James L. Resseguie extends narrative-critical analysis by emphasizing the cognitive and perceptual dimensions of reading John. In this model, meaning emerges through the reader’s active engagement with shifting perspectives, perceptual gaps, and narrative ambiguity. Resseguie’s contribution is significant in shifting focus from authorial design to readerly cognition, but it retains a central assumption inherited from Culpepper: that interpretive activity leads toward integrative understanding.
In this
cognitive-narratological framework, ambiguity is typically construed as a
stimulus for interpretive processing that ultimately yields determinate
meaning, rather than as a persistent structural feature of the text. Narrative
gaps are likewise understood as functional sites of engagement that activate
the reader’s inferential activity, directing attention toward resolution and
coherence rather than sustained indeterminacy. On this account, readerly
participation produces a progressively integrated experiential understanding of
the narrative world, such that perception itself operates as a stabilizing
interpretive mechanism capable of organizing disparate narrative data into a
coherent whole.
Resseguie, for example, emphasizes the ways in which
perceptual and cognitive dynamics shape the reader’s construction of meaning,
foregrounding the interpretive coherence generated through engagement with
narrative ambiguity.[1] However, this study contends that such a model continues to presuppose a movement toward coherence
that is not consistently borne out by the narrative dynamics of the Fourth
Gospel. Even where cognitive resolution is posited as the outcome of readerly
engagement, the text itself repeatedly sustains interpretive openness,
disjunction, and deferred closure in ways that resist final stabilization.[2]
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