L’Esthétique de la réception et la triade auteur-oeuvre-lecteur. Le rôle des éléments paratextuels dans la formation de l’horizon d’attente du lecteur

Abstract

Since Aristotle, the study of any work has been done by taking into consideration three dimensions: that of the author (his
biography, his vision of the world, his place and his importance, his contribution in literary history), that of the of the work (the
way in which it handled language), that of the reader (the reception and production of meaning by the person who reads the literary
work), while granting different importance to each of them and the relationships between them in different historical periods and
according to different literary currents. Thus, throughout literary history, traditional literary interpretation has always been primarily
concerned with the study of the text-author relationship, since 1967, the date of the publication of H.R. Jauss’s book For an Aesthetic of reception, theories of reception aesthetics deal with the study of the text-reader relationship. To our knowledge, there are few works where we study the relationships between these three dimensions at the same time. We have therefore set ourselves the objective of studying the complex relationship between author-text-reader. However the limits of a paper do not allow us to address such a vast subject in depth we will only deal with the role of paratextual elements in the formation of the reader’s horizon of expectation while adding to the author-text-reader triad a fourth element, that of the editor, because we find that the paratextual elements represent a universe of cooperation between the author and the editor and that the function of this cooperation consists of putting into action and to revive the reader’s knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge, his literary experience in order to guide him in reading the work itself so that he can cooperate with the author and take on the role of the one who, according to the theories of the aesthetics of reception, assumes the actualization, the “concretization” and the reconstruction of literary works.