Barthes & Ong: Audience Interpretation Differences

After reading Ong, I  noticed that he focuses on words that we barely pay attention to. For example, "audience"and "reader". Ong explains the difference of the two and how one is a collective noun and how the other isn't. His point in mentioning that is to say that an audience is a collective noun but if a speaker asks the audience to read something silently then at that point they are going into their own separate  reading minds. Answering the questions posed in the blog if the audience has not experienced what the author is talking about, imagination can always come into place for you to think outside the box. I don't think that should stop the audience from connecting with the author. The readers can also listen to details that are given in the text to picture what is happening.

“First, that the writer must construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role-entertainment seekers, reflective sharers of experience, inhabitants of a lost and remembered world of prepubertal latency, and so on,” (12). This quote basically means that the writer must also meet the audience half-way so that they can understand where the writer is coming from. That connects the writer and reader together and the point in which the writer was trying to make will end up being conveyed. 

"Oral strorytelling is a two way street." (16) This is true because oral is can only be told through verbal dialect. Whereas, writing and printing can be interpreted in different ways since no one is physically reading it to you. That allows your mind to wander to different places and interpret the main points in different ways. 

Now as far as Barthes goes in "The Death of the Author" he feels that the reader should interpret the content of the article in a way that makes sense and has meaning to them. That way they will feel as if they understood something and got something from the text. Ong feels as if the reader interpretation doesn't matter. Clearly Ong and Barthes have different views. 
Kelshay Toomer

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007. 868, 874-877.

Ong,Walter J. “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (1975): 9-21.