ABSTRACT
One of the most salient advances of contemporary theory lies in its recognition of the rhetoricity in all writing, even fiction – but to what extent have theorists speculated on a rhetoric of reading! The question may at first seem strange, since rhetoric, understood as the art of persuasion, appears naturally to align itself with that which does the persuading – the writer or the text. But a model which grants all activity to the text and reduces the reader to mere passivity does a serious injustice to the actual shaping of meaning which occurs in the dramatic exchange that constitutes reading. Whether or not we go as far as Stanley Fish, who claims that the reader creates everything in the textual encounter, most of us now recognize that ‘the role of the reader’ – the reader’s participation in the creation of meaning – cannot be ignored. Therefore, the time appears ripe for a model of reading that would conceive of the reader not only as receiver but as producer of what we commonly call ‘rhetorical stance’.
