tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post4039002747913004991..comments2024-01-05T20:26:44.857-08:00Comments on Thinking Again: An Audience and a Readermark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-39797539371614024002007-10-09T13:15:00.000-07:002007-10-09T13:15:00.000-07:00hmm -- Mark, I have to disagree about how you see ...hmm -- Mark, I have to disagree about how you see reader and audience. For me, the critical emphasis on the "reader" is a product of the captialist notion of the "consumer". In this new era, we are all atomized, and I want to resist that in its application to poetry.<BR/><BR/>To me, "audience" signifies the <I>situated</I> reader -- a reader in the middle of her own network of obligations and privileges, engaged both with the writer and with other people. Yes, there remains a distance, but it is a distance in some sense of respect. <BR/><BR/>To put it another way: the writer-reader relation is hierarchical. The writer creates something which is read by a reader -- a creature whose only feature is that he consumes the text. It's this hierarchical notion that I oppose for both "high theory" reasons, and practical ones.<BR/><BR/>Whereas the writer-audience relation seems different to me: the audience has its own concerns, and turns to the writer as an act of volition. The audience chooses to attend, to open itself up, but does not abandon its social identity in the way the far more "conceptualized" writer-reader relation implies.<BR/><BR/>Of course, in the end, we are using the same words but they have different valences. I suppose what I'm saying is that for me, the properties of the "reader" that have nothing to do with the fact that she is reading me, have become more and more important.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-15170261014266891372007-10-08T20:38:00.000-07:002007-10-08T20:38:00.000-07:00Thank you for this.I have been thinking a lot abou...Thank you for this.<BR/><BR/>I have been thinking a lot about<BR/>these two topics recently, but I<BR/>have barriers to find ways around,<BR/>barriers which/ did not exist <BR/>some years ago when I could have<BR/>participated traditionally<BR/>but/ chose not to.brian (baj) salcherthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11649691450577647656noreply@blogger.com