SOURCE: Hutton, Margaret-Anne. “Know Thyself vs. Common Knowledge: Bleich's Epistemology Seen through Two Short Stories by Balzac.” Modern Language Review 86, no. 1 (January 1991): 49-56.

In the following essay, Hutton explores the concept of community in “Le Colonel Chabert” and “Adieu” and employs David Bleich's epistemology to gain insight into the two stories.

Reader-response theorists, still haunted by the spectre of the ‘affective fallacy’, yet equally aware of the dangers of an objectivist stance, are faced with a problem of authority: who or what is the ultimate source of meaning? At one end of the spectrum, authority may be invested in the actual author of the text, as in the theory of E. D. Hirsch; at the other, meaning may be a function of the individual reader's identity, an approach favoured by Norman Holland.¹ Other works, such as Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading, or Stanley Fish's Affective Stylistics, grant...