Return of the Reader? On the Rediscovery of a Category in Literary Studies

After the first phase of literary theory formation in the 1960s, which focused on the reader (e.g. Jauss, Iser, Warning, Riffaterre), reader-related approaches seemed to be outdated by theories such as deconstruction or discourse analysis. In the last few years, however, the category of the reader has increasingly come back into the focus of literary studies: be it with a historical-systematizing intention, be it with regard to theories of aesthetic experience, or in the context of emotion research. In addition to qualitative reading research, which is often influenced by cognitive science and uses methods from psychology and neuroscience, quantitative-empirical approaches are also gaining influence. A summer school organized with the participation of Kassel wants to set further accents here, not least in the discussion between the philologies.

There is the possibility to participate via Zoom in the digital lecture on 11.09.2020 at 09:30 by Françoise Lavocat (Sorbonne). The topic of her talk is:

The difference between fact and fiction in the light of cognitive science and neuroscience, and the challenge of new media and new genres

https://cmb.hu-berlin.de/kalender/termin/sommerschule-rueckkehr-des-lesers/

Access data are available upon request to jknobloch[at]uni-kassel[dot]de