Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

One of the most interesting aspects of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is its exploration of the relationship between reader and author. One way of approaching literary criticism is to use a “reader-response” lens. A reader-response lens is used to evaluate the reader's reaction to a literary text as a substitute for the text itself. With this lens, what a text is cannot be separated from what it does. Readers actively make meaning out of the text instead of passively reading a predetermined narrative. This is in contrast to other schools of criticism which instead typically focus on the work’s content and form.

To that end, the very premise of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is designed to explore and test that focus. If the goal of the critic in writing this essay is to compare and contrast each version of Don Quixote, then the identical nature of the texts would make any sort of comparative analysis regarding the actual content and structure of the works impossible. However, it still allows for a type of reader-response criticism, since the historical context of the two works differs. Therefore, the centrality of the importance of historical context to a literary work, which is the position that the critic takes within the story, is reinforced.