Model Reader(s)

Umberto Eco ( On Literature ) explores the phenomenon of the “quality best seller,” the book that gains a wide readership for compelling story or characters, yet at the same time employs sophisticated literary devices that entertain and delight more serious readers.  This is nothing new, Eco thinks.  Dante and Shakespeare were both “quality best selling” authors.  Eco generalizes: texts “tend to construct two Model Readers” rather than simple one.

“It addresses in the first place a Model Reader of the first level, whom we will call the semantic reader, the reader who wants to know (and rightly so) how the story will end . . . . But the text also addresses a Model Reader of the second level, whom we will call the semiotic or aesthetic reader, who asks himself what kind of reader that particular story was asking him to become, and wants to know how the Model Author who is instructing him step by step will proceed.  To put it bluntly, the first-level model reader wants to know what happens, while the second-level model reader wants to know how what happens has been narrated.”  First-level readers may never advance to the second level, but Eco insists that to become a good second-level reader, “you have to have been a good first-level reader.”