A Bourgeois Reader Through the Eyes of a Post-Bourgeois Researcher: On Tatiana Venediktova’s Literature as an Experience, or a "Bourgeois Reader" as a Cultural Hero. Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2018. 280 p.

Tatiana Venediktova’s new book is devoted to the problem particularly relevant for contemporary philosophers, culturologists and philologists. In the situation of radical changes in the social and economic status of literature, the question of the reader’s role ceases to be an element of receptive aesthetics or the psychology of reading only and strongly requires new approaches for its research. In Venediktova’s interpretation, the reader is a real participant in the creative process and gets new experience through communication with the literary work creating new meanings, often different from those the author laid in the text. The figure of a bourgeois reader is presented through the intersection of literary history, cultural history and literary theory dimensions. This gave Venediktova the possibility to use the sociological poetics of Mikhail Bakhtin’s circle. At the same time, Venediktova’s research methods have little in common with the traditional sociology of reading and the new sociology of reader. The reference to Bakhtin is not only a tribute to today’s fashion in the humanities. Bakhtin as a reader and creator of new artistic and aesthetic meanings is a special and not yet explored part in the modern history of literary text interpretation. In the later fragments, Bakhtin offers his own understanding of the image of the reader opposing it to the structuralist image of the ideal reader. Venediktova chooses the 19th century as a field of her research. It is the historical period when the bourgeois class consciousness reaches its highest point and acquires a special sociality; one of its characteristic features is the wide-spread distribution of books and reading and the final democratisation of the readership. The author presents a transition from the theoretical description of the bourgeois reader to the historical interpretation of the possibilities and ways of gaining aesthetic experience as a consistent transfer from poetry to prose. The prosaisation of the lyrical vision of the world and man finds its continuation in the novel as a “bourgeois epic” (Hegel). The concept of the book is especially convincing due to the author’s reliance on the authoritative circle of the classics of the contemporary humanities as well as on the well-made and logical composition of the text. The literary-historical parts of the monograph become a natural continuation and development of theoretical ideas. In gaining new reader experience, the specific characteristics of its source, the changing position of the creator of the text are important. It equally works in relation to the poetry of William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Charles Baudelaire and to the novels of Honore de Balzac, Herman Melville, Gustave Flaubert, and George Eliot. Another important feature of the book is the prospects of the research. The problem of the bourgeois reader seems relevant for the sociocultural history of Russian literature and for the understanding of the role and interaction of the reader and writer in the space of today’s World Wide Web.

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