ABSTRACT
In the study of reception, reality returns both as the text and as the response of the audience, as the impossibility of the truth of the text and as the real context that supplements the text. Nevertheless, this real context remains distant; it does not speak directly to the analyst/historian, not even in a contemporaneous context, which instead is reconstituted as a hyperreading, the reading of a reading that is not directly available but must itself be traced, gathered in the form of evidence, reconstructed from documents, artifacts, records, case histories, surveys. The particular reality that is attained in this way is both derivative and unique: it is unique in that it is the only real reading of the text allowed to the reception analyst, and derivative in that the analyst has nevertheless been displaced, separated in the reading from the real audience and the real experience of the text, which can only be known by criticism second-hand. Thus the text is the intertext of a context whose reading is itself the intertext of the theoretical/critical text of reception.
