A wonderful diatribe today by Heriberto Yepez against the overvaluation of the role of the reader, in literary theory beginning in the 60s and 70s. The great thing about this diatribe is its exaggeration, its overkill. A mere reader is nothing more than a consumer of texts, with no creative element at all. He is only interested in readers who are also writers. I would tend to agree - with allowances made for the exaggeration of course. What I always resented was that all readers were presumed equal. So that the effort I made to be a better reader over many years counted for naught. Someone else picking up the text and reading casually or with diminished skill had an opinion that was, in theory, equal to my own. Then why bother teaching literature at all?