The theoretical segment that refers to the phenomenon of receiving the artistic literature, more specifically the field interested in the concepts of reading and reader, is characterized by a deep indeterminacy, multiple confusions and terminological overlaps. All this is due to the polysemy of the notions with which it operates, the lack of a globalizing and fundamental explanatory study, as well as due to the large number of schools, research perspectives, theories, hypotheses, methods, approaches that have self-propelled parallel, successively or deductively. throughout the last century. Also, this self-reflexive dimension of anti-intentional hermeneutics is extremely vast and complex with an inter- and multidisciplinary specificity. The basic disciplines, but also directions derived from them, which approach and define the concepts of reading, reception, reader are: history and literary criticism, hermeneutics, pragmatics, rhetoric, poetry, communication sciences, sociology of literature, sociocriticism, psychology of literature , psychoanalysis, psychocritics, semiotics, linguistics, dialogism, aesthetics. Thus, a research in this sense would clarify many drawbacks of studies on the concept of literary reading. The approach proposes a re-inventory of all concepts related to the act of reading and its agent - the reader, as well as a delimitation and a clarification of them using several dictionaries of literary theory and by updating the most important theoretical studies on this topic appeared during the twentieth century.