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 status--be 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.

Originally published in 1980.

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