http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/421376

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

The essays in this book focus on the role of the reader in textual interpretation. Specifically, they examine "open" and "closed" texts. The three essays in Part I deal with both verbal and nonverbal texts. The first considers musical compositions that leave considerable autonomy to the individual performer and also discusses the phenomenon of the "unfinished work" in contemporary art and aesthetic theory. The second and third essays examine how the procedures of aesthetic manipulation of language produce the interpretive cooperation of the addressee. Closed texts are represented by examples from popular culture in the three essays in Part ii. These examine the sociopolitical assumptions implicit in Superman comic books, the relationship between rhetoric and ideology in the fiction of Eugene Sue, and the narrative structure in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. The two essays in Part iii provide a theoretical framework for understanding the semiotic strategies of open and closed texts. The first investigates the contributions of contemporary semantics to the study of narrative; the second connects the modalities of textual interpretation with the problem of possible worlds and discusses a story by Alphonse Allais. Appendixes contain an empirical test of the Model Reader as a textual construct and excerpts from "a Most Parisian Episode" by Alphonse Allais. (Fl).

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