“Mind the Gap: Post-structuralist Suggestions for the Revision of New Testament Reader-response Criticism.” Information Technologies in Antiquity Seminar. Canadian Society of Biblical Studies (original) (raw)

Abstract

This paper will challenge the habit of reader-response critics to present their work as both respectful of the hypothetically limitless number of reader-readings and individual programmatic stories-of-reading. Making use of insights from literary theorists, I will attempt to reconstruct a theory of story that accounts for the individuality of the reader and the reality of text and apply it to the Gospel of Mark. I will demonstrate a reader-response methodology that describes the reciprocal axiological relationship between text and reader—the individual reader’s response (affective, cognitive, behavioural) to text, and text’s evaluation of individual readings. It may be impossible to predict a reader’s response, but it is possible to describe textually valued responses (at the discourse level) and relate them to the textual experience of actual readers.

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