Aesthetics of reception and historical-critical methods: the text from the reader's perspective

Aesthetics of reception presents a challenge to biblical historical-critical research, usually dominated by questions about the origins and history of the text. This paper seeks to demonstrate how, in the late 1960s, with Reception Studies a shift was made to the in the process of interpreting literary texts. Aesthetics of reception, by distancing itself from the paradigms of interpretation of the previous literary work of art and proposing a reflection that emphasizes the receptor, the reader, allowed a new orientation to the literary studies. Previous aesthetic theories have generally centered more on research dedicated to the historical reconstruction of the biblical text than to the history of interpretation and the effects of the text. The contribution of aesthetics of reception is one of the most original theoretical efforts related to the reading, understood as a cultural practice that develops from the interaction between the subjectivity of each reader and their social place.