The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation

by Susan Rubin Suleiman (Editor), Inge Crosman (Editor)

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.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Genres: Philosophy, Literary Criticism

456 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Susan Rubin Suleiman is the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and Research Professor of Comparative Literature

She was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She obtained her B.A. from Barnard College and her Ph.D. from Harvard University, and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1981, where she is currently the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and Research Professor of Comparative Literature. She retired from full-time teaching in 2015.

Suleiman is the author or editor of numerous books and more than 100 articles on contemporary literature and culture, published in the U.S. and abroad. Her latest book, The Némirovsky Question, to be published by Yale University Press in fall 2016, is about the Russian-French novelist Irène Némirovsky and issues of “foreignness” in 20th-century France. Her other books include Crises of Memory and the Second World War; Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre; Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, and Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature. She has edited and co-edited influential collective volumes, including French Global: A New Approach to Literary History and Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances.

In addition to her scholarly work, Suleiman is the author of Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, a memoir about Hungary. Her book reviews and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The American Scholar, Moment Magazine and other newspapers and magazines.

Suleiman has won many honors, including a decoration by the French Government as Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques). She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, and several NEH Fellowships. She has been an invited Fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest and at the Center for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo, as well as the Texas A&M Institute for Advanced Study. During the 2009-2010 academic year, she was the invited Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2015-16 she was a Faculty Fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study in College Station, Texas, and in the fall of 2017 a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of the Central European University in Budapest. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.