Structuralism, modelling its analysis on linguistics, ignored authors, readers and social contexts and kept to a strictly formal analysis of textual units of meaning and their interrelations. Characters, for instance, ceased to be ‘brought alive’ as they were in traditional criticism, and had to be content to be functional elements of plot structure.

In phenomenological criticism the text becomes a site for the author and the reader mutually to construct a set of meanings. The conventions of the literary text thus become constraining factors on this author/reader intersubjectivity. One of the most important of these conventions is narrative, the object of analysis in the book under review.

Horst Ruthrof’s book (the title of which seems to allude to Berger and Luckmann’s important sociological work The Social Construction of Reality) gives an account of reading processes from within the above two problematics: structuralism, and to name it more correctly, phenomenological reader-reception aesthetics. Ideas from the former area are received and integrated far more critically than those from the latter; the book poses and resolves its problems largely from within this-second paradigm. Traditional literary criticism is ignored, and Marxist approaches which, roughly speaking, look to the objective conditions of production and reproduction of literature, are rejected.

In specifically locating the reader as a site for the construction of literary meanings Ruthrof is responding to a recent trend in literary criticism which attaches less importance to the author or the author’s intentions in the discussion of how works come to mean. Reading is stressed as an active, dynamic process, not just the passive decoding of meanings which are somehow fixed in relation to an originating psyche.

Literary criticism has distinguished two senses of ‘reading’, one as verb and the other as noun. The first, which Ruthrof uses, is reading in the sense of ‘mentally staging that which is presented’, so that although the emphasis has shifted to the reader, literary communication is still conceived as the ‘concretization’ of ‘acts of consciousness’ emerging from the phenomenological interaction of author/reader inter-subjective relations.

The other sense of ‘reading’, which is not attended to in this book, is that of the set of interpretative discourses (possible readings such as Leavisite, New Critical, structuralist or psychoanalytic) which are concretized not at the level of the mind, but at the level of actual institutional production, or training for the production, of critical texts (readings or rewritings).

The phenomenological reading of those texts selected as ‘literary’ has it that the subject who-is doing the representing and the thing represented come into existence for one another in the temporal unfolding of the text as object. Early in his book, therefore, Ruthrof sets up his pervasive distinction between ‘presentational process’ and ‘presented world’ (roughly how the story is told versus what it is told about). Different structural relations between text, reader position, author position and ‘world-out-there’ give rise to. a typology of narrative fiction: mythic allegory, documentary fiction, realist novel and so on. At each stage Ruthrof proffers textual fragments (from the Book of Genesis to Hemingway to oral Aboriginal narrative) to demonstrate the theory.

Movements in the study of narrative, such as Roland Barthes’ ‘narrative transgression’ or David Lodge’s poetics, are criticized and rejected on the grounds of an excess of static formalism. Ruthrof’s approach is a modification of Ingarden where the reader’s actions are seen as bringing to light aspects of the potential polyphony of aesthetic value qualities of narrative art’. The category of the ‘aesthetic’ functions here at the level of justification or as a unifying tendency for th.is theory, but unfortunately this category is, not interrogated as it is in the work of, say, Balibar and Macherey, which analyses the writing and reading of texts as ‘literary’ as an ideological form of production.

The book’s most useful content lies in its clear exposition of lngarden; an interesting analysis of ‘bracketing’ (types of structural reduction) in the modem short story; and the beginnings of a theory of ‘control’ in which the changing relations of narrator, signified world and implied reader give rise to varying authority effects. Even the paradox of ‘authoritative reader’ becomes possible in the self-conscious reworkings of classic realist narratives which have given rise to ‘metafiction’.

Other chapters include discussions of parodic narrative, the form-content debate, translation and linguistic modality.

One of the weaknesses of the book is the failure to differentiate its major conceptual category: the reader. The homogeneity of this term is repeated throughout the text in phrases like ‘the reader’s mind’, ‘At the end of the story we know ...’, ‘the reading consciousness’. Without differentiation of this unifying ‘reader’ category, aesthetic reception of certain texts cannot be explained. The canon of literary works of art is maintained by training certain types of readers. Ruthrof’s work is precisely this: a work which will function in the training of fairly orthodox, although theoretical, literary critics, readers whose aesthetic reception of the literary text is already taken for granted.

But the book’s main value lies in its theoretical emphasis. In attempts to renovate the institution of literature theoretically, it is implicitly claimed that literary criticism can be made more rigorous by concentrating on categories of analysis like narrative, and it is thereby freed from the moralistic role of being the guardian of a society’s literary taste. Narrative can be seen to be organizing a much broader range of texts from Shakespeare to Dallas and so becomes extremely useful for contemporary criticism. Although further effects of these operations are not investigated, Ruthrof’s book will be a valuable contribution to the growing, and contested field of literary theory in Australia.