Susan R. Suleiman

Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criticism

Some revolutions occur quietly: no manifestoes, no marching and singing, no tumult in the streets; simply a shift in perspective, a new way of seeing what had always been there. New words enter the vocabulary, old words suddenly take on new meaning: proletariat, ego, structure. Or they retain their meaning but their position changes: the peripheral becomes central, the walk-on becomes the hero of the play.

For the past few years, we have been witnessing just such a change in the field of literary theory and criticism. The words reader and audience, once relegated to the status of the unproblematic and obvious, have acceded to a starring role. A little over ten years ago, the authors of an influential study on the nature of narrative could self-confidently affirm that narrative literature was "distinguished by two characteristics: the presence of a story and a story-teller." The fact that all stories are implicitly or explicitly addressed to an audience, whose presence is as variable and as problematic as that of the storyteller, escaped their notice or was considered too trivial to mention. Today, one rarely picks up a literary journal on either side of the Atlantic without finding articles (and often a whole special issue) devoted to the performance of reading, the role of feeling, the variability of individual response, the confrontation, transaction, or interrogation between texts and readers, the nature and limits of interpretation — questions whose very formulation depends on a new awareness of the audience as an entity indissociable from the notion of artistic texts.

One could adduce many reasons for this shift in perspective, and I shall discuss some of them in this essay. Even at first glance, however, it is obvious that the current interest in the interpretation, and more broadly in the reception, of artistic texts — including literary, filmic, pictorial, and musical ones — is part of a general trend in what the French call the human sciences (history, sociology, psychology, linguistics, anthropology) as well as in the traditional humanistic disciplines of philosophy, rhetoric, and aesthetics. The recent evolution of all these disciplines has been toward self-reflexiveness — questioning and making explicit the assumptions that ground the methods of the discipline, and concurrently the investigator's role in delimiting or even in constituting the object of study. Such self-reflexiveness, which has its analogue in the principles of relativity and uncertainty as they emerged in physics early in this century, necessarily shifts the focus of inquiry from the observed — be it defined as text, psyche, society, or language — to the interaction between observed and observer. Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques is, like so many of his works, exemplary in this respect.

As concerns the increasingly interrelated disciplines of linguistics and literary theory, the general move toward self-reflexiveness has been accompanied by more specific or local evolutions tending toward the same results. In linguistics, generative grammar, with its emphasis on linguistic competence and performance, has tended to displace the older (and in its own day revolutionary) Saussurean linguistics, whose emphasis was primarily on the static system of language. The Chomskyan project is not to describe the system of relations that constitute a given language (langue), but to state the general rules that account for the production of the potentially infinite number of utterances (parole) considered grammatically acceptable by speakers of a language. Moreover, generative grammar has itself been challenged by generative semantics and by the theory of speech acts, which attempt to take into account not only the syntactic and phonological rules of sentence formation but also the semantic and contextual rules that govern actual speech situations.

In literary theory, there has been a parallel movement away from the formalist and New Critical emphasis on the autonomy of "the text itself" toward a recognition (or a re-recognition) of the relevance of context, whether the latter be defined in terms of historical, cultural, ideological, or psychoanalytic categories. This does not mean a return to traditional historical or biographical criticism, and it would be a pity if the current fashion of using the New Criticism as a whipping boy — or as a discredited father — made us forget the very significant contributions of both the New Critics and their predecessors, the Russian Formalists, to modern literary theory and criticism. The same must be said of the Czech and French structuralists, whom it has become de rigueur in some circles to reject, either in the name of a newly discovered semiotics or in that of Derridean "post-structuralism." Semiotics has nothing to disdain in structuralism, for as I shall show later the two are continuous, often overlapping enterprises. As for "post-structuralism," the very term implies what its most distinguished exponents (beginning with Jacques Derrida himself) acknowledge: namely, that it could not have existed without structuralism and constitutes not so much a rejection of the latter as its dépassement.

If one may safely affirm that a preoccupation with audience and interpretation has become central to contemporary American and Continental theory and criticism, one encounters a major difficulty in citing names or examples. Even a partial list of American critics most closely associated with this mode must include names as apparently incompatible, for theoretical reasons, as Jonathan Culler and Norman Holland, Stanley Fish and Wayne C. Booth, E. D....