| Summary: | Identification has been a substantial topic for discussion in aesthetics and literature for a long time. Different views on what a text is has opened up for different approaches for how a reader should perceive and position herself in relation to a text. My specific take on the issue of identification is directed on how different theories and literary ideas have concerned itself with emotional and affective responses in the reader, I view this position through what is called postcritique, specifically with the works of Susan Sontag, Toril Moi and Rita Felski. The postcritical perspective have a significantly more positive look on reader involvement and emotional connections with a text which makes it an appropriate aim for discussion in contrast with for instance structuralism. The aim of this essay is to examine reader identification, its possibilities and functions in the literary field. I do this by attempting to unravel the lingering debate about reader involvement and identification which is shown in the texts by Sontag, Moi and Felski. Another part of this essay’s aim is to test the postcritical argument of the reader’s experience and importance to the text, which I mean have similarities with contemporary views on the importance of the individual’s formation of identity. The essay is divided into three parts: introduction, analysis and at last a critique of the postcritical arguments based on what is presented in the analysis. A conflict that is shown and discussed throughout the essay is whether reader involvement reveals the text itself or just the individual reader, which goes down to the base question of “what is the meaning of literature?” In the final part of the essay, concerning the postcritical arguments, I suggest that what is indeed thought to be a new, more broadened way of perceiving texts and literature, there is a focus on the individual in reading, which resembles the contemporary ideology of self-building and a therapeutic tendency which is present in our society. I question whether the postcritical approach truly have the ability to be a subversive reading practise in today’s society.
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