, Tzvetan Todorov, Karlheinz Stierle, Wolfgang Iser, Christine Brooke-Rose, Robert Crosman, Naomi Schor, Pierre Maranda, Jacques Leenhardt, Gerald Prince, Peter Rabinowitz, Cathleen Bauschatz, Louis Marin, Michel Beaujour, Norman Holland, and Vicki Mistacco. Susan R. Suleiman is Assistant Professor of French at Occidental College. Inge Crosman is Associate Professor of French Studies at Brown University.

Genres: Philosophy, Literary Criticism

456 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Susan Rubin Suleiman is the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and Research Professor of Comparative Literature

She was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She obtained her B.A. from Barnard College and her Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1981, where she is currently the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and Research Professor of Comparative Literature. She retired from full-time teaching in 2015.

Suleiman is the author or editor of numerous books and more than 100 articles on contemporary literature and culture, published in the U.S. and abroad. Her latest book, The Némirovsky Question, to be published by Yale University Press in fall 2016, is about the Russian-French novelist Irène Némirovsky and issues of “foreignness” in 20th-century France. Her other books include Crises of Memory and the Second World War; Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre; Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, and Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature. She has edited and co-edited influential collective volumes, including French Global: A New Approach to Literary History and Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances.

In addition to her scholarly work, Suleiman is the author of Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, a memoir about Hungary. Her book reviews and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The American Scholar, Moment Magazine and other newspapers and magazines.

Suleiman has won many honors, including a decoration by the French Government as Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques). She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, and several NEH Fellowships. She has been an invited Fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest and at the Center for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo, as well as the Texas A&M Institute for Advanced Study. During the 2009-2010 academic year, she was the invited Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2015-16 she was a Faculty Fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study in College Station, Texas, and in the fall of 2017 a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of the Central European University in Budapest. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.