implicit reader

his paper develops a methodological framework to guide the efforts of a research team united by the task of investigating the reader in contemporary Bulgarian literature. For this purpose, we start from the receptive theory of Wolfgang Iser, but the authors develop, change and adapt this theory to the team's own goals. As a result, The Implicit Reader is seen as a textual program and normative instance in the texts, with which try to control and guide the behavior of their real readers. The categories of analysis with which this program can be approached and explored are grouped into three major groups: “repertoires”, “strategies” and “communicative competences”. They are further divided into finer operational sub-categories and tools, allowing shared methodologies of work between team members and comparability of research results.

The preliminary results from the study „Reading Practices in Bulgaria: The Implicit Reader in the Text“ identified different images of readers and readership, produced by various Bulgarian literary and media works. In spite of the genre convergence between the so-called „high“ and the so-called „popular“ literature, it was found that „high“ works leave more space for reader navigation and interpretation and open more free spaces for a wide range of different readers. On the other hand, popular literature has proven to be much more controlling and guiding. It allows its implicit reader some complex and specialized competencies, but only as far as the levels of genre are concerned. On the other hand, the popular texts expect significantly less from their reader what concerns other abilities: reading verbal and style registers, ability to understand complex metaphors and symbolic motifs, understanding of character building and conflicts. The text expectations toward the reader. What concerns philosophical and axeological levels in popular readings, the text expectations are especially modest: such works often presuppose a one-sided patriotic consensus among their audiences. As for the small number of media texts of scandalous journalists that were analyzed in the frame of the collective study, they model a similar patriotic audience, yet, in a state of anger and emotional excess. In parallel with this „state of emergency“ of communication, media texts model a clear hierarchy between the undisputed authority of their charismatic authors and the supposedly silent, admiring readers, merging into a homogeneous and emotional audience of like-minded people (implicit image of „the angry People“, construed by the media text).