This communication aims to make a clarifying foray into the conceptual history of the last century in order to understand how the new principles and directions of approaching literature have been harmonized. Thus, during the twentieth century, the numerous studies concerned with the reading of the literary work were oriented towards the two classical directions - the intrinsic and the extrinsic approach. Regarding the field of reading and of the reader, there is a difference between the theories of reading and the theories of reception. The two types of theories are as close (as purpose and object of study), as contradictory (the first are centered on the authority of the text and/or on the author's intention, on the structure of the text that schedules its reading and influences it on reader, the other category of theories studies the subjectivity, the freedom of the empirical reader and its response or reaction to the text).The solution to the eternal interpretive dilemma could be found in the theoretical-philosophical conception of Mikhail Bahtin. For the Russian scientist, all these intrinsic and extrinsic instances become "voices" framed in a continuous dialogue from which the meaning of the text crystallizes. Later, in the French theoretical context, Bakhtinian dialogism offers an opportunity for the emergence of a new discipline - sociocriticism. This represents the theoretical movement that tries to reconcile the extremes and avoid the limited, unidirectional or lacuna interpretation of the literary work. In contrast to the intrinsic approaches (narratology, poetics) that consider the text as an artistic phenomenon or the extrinsic approaches (the sociology of literature) that define the text as a social phenomenon, the sociocriticism understands through the literary text an artistic social phenomenon, thus encompassing it, the two directions of study of the literary work.