I am not a part of the fictionalized audience

While reading Ong’s work on fictionalizing an audience, I found myself looking back to Leitch’s essay on theory and criticism. As I re-read Leitch’s points on interpretation, I found an interesting dilemma on the concept of creating or imagining an audience for a literary work. Ong goes through many examples of different approaches to the fictionalizing of an audience and the various concepts that should be taken into account such as literary tradition, time, cultural importance, interest, and common knowledge etc. However, Leitch states “reading or interpretation, typically involves such activities as personal response, appreciation, evaluation, historical reception, explication, exegesis, and critique” (Leitch 2). Of course an author must fictionalize his audience because as Ong explains, the writer is the only responsible party for the text. Nonetheless, my question is, to what extent does the “fictionalized” audience, in terms of the workload of the writer, actually matter? I realized by re-reading Leitch, that an audience comes into relations with a text with an already somewhat bias expectation based on the genre of the text. It intrigues me to read about the dedication and amount of work an author must put into his work in order just for an imagined audience, when right along with it I read about the different types of readings people give, based upon the reasoning for picking up the text in the first place. The best example I can give in direct relation to my discovery; I personally would never read Ong or Leitch on my own time or leisure, but here I am. I am not a part of the fictionalized audience because I have no interest or desire to read the texts, I was influenced and in a sense forced to become a part of the audience of the texts.