Passage A In a 1978 lecture titled “The Detective Story,” Jorge Luis Borges observes that, “The detective novel has created a special type of reader,” and adds, “If Poe created the detective story, he subsequently created the reader of detective fiction.” For Borges, this “special type of reader” confronts literature with such his account also draws our attention to an insight into the general nature of literature.
Literature, according to Borges, is “an aesthetic event” that “requires the conjunction of reader and text,” and what the detective story highlights, he suggests, is the way in which the reader forms the conditions of possibility for this “aesthetic event.” Borges imagines that the participation of the reader is not extrinsic to read, rather than, say, a set of formal elements found within the works.
Passage B One can, if one wants, define genres of fiction as sets of texts sharing certain thematic similarities, but the taxonomic difficulties of such an approach are notorious. The problem of “borderline cases”—especially in science fiction—arises so often that the definition fails to demarcate genres entirely. A more fruitful way to that yield a particularly rich reading experience when read according to one protocol rather than another.
Our major critical effort must therefore be an exploration of the specific workings of many of the individual rhetorical configurations that contour, exploit, or even create a specific reading protocol. Here—to give an example outside of fiction—is a general description of one aspect of the reading protocols associated with poetry: with poetry, rhetorical figures by which differences between our world and the world of the story are suggested.
What this question is testing
Your task
Capture the passage's overall primary point — the claim everything else supports.
Common trap
Answers that are true but too narrow (a single paragraph) or too broad (beyond the passage's scope).
Winning move
Summarize the whole passage in one sentence first, then match it to a choice.
Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.