Den talande bokens poetik - Doria

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is that the didactics 77 also includes paradigmatic thinking, which means that the
student reflects on the story. Paradigmatic thinking is another way of making
meaning. Penne (2010, 134–135) mentions specifically meta-thinking or
understanding of metaphors as a cognitive schema.
Chapter 3 continues in discussing how various theorists within the tradition of
text-reader-oriented literary theory have described the encounter between text
and reader. This part of the chapter provides the researcher with theoretically
loaded concepts which are used as analytic tools in the researcher’s
interpretation of the informant’s statements and interpretations in the literature
conversation.
The active role of the reader as interpreter of the text and as constructor of
meaning in the reading process is central for research within reception theory.
The “reader” can be viewed in a broad sense as a person who looks upon an
artistic product, that tells about a fictive world, and the concept “reader” then
applies also to a person who watches a film, a TV production or a piece of
theatre or a listener to talking books. A pre-understanding in this research project
was that the meaning of a text is something that is created in the encounter
between reader and text. The research questions explored if and how the form in
which the talking book was presented affected the meaning that was created.
According to Wolfgang Iser (1978), meaning is created when the reader gives
the text a meaning that is relevant, or significant, to him or herself.
Iser (1978), Rosenblatt (2002) and Langer (1995) have contributed to the
analytic concepts "empty spaces", "horizons of understanding", "efferent and
aesthetical reading" and "envisionments" that are used in the analytic
interpretation in this work. Iser thought that a text offers a lot of empty spaces
that the reader has to fill out in order to make sense of what is written. A writer
can never write out everything in detail in a novel, a lot of things are left out and
thereby left to the reader to fill in. Iser (1978, 21) used the concepts “artistic
pole” and “aesthetic pole” for this. The artistic text is the text of the writer, what
he or she has written, and the aesthetic text is the text that the reader experiences
while reading and interpreting. Iser therefore thought that the meaning of a text
is something that should be experienced and not defined, something he called
“aesthetic effect”. Iser’s concept “horizons of understanding” refers to the
perspective from which a reader interprets a text. He or she uses his or her own
understanding, which is based on prior experiences to interpret a situation. When
different points of views meet and create cognitive dissonance in a text or in the
77 In a Nordic context the concept didactic is in use with no negative connotations. It
encompasses the theoretical consideration connected to teaching and learning as well as
the instructional design of learning situations.