The Summarizer as Horizon of Reception is a theoretical paper by Lee Sharks, deposited 29 July 2026, reading the machine summarizer through the categories of reception aesthetics.
Its central move is to treat the composed answer as a horizon of expectation in Hans Robert Jauss's sense — the frame a reader brings to a text, which determines what the text can mean. When a summarizer stands between a work and its reader, that horizon is no longer formed by the reader's own literary experience but composed on the reader's behalf, in advance, by a system with its own tendencies.
The paper names machine-mediated reception as the successor problem to Jauss's: reception theory asked how the horizon of a historical audience could be reconstructed, and the new question is how a horizon that is generated per query, invisibly, and differently each time can be studied at all. Its answer is methodological — the capture is the empirical practice the frame requires, since a horizon that is not recorded when it appears cannot be recovered afterwards. The summarizer is cast as the new first reader: the reader every subsequent reader inherits.