Pojem čtenář v anglosaské kulturně-analytické tradici Cultural Studies: možné spojnice, parelely a přesahy

This article is concerned with readership and reading, a key theme in the work of the founding fathers of British Cultural studies, like Hoggart, Thompson, and Williams, and related American scholars, such as Altick. The article offers links with research areas related to this tradition in terms of time and concerns, that is, analyses of the centrally controlled readership in the ‘socialist’ countries. In addition to a Marxist orientation, the common features include an attempt to critically challenge the privileged position of the ‘elite culture/text’ as an object of enquiry, the rehabilitation of the non-elite (common) reader, as well as a search for the relation between the phenomena of reading, the reader, and literacy on the one hand and socio-economic progress on the other. In both traditions, reading is burdened with enormous social expectations and tends to be transformed from an analytical category into a prescriptive, axiological one.