Paul Cornea, Introducere în teoria lecturii. (2nd edition). Iai: Polirom, 1998; xvi+240 pp.; ISBN: 9736830357 (pbk)



The first edition of Cornea's Introduction to the Theory of Reading appeared in 1988 at the "Minerva" Publishing House in Bucharest. In the extremely tense climate of the last year of the communist dictatorship in Romania, an academic treatise dealing with an apparently highly specialized topic had but little chances to stir interest. Besides, while very few Romanian literati were at that time familiar with the research field of the theory of reading, most of the scholars of the humanities were prone to underestimate the importance of this topic. The dominant paradigm in Romanian literary criticism had been, for decades, the immanent, intrinsic approach, such as practiced by the Russian formalists, the New Critics, and the French structuralists. Loosely connected to the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy, this type of approach was enthusiastically embraced by scholars, critics, and writers by the mid 1960's, when it seemed to secure literary activity from the interference of the feared "outside" of political control and instrumentation. In spite of this defensive stance largely adopted in aesthetic matters and its feeble compatibility with contextualist, interactional views such as the one brought about by the theory of reading, some noted Romanian literary critics saluted the publishing of Paul Cornea's treatise in 1988. The substantial French abstract which concluded the volume also gave the author the possibility to make his theoretical theses known abroad. An Italian translation (Introduzione alla teoria della lettura) was published in 1993 by Sansoni Publishing House in Florence.

As times have changed, the Western shift in literary perspective - roughly speaking, the (re)orientation from 'text' to 'context' - gained ground in Romania, too. The theory of reception and related topics were pushed forward in the curricula at most of the philological faculties and gradually drew public attention. Questions like 'who is reading what... how... and why?' turned out to be of major importance not only for the teaching of literature, but also for educational planning and management, book production, and cultural policy. Paul Cornea's treatise is an excellent means to cope with such prob-lems, endowing the researcher with both broad information and deep insight.

The second edition presents but slight modifications, except for a new preface which has been added, and the omission of the abstract in French. The author has given up the attempt to update the text, on the one hand considering that no major changes have occurred in between in the investigated branch of knowledge, on the other fearing that subsequent interpolations might damage the original layout of his book on the other. "I have the fault - even risking to be considered frivolous by scientists - to care not only for rigor, but also for style" (iii).

A preliminary distinction, between "reception" and "reading," is meant to clarify the scope and the orientation of the research: the former suggests "especially the subject's reaction to the text," while the latter starts from the text, from "the way the text is organized, in its objectiveness" (15). "Consequently, the notion of "reading" privileges what the text contains, the one of "reception" - what the reader retains, according to his/her personality and the circumstances" (16).

The first part of the treatise offers a generous survey of the prerequisites of reading. Paul Cornea discusses and evaluates a wide range of up-to-date theories regarding the notions of "text," "reader," and "system of codes" in relation to "reading competence" and "context." Critical comment-ary builds up challenging subchapters such as "Some shortcomings of the standard text theory" (27-32), and the ones offering the author's position concerning the ongoing splitting between the study of the "virtual" and the "real" reader (63-68). Worth mentioning is also Cornea's contribution to the subcategorization of texts. He distinguishes among three fundamental types of textualization, namely referential, trans- or pseudo-referential, and self-referential, attempting to bridge the gaps and remove the contradictions which result from the use of traditional oppositions such as "literary vs. non-literary" and "poetry vs fiction." Referential behavior uses the language in a "denotative, unequivocal, literal, de-modalized" manner (33). Pseudo- or trans-referential practices are no longer meant to "convey (receive) factual information' but to render an 'imaginary construction." Self-referential behavior is 'narcissistic,' implying a "non-functional, often playful intention" on the part of both sender and receiver (34). This taxonomy is fruitfully handled throughout the volume, enabling the author to cast a new light on specific traits of reading, with particular emphasis on skills and activities involved in "literary" reading.

In the second part of the book, Cornea analyzes the processes involved in reading comprehension, drawing theoretical suggestions from a large variety of sources: structural linguistics, pragmatics, semiotics, Grice's philosophy of language, Siegfried J. Schmidt's "constructivism," psychology (of perception, of memory), psycholinguistics, literary sociology, and (especially phenomenological) aesthetics. As the author himself admits, evoking a famous distinction made by Dilthey, his study was intended to follow a double path, to complement the "explanatory" approach of reading, based on theoretical models prevailing during the 80's such as Piaget's structural cognitivism and the emerging computational cognitivism, with a "comprehensive" view in the line of Ingarden and Iser (iv).

The main aspects of comprehension which are dealt here with are its stages (analytical models of reading), the pre-reading, the levels of comprehension, the "reading clues," the recodifying of meaning in relation to memorization, the dynamics of the reading process, the thematic orientation guided by connectors and the ways to overcome potential 'crises' in sense-building. A special attention deserve the chapters on the "Negotiation of meaning" and "Imaginative investment," which reveal at best the author's ability to fuse theoretical thinking with textual analysis.

The last chapter, "Interpretation," leads towards the author's work in progress on hermeneutics.

The new preface hints at several aspects which have come to the foreground since 1988: the development of empirical and cognitive research, the hard competition between print and other contemporary media, and the new patterns of behavior effected by "electronic reading."



Liviu Papadima

University of Bucharest