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The Understood Author: A hermeneutical exploration of audiences interpretation of the author as productive practices behind a text
Pavlíčková, Tereza ; Carpentier, Nico (advisor) ; Kuzmičová, Anežka (referee) ; Hermes, Joke (referee)
in English This project builds on the tradition of audience research that theoretically and empirically established that meaning is formed in the negotiation between the text and the reader, that the audiences are agentic, their interpretation of media is contextual and situated, and that they have the potential to resist the media. It argues that it is important to explore people's attention to different sources: who is listening, to whom, and why - and asks how people understand the notion of an author that they encounter in the interpretation of factual media texts, and how this interpretation is brought back into the interpretative act. The thesis subscribes to philosophical hermeneutics as an overarching theoretical as well as methodological framework to devise a concept of an understood author that is a result of the interpretative act, where the author imagined and anticipated by the reader (in the form of prior knowledge and prejudices) is encountered and actualised by the author inscribed into the text. I carried out 28 in-depth face-to-face interviews with Czechs born between 1948-1963 to explore participants' experiences and relationship with media and media authors. Employing hermeneutical analysis, the focus is not to capture what is an author, but how it happened to be so. The...
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