ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at reader-centred theories of reception, mapping critical approaches to readers on a spectrum from text-dominant to reader-dominant.
The chapter opens with the crucial distinction between the implied reader and the real reader, or, in film studies, the spectator and the social audience. It shows how we can analyse the addressivity of texts or the ways in which they address readers, and explores the ways in which real readers and audiences inhabit and/or resist the positions created for them by texts. It introduces the key feminist notion of the ‘resisting reader’; Marxist theories about hegemonic, negotiated and oppositional reading positions; practices of symptomatic reading and reading against the grain; and theoretical and empirical work on marginalized readers, including black women spectators, female romance readers and queer readers. Showing that readers have some power over the meanings they make out of texts, it investigates theoretical, political and ethical questions about the relationship between texts and readers. Finally, moving to reader-dominant models of reading and to practices of reading and not reading structured around reader–reader relationships, the chapter asks whether and when the text itself ever becomes dispensible in acts of reading.
