The Challenge of Reader Involvement to the Autonomy of the Work of Literature

FAIN: FR-10244-78

Robin L. McAllister
El Centro College (Dallas, TX 75202-3605)

To do a study on the general question of how to teach students to reconstruct imaginatively the work they read without confusing their impressions and responses with the work itself. Three papers will be written on the subject of involvement of the reader's intervention in the text and the formal autonomy of the work. Each paper will focus on issues on which Formalist and Continental critics disagree. The first study will review and assess the concept of the "hermeneutic circle." The other two studies on Cervantes and Borges will examine problems of interpretation in the works of writers who deliberately invite the reader's intervention in the text.