The Image of the Audience in the Text: The View of Literary Scholars and Specialists in the Theory of Rhetoric

Abstract

This article briefly highlights the history of the problem of the addressee category in a literary or oratorical text. The main theoretical manuals on literary criticism and rhetoric are considered. Based on the studied material, it is shown how the image of the reader (audience) manifests itself at the lexical, grammatical and compositional levels of the text. It is noted that the figure of the addressee always falls into two components: the real recipient of information and the imaginary listener of the author. Establishing the image of the listener in a particular text becomes a difficult but necessary task for the researcher. This action helps to understan 
and comprehend the worldview of the creator of the text. The main difficulty for the researche is to identify the differences between the intentionally created image of the desired addressee in the work and the actual image that came from the author’s pen.