Literary studies have always been led by a question ; "what is the meaning of the work?" And literary theories have also been assumed to be the servants, whose task is to provide instruments for the better interpretation of a work as the ultimate purpose of study. The traditional theorists, identifying this meaning of work with the author's intention as the origin, have attempted to reconstitute it in various ways : until the 20th century, Literature had been nothing but the example of Humanity, the storeroom of Truth and the bearer of Value, made by the great masters. Therefore, it used to be believed that the holy duty of literary studies in general was to elucidate their secrets. However, all this was fundamentally reversed after the Structuralism, for it demonstrated sufficiently that a text, itself, has no center and is multiple from the outset, separated from the domination by the author. And the activity of the reader has recently become decisive for literary studies. In this essay, we examine these theories of reading (hermeneutics, reader-response criticism, Rezeptionsasthetik...), surveying their limits, which seem to shape the main stream after the Structuralism.
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