Research On The Chicago School’s View Of The Reader

The Chicago School has been active in the field of American literary criticism for more than half a century.While the formal criticism advocated by the New Criticism was highly popular,the Chicago School also focused on rhetorical criticism and textual criticism,and was regarded as the same camp of Formal Criticism as the New Criticism.In contrast,the Chicago School’s critical concept of uniting rhetoric and ethic and its continuously developing multidimensional rhetorical view are distinctive.This paper focuses on the Chicago School’s view of reader and explores its theoretical efforts to unite rhetoric and ethic.By sorting out the background of the formation of its view of reader,the characteristics of the rhetorical view of reader and the ethical view of reader,and the way in which the rhetorical view of reader and the ethical view of reader are combined,the paper aims to form a relatively holistic grasp and discovery of the Chicago School’s view of reader.The first chapter composes and explores the background of the formation of the Chicago School’s view of reader.First,the Chicago School has a broader theoretical vision than the New Criticism.For example,the second generation of scholars,such as Booth,adjusted their theoretical stance to accommodate the reader dimension,and the school’s complementary effects of critical pluralism and inductive criticism allowed for the continuous adjustment and development of its reader perspective.Secondly,in the process of literary criticism’s migration from text-centered to reader-centered,reader-response criticism has continued to do justice to readers,and this has to some extent contributed to the Chicago School’s thinking about the view of reader.Moreover,Booth and Nussbaum played an important role in the ethical turn of American literary criticism,repositioning it and revitalizing it,as well as deepening the Chicago School’s understanding of ethical reader.The second chapter explores Booth’s,Rabinowitz’s,and Phelan’s views of rhetorical reader.Although Booth’s view of rhetorical reader is not explicit,key concepts such as"implied reader" and "unreliable narrative" have been introduced.Rabinowitz,on the other hand,both finely delineates the rhetorical reader view and discusses in detail the relationship between different rhetorical readers,greatly developing the Chicago School’s view of reader.Based on Rabinovitch’s view of reader,Phelan further discusses the issue of reader of second-person works,develops Booth’s theory of unreliable narrative,and develops his own concept of multidimensional interactive reader.The third chapter explores Booth’s,Nussbaum’s,and Phelan’s views of ethical reader,all three of which are grounded in the view of rhetorical reader.Booth’s view of ethical reader relies on the triple perspective of the narrative reader,the author’s reader,and the actual reader to complete the ethical reconstruction,and encourages the actual reader to form a reading community and play a role in the "co-duction" of the ethical guidance of the text.Nussbaum argues that literary reader contributes to the development of what Smith calls the "judicious spectator".Phelan dissolves Booth’s model of textual guidance and forms his own ethical reader in which actual readers and textual ethics are in equal dialogue and permeate each other.The fourth chapter concentrates on exploring and reflecting on the ways in which the view of rhetorical reader and the view of ethical reader are combined,their gains and losses,and their insights.The Chicago School’s view of rhetorical reader is deeply integrated with the view of ethical reader,embodied in the methodological level of "rhetorology",which answers the question of rationality for the critical path of rhetorical ethic;in the literary level,the finely divided view of rhetorical reader provides a solid foundation for exploring the ethics of texts.The contribution of the Chicago School’s view of reader is that it always restrained and balanced theoretical posture expands the understanding of the text-reader relationship,whose limitation lies in the inherent contradiction between nurturing purpose and accommodating diversity.The Chicago School’s view of reader has implications for Chinese literary criticism in terms of combining rhetorical criticism with ethical criticism and textual criticism with reader criticism.