Definition:
The readers or listeners imagined by a writer or speaker before and during the composition of a text. According to Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca in Rhetorique et Philosophie (1952), the writer predicts this audience's probable response to and understanding of a text. See also:
Examples and Observations:
- "Just as the speaker need not be, and usually is not, identical with the author, so the implied audience is an element of the poem itself and does not necessarily coincide with a given chance reader."
(Rebecca Price Parkin, "Alexander Pope's Use of the Implied Dramatic Speaker," College English, December 1949) - "The meanings of 'audience' . . . tend to diverge in two general directions: one toward actual people external to a text, the audience whom the writer must accommodate; the other toward the text itself and the audience implied there; a set of suggested or evoked attitudes, interests, reactions, [and] conditions of knowledge which may or may not fit with the qualities of actual readers or listeners."
(D.N. Park, "The Meanings of 'Audience,'" College English, 1982) - "[T]exts not only address concrete, historically situated audiences; they sometimes issue invitations or solicitations for auditors and/or readers to adopt a certain perspective for reading or listening. Black's (1970) 'Second Persona' essay explored the 'form of consciousness' solicited by the 'communism is cancer' metaphor employed by the radical right during the 1950s and 1960s. Jasinksi (1992) described how The Federalist Papers constructed a vision of an impartial and 'candid' audience that contained specific prescriptions for how the 'real' audience should evaluate the arguments being addressed during the constitutional ratification debate."
(James Jasinski, "Audience," Sourcebook on Rhetoric, Sage, 2001)
Also Known As: textual audience, implied reader, fictional audience
