Özet:

From the second half of the 20th century, it can be expressed that a paradigmatic change took place in the field of literature. This change came into view when the new role of the reader was discovered and when a new definition was put forward about the reader, who was generally ignored by the literary theorists and critics until that time but in fact who has played the most important role in literature from the very beginning. The reader, who had a passive status in front of the author and the literary work s/he produced, has gradually acquired an active position since the circumstances of the period were appropriate. From 1970s, a vast number of new perspectives and philosophical understandings dealing with the reader’s new role came to the fore. Each of these perspectives, particularly those emerging in Germany, America and France, under the effect of the philosophical traditions leading them to emerge, introduced a different reader model. In this study, three of these different reader models have been analysed in order to discuss how they describe and define the concept related to the reader. By dwelling on these three different perspectives, what is questioned in this article is whether or not these understandings have contributed to the “postmodern reader” model which has been employed to define the position of the reader, who has a significant role nowadays in identifying the literary texts.

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