SOURCE: “Audience” and “Another Poet, Another Audience” in François Villon and His Reader, Wayne State University Press, 1989, pp. 15-27, 111-22.

In the first excerpt, Fein informally theorizes a historically aware reader-response approach to Villon's Testament drawing from the work of literary scholars Stanley Fish and Hans R. Jauss, establishes an identity for Villon's contemporary readership, and discusses Villon's deft maneuvering between obscure historical detail and universal themes. The second excerpted chapter compares Villon's Testament to the work of his patron Charles d'Orléans, discussing the role of the interpretive community.

Audience

Any reader-oriented study should begin with a clarification of the term “reader,” a word all too loosely used in reader-response criticism. Many critics assume tacit agreement on the question of the reader's identity or else dismiss this identity as irrelevant, thereby considerably weakening the foundation on which all their hypotheses will ultimately rest. Stanley Fish defines...