Abstraktní autor a abstraktní čtenář
The Abstract Author and the Abstract Reader

Summary/Abstract: This contribution is devoted to two frequent factors in narratology (narrative theory): the implied author and the implied reader. The starting point in exploring these special strategies of narrative text is the fact that narrative does not narrate but represents narration. It comprises therefore at least two levels of communication: communication of the author and communication of the narrator. The article attempts to reveal the relationship between the transmitter and the receiver of a narrative utterance at the individual levels of communication, which are established by the narrative and the narrative action. It precisely sets down the form or definition of the individual instances of communication, concrete and abstract, and also investigates the historical development and formation of these terms in narratology. Against the background of disputes and the forms of the investigated instances in the history of narratology, the article analyzes their concepts and considers their advantages. It then proposes a new systematic definition of the two fundamental terms or, rather, tools of narratological analysis: the implied author and the implied reader. The article presents a methodologically clear way of investigating the semantic action of a narrative text and posits a logically and factually precise formulation for analyzing key problems of the theory, which it helps to support. The article focuses on the question of the limits of the lyric subject from the perspective of its potential for expression. It recapitulates the main features of Červenka’s conception of the lyric subject, particularly the concept contained in his Fikční světy lyriky (Fictional Worlds of Lyric Verse, 2003), and it questions the sharpness, or functionality, of the boundary that Červenka demarcated between the fictional world of the work and the fictional world of playing with the work. The author proposes granting the persona greater “authority” and accepting the blurred boundary between the persona and its utterance.

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