Reader's Status in Stanley Fish's Reader-Response Theory

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

There is a great difference between the theoretical assumptions underlying Stanley Fish's earlier essay, "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics" and his later essays following "Interpreting the Variorum." The object of this paper is to map the changes between these articles concerning the status of the reader. Critics have labeled Fish as an anti-formalist aligning himself with poststructuralism. It is certainly true that poststructuralism manifests itself in Fish's later essays. However, I will try to distance myself from this general observation by foregrounding the struc-turalist trend in his later poststructuralist enterprise as well as the traces of formalism remaining in his earlier essays. My thesis grounded on this argument is that Fish's reader is an Althusserian subject in the sense that he is a social construct, a mere product of a given communal perspective. Then I will lay bare what Fish's theory of self overlooks by comparing it with E. D. Hirsch's model of reader and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of self.