Phenomenology and the Reception of Literary Texts: The Implied Reader as an Element of a Genre

Abstract

In a short article designed to refute Anthony Close’s Hirschian approach to Don Quijote,¹ i.e., the search for an understanding based on Cervantes’ possible intentions in the novel as opposed to subsequent Romantic interpretations, Inés Azar attacked the theoretical basis of Close’s work in the following words:

A written text is the permanent mark of an exclusion: the absence of the reader in the act of writing, the absence of the writer in the act of reading, the absence of the reader and writer in the text itself.²