The Role Of The Reader

1.Introduction

There are opinions that readers are very active and important pawns in the act of literary creation, because a work is completed in the process of reading. The reader is the one to find and provide the work with different meanings thus establishing the value of the work. The process of reading enriches and recreates the literary work. As an active reality, perceived in anaesthetic way the literary work, represents the union of the author's intention and the reader's interpretation, therefore an only author-centered interpretation would not be correct .Consequently the reader completes the work in harmony with his or her character.
Reading is a phenomenon, both socially and psychologically reaching different groups of people with different levels of culture, andprofessional training opportunities. But in the broadest sense, reading is a form of communication. It implies the sender of information ( the writer), a channel ( the book), a code (the language common to both writer and reader), a message (sent by the writer) and the receiver ( the reader). There cannot exist communication without the writer and the reader, and we could not talk about writingand reading without mentioning the writer and the reader. They both are present there with their whole being. Belonging to a social system, with the characteristics of their time, with their system of thinking and their emotions and prejudices, frustrations and discontent typical of that time.
2. The role of the reader
But back to the reader, because we would like to talk about itspecifically here. We should realize how important the role of the reader is and we should be proud when performing it. The process of receiving a text, is not simply to skim through a string of words. It is an active process during which we update our knowledge and our points of view, we connect emotionally to what we read, every idea being a stimulus. That way there begin to appear new judgments andreasoning that lead us to new insights, new perspectives, ideas and even ideals. In the process of reading we go through three phases: global intuition-driven by a spontaneous reaction, the analysis and the final synthesis. Thus, both the work and the reader get enriched by the reading. That way the work receives messages, meanings and symbols that the author may be even did not imagine at thetime of creation. But any literary creation, is defined not only by what its creator wanted to convey, but it is overlapping feelings, messages, meanings, polemics that individual or social revolutions generate during its history.
Traditional literary theories could not agree about the fact as where the meaning of a text lies. Here we have a reference to "intentio auctoris", "intentio lectoris"and "intentio operis". Was it only in the author's intended interpretation, or the "objective" meaning of the text itself, or the reader's personal interpretation of it. The reader has to acknowledge that there is an author who expects him to be able ‘‘to supply readily contextual assumptions... that allow the kind of interpretation that [the author] may have intended’’. Thus the author’sintentionality is important, unlike previous non-intentionalist theories of literature. In this aspect, literary communication does not differ from ordinary communication: ‘‘The communicator [i.e. the author] intends some particular thought and the addressee [i.e. the implied reader] is interested in what that thought is. The interpretive processes that the addressee employs are designed to establishthe speaker’s [or author’s] intentions’’.
When writing the author does not of adapting the message to the reader, as in face-to-face communication, instead the writer will make use of a form of words that will suggest certain thoughts to the reader . Obviously, then, the author has to make ‘‘an adequate assessment of what beliefs an addressee has stored in his memory, and of their varying...