Ricoeur points out ways in which the act of reading is complex:

The task [Ingarden [4] proposes is] exploring the multiple ways in which a work, in acting on a reader, affects that reader. This being-affected has the note-worthy quality of combining in an experience of a particular type of passivity and activity, which allows us to consider as the “reception” of a text the very “action” of reading it.

.... this aesthetic, as it complements poetics, encompasses in turn two different forms, depending on whether the emphasis is placed on the effect produced on the individual reader and his response in the reading process, as in the work of Wolfgang Iser [5], or on the response of the public on the level of its collective expectations, as in the work of Hans-Robert Jauss [8].

These two aesthetics may appear to be opposed to each other, inasmuch as the one tends toward a phenomenological psychology while the other aims at reshaping literary history, but in fact they mutually presuppose each other.

On the one hand, it is through the individual process of reading that the text reveals its “structure of appeal”; on the other hand, it is inasmuch as readers participate in the sedimented expectations of the general reading public that they are constituted as competent readers. (TN3, 167-68)

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