« Literature in the Reader » – mais quel·le lecteur·rice et quelle littérature ? Relire Stanley Fish en 2025

Abstract

Starting from Stanley Fish’s 1970 article redefining the text as a temporal experience, this paper seeks to nuance some of his claims by examining Let Them Eat Chaos, a poem by Kae Tempest written for performance. While a text may indeed unfold as a temporal experience, this does not mean it lacks any concrete reality. A text exists objectively in the reader’s psyche as a set of visual and auditory impressions. This mode of existence ensures that reading always leads to a reconfiguration of the reader’s identity—especially when the text brings into play voices and images marked by a certain degree of indeterminacy.