Amazing Reader in the Labyrinth of Literature

A literary theorist often tries to put his views in focus by describing a hypothetical reader. Occasionally this model reader is idealized as clever and knowledgeable, as in instances of Stanley Fish's Informed Reader and Jonathan Culler's Competent Reader. Sometimes he appears to be a normative like Wolfgang Iser's Implied Reader, or Umberto Eco's Model Reader, or Michael Riffaterre's Average Reader. Riffaterre speaks also of Superreader, who is not a comicbook character but who does have strength of many in that he represents collective wisdom of what critics have had to say about a particular text. Harold Bloom gives us a Strong Reader, oedipally anxious about influences but bound to deal with them assertively, a creatively Mistaken or Mistaking Reader. Jacques Derrida presents us with a Deconstructing Reader obsessed by issue of textual authority. Roland Barthes, speaking in Pleasure of Text of the infinite perversity of critic and his reader, introduces us to a Perverse Reader in declaring that text never denies us anything. Everything is permitted, as in perversion, which is realm of textual pleasure (1975:3-4, 9, 17). Not to be outdone, Geoffrey Hartman conjures up a Feasting Reader based on Bertram Lewin's concept of breast as a prototype of dream screen: Interpretation is a feast, not a fast, says Hartman. It imposes an obligatory excess [.... .] We have forgotten breast, he declares, and adds, I cleave to you, o doublebreasted book (1975:18-19). This profusion of models breeds confusion, and adding to this confusion is problematic nature of textuality. For example, some poststructuralist versions of textuality confer-or project-upon text functions that only a few years ago would have been attributed to reader of text. For Barthes, The text is dilatory and The text itself plays (1979:73-81). Further compounding indeterminacy surrounding nature of reader and text is indeterminacy of authorship itself, as Michel Foucault explains in What is an Author? (1979). As these instances of complexities facing contemporary literary theory suggest, it would be difficult, if not futile, to make a direct, frontal approach

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