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Collaboration, information literacy, writing process, reader-response criticism.

  • © 2023 by Angela Eward-Mangione - Hillsborough Community College

Reader-Response Criticism is

  • a research method , a type of textual research , that literary critics use to interpret texts
  • a genre of discourse employed by literary critics used to share the results of their interpretive efforts.

Key Terms: Dialectic ; Hermeneutics ; Semiotics ; Text & Intertextuality ; Tone

The origins of reader-oriented criticism can be located in the United States with Louise Rosenblatt’s development of theories in the 1930s, though she further developed her theories in the late seventies ( The Reader, the Text, the Poem 1978). American critic Stanley Fish has also significantly influenced Reader-Response theory. He conceived of “interpretive communities” that employ interpretive strategies to produce properties and meanings of literary texts (14-15). The thoughts, ideas, and experiences a reader brings to the text, combined with the text and experience of reading it, work together to create meaning. Reader + Text = Meaning.

Reader-response criticism, or reader-oriented criticism, focuses on the reading process. As Charles Bressler notes in Literary Criticism , the basic assumption of reader-oriented criticism is “Reader + Text = Meaning” (80). The thoughts, ideas, and experiences a reader brings to the text, combined with the text and experience of reading it, work together to create meaning. From this perspective, the text becomes a reflection of the reader. The association of the reader with a text differs from the premise of Formalist criticism, which argues for the autonomy of a text. Reader-response criticism does not suggest that anything goes, however, or that any interpretation is a sound one.

The origins of reader-oriented criticism can be located in the United States with Louise Rosenblatt’s development of theories in the 1930s ( Literature as Exploration ). Rosenblatt further developed her theories in the late seventies ( The Reader, the Text, the Poem ). American critic Stanley Fish has also significantly influenced reader-response theory. Fish conceived of “interpretive communities” that employ interpretive strategies to produce properties and meanings of literary texts (14-15).Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , a novel that critiques the dangers of a fictional utopian society, incorporates an intriguing exploration of reader-response criticism into its plot. John and Mustapha Mond both read texts written by Shakespeare, but they report very different responses to Shakespeare’s plays. For John, a noble savage born on a reservation in New Mexico, plays by Shakespeare represent a useful way to learn about the finest aspects of humanity and human values. In contrast, Mustapha Mond views literary works written by Shakespeare as useless high art. Mustapha Mond’s position as the Resident Controller for Western Europe influences his perspective as a reader as much as John’s encounter with Shakespeare on a Reservation in New Mexico does. Recognizing how John’s and Mustapha Mond’s experiences differ in the novel helps readers understand why these characters respond to Shakespeare in dissimilar ways.

Foundational Questions of Reader-Response Criticism

  • Who is the reader? Who is the implied reader?
  • What experiences, thoughts, or knowledge does the text evoke?
  • What aspects or characters of the text do you identify or disidentify with, and how does this process of identification affect your response to the text?
  • What is the difference between your general reaction to (e.g., like or dislike) and reader-oriented interpretation of the text?

Online Example: Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”: A Reader’s Response

Discussion Questions and Activities: Reader-Response Criticism

  • List and define two to three of the key terms you would consider to approach a text from a reader-response approach.
  • Explain why a text that has not been interpreted by a reader is an “incomplete text.”
  • Using the Folger Digital Texts from the Folger Shakespeare Library , interpret the soliloquy in act three, scene one, lines 64-98 of Hamlet from a reader-response approach. Consider the following questions as you construct your response: what previous experiences do you have with the drama or poetry of William Shakespeare, and how have those experiences shaped the way you currently approach his work? If you read this soliloquy in the past, has your view of it changed? Why?
  • Differentiate between your general opinion of Hamlet’s soliloquy (your like or dislike of it) and your interpretation of it.
  • In your view, what does Hamlet mean when he says, “To be or not to be—that is the question” (3.1.64)? Defend your interpretation.

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2. Reading Literature as a Critic

Reader-response criticism.

We have examined many schools of literary criticism. Here you will find an in-depth look at one of them: Reader-Response.

The Purpose of Reader-Response

  • why you like or dislike the text;
  • explain whether you agree or disagree with the author;
  • identify the text’s purpose; and
  • critique the text.

Write as a Scholar

Criticize with examples.

  • Is the text racist?
  • Does the text unreasonably puts down things, such as religion, or groups of people, such as women or adolescents, conservatives or democrats, etc?
  • Does the text include factual errors or outright lies? It is too dark and despairing? Is it falsely positive?
  • Is the text poorly written?
  • Does it contain too much verbal “fat”?
  • Is it too emotional or too childish?
  • Does it have too many facts and figures?
  • Are there typos or other errors in the text?
  • Do the ideas wander around without making a point?

In each of these cases, do not simply criticize, but give examples. As a beginning scholar, be cautious of criticizing any text as “confusing” or “crazy,” since readers might simply conclude that  you  are too ignorant or slow to understand and appreciate it.

The Structure of a Reader-Response Essay

  • title of the work to which you are responding;
  • the author; and
  • the main thesis of the text.
  • What does the text have to do with you, personally, and with your life (past, present or future)? It is not acceptable to write that the text has NOTHING to do with you, since just about everything humans can write has to do in some way with every other human.
  • How much does the text agree or clash with your view of the world, and what you consider right and wrong?  Use several quotes as examples of how it agrees with and supports what you think about the world, about right and wrong, and about what you think it is to be human.   Use quotes and examples to discuss how the text disagrees with what you think about the world and about right and wrong.
  • What did you learn, and how much were your views and opinions challenged or changed by this text, if at all?   Did the text communicate with you? Why or why not?   Give examples of how your views might have changed or been strengthened (or perhaps, of why the text failed to convince you, the way it is). Please do not write “I agree with everything the author wrote,” since everybody disagrees about something, even if it is a tiny point. Use quotes to illustrate your points of challenge, or where you were persuaded, or where it left you cold.
  • How well does the text address things that you, personally, care about and consider important to the world?   How does it address things that are important to your family, your community, your ethnic group, to people of your economic or social class or background, or your faith tradition?  If not, who does or did the text serve? Did it pass the “Who cares?” test?   Use quotes from the text to illustrate.
  • What can you praise about the text? What problems did you have with it?  Reading and writing “critically” does not mean the same thing as “criticizing,” in everyday language (complaining or griping, fault-finding, nit-picking). Your “critique” can and should be positive and praise the text if possible, as well as pointing out problems, disagreements and shortcomings.
  • How well did you enjoy the text (or not) as entertainment or as a work of art?  Use quotes or examples to illustrate the quality of the text as art or entertainment. Of course, be aware that some texts are not meant to be entertainment or art: a news report or textbook, for instance, may be neither entertaining or artistic, but may still be important and successful.
  • your overall reaction to the text;
  • whether you would read something else like this in the future;
  • whether you would read something else by this author; and
  • if would you recommend read this text to someone else and why.

Key Takeaways

  • In reader-response, the reader is essential to the meaning of a text for they bring the text to life.
  • The purpose of a reading response is examining, explaining, and defending your personal reaction to a text.
  • When writing a reader-response, write as an educated adult addressing other adults or fellow scholars.
  • As a beginning scholar, be cautious of criticizing any text as “boring,” “crazy,” or “dull.”  If you do criticize, base your criticism on the principles and form of the text itself.
  • The challenge of a reader-response is to show how you connected with the text.

Reader-Response Essay Example

To Misread or to Rebel: A Woman’s Reading of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”

At its simplest, reading is “an activity that is guided by the text; this must be processed by the reader who is then, in turn, affected by what he has processed” (Iser 63). The text is the compass and map, the reader is the explorer. However, the explorer cannot disregard those unexpected boulders in the path which he or she encounters along the journey that are not written on the map. Likewise, the woman reader does not come to the text without outside influences. She comes with her experiences as a woman—a professional woman, a divorcée, a single mother. Her reading, then, is influenced by her experiences. So when she reads a piece of literature like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber, which paints a highly negative picture of Mitty’s wife, the woman reader is forced to either misread the story and accept Mrs. Mitty as a domineering, mothering wife, or rebel against that picture and become angry at the society which sees her that way.

Due to pre-existing sociosexual standards, women see characters, family structures, even societal structures from the bottom as an oppressed group rather than from a powerful position on the top, as men do. As Louise Rosenblatt states: a reader’s “tendency toward identification [with characters or events] will certainly be guided by our preoccupations at the time we read. Our problems and needs may lead us to focus on those characters and situations through which we may achieve the satisfactions, the balanced vision, or perhaps merely the unequivocal motives unattained in our own lives” (38). A woman reader who feels chained by her role as a housewife is more likely to identify with an individual who is oppressed or feels trapped than the reader’s executive husband is. Likewise, a woman who is unable to have children might respond to a story of a child’s death more emotionally than a woman who does not want children. However, if the perspective of a woman does not match that of the male author whose work she is reading, a woman reader who has been shaped by a male-dominated society is forced to misread the text, reacting to the “words on the page in one way rather than another because she operates according to the same set of rules that the author used to generate them” (Tompkins xvii). By accepting the author’s perspective and reading the text as he intended, the woman reader is forced to disregard her own, female perspective. This, in turn, leads to a concept called “asymmetrical contingency,” described by Iser as that which occurs “when Partner A gives up trying to implement his own behavioral plan and without resistance follows that of Partner B. He adapts himself to and is absorbed by the behavioral strategy of B” (164). Using this argument, it becomes clear that a woman reader (Partner A) when faced with a text written by a man (Partner B) will most likely succumb to the perspective of the writer and she is thus forced to misread the text. Or, she could rebel against the text and raise an angry, feminist voice in protest.

James Thurber, in the eyes of most literary critics, is one of the foremost American humorists of the 20th century, and his short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is believed to have “ushered in a major [literary] period … where the individual can maintain his self … an appropriate way of assaulting rigid forms” (Elias 432). The rigid form in Thurber’s story is Mrs. Mitty, the main character’s wife. She is portrayed by Walter Mitty as a horrible, mothering nag. As a way of escaping her constant griping, he imagines fantastic daydreams which carry him away from Mrs. Mitty’s voice. Yet she repeatedly interrupts his reveries and Mitty responds to her as though she is “grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in the crowd” (286). Not only is his wife annoying to him, but she is also distant and removed from what he cares about, like a stranger. When she does speak to him, it seems reflective of the way a mother would speak to a child. For example, Mrs. Mitty asks, “‘Why don’t you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?’ Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again” (286). Mrs. Mitty’s care for her husband’s health is seen as nagging to Walter Mitty, and the audience is amused that he responds like a child and does the opposite of what Mrs. Mitty asked of him. Finally, the clearest way in which Mrs. Mitty is portrayed as a burdensome wife is at the end of the piece when Walter, waiting for his wife to exit the store, imagines that he is facing “the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last” (289). Not only is Mrs. Mitty portrayed as a mothering, bothersome hen, but she is ultimately described as that which will be the death of Walter Mitty.

Mrs. Mitty is a direct literary descendant of the first woman to be stereotyped as a nagging wife, Dame Van Winkle, the creation of the American writer, Washington Irving. Likewise, Walter Mitty is a reflection of his dreaming predecessor, Rip Van Winkle, who falls into a deep sleep for a hundred years and awakes to the relief of finding out that his nagging wife has died. Judith Fetterley explains in her book, The Resisting Reader, how such a portrayal of women forces a woman who reads “Rip Van Winkle” and other such stories “to find herself excluded from the experience of the story” so that she “cannot read the story without being assaulted by the negative images of women it presents” (10). The result, it seems, is for a woman reader of a story like “Rip Van Winkle” or “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” to either be excluded from the text, or accept the negative images of women the story puts forth. As Fetterley points out, “The consequence for the female reader is a divided self. She is asked to identify with Rip and against herself, to scorn the amiable sex and act just like it, to laugh at Dame Van Winkle and accept that she represents ‘woman,’ to be at once both repressor and repressed, and ultimately to realize that she is neither” (11). Thus, a woman is forced to misread the text and accept “woman as villain.” as Fetterley names it, or rebel against both the story and its message.

So how does a woman reader respond to this portrayal of Mrs. Mitty? If she were to follow Iser’s claim, she would defer to the male point of view presented by the author. She would sympathize with Mitty, as Thurber wants us to do, and see domineering women in her own life that resemble Mrs. Mitty. She may see her mother and remember all the times that she nagged her about zipping up her coat against the bitter winter wind. Or the female reader might identify Mrs. Mitty with her controlling mother-in-law and chuckle at Mitty’s attempts to escape her control, just as her husband tries to escape the criticism and control of his own mother. Iser’s ideal female reader would undoubtedly look at her own position as mother and wife and would vow to never become such a domineering person. This reader would probably also agree with a critic who says that “Mitty has a wife who embodies the authority of a society in which the husband cannot function” (Lindner 440). She could see the faults in a relationship that is too controlled by a woman and recognize that a man needs to feel important and dominant in his relationship with his wife. It could be said that the female reader would agree completely with Thurber’s portrayal of the domineering wife. The female reader could simply misread the text.

Or, the female reader could rebel against the text. She could see Mrs. Mitty as a woman who is trying to do her best to keep her husband well and cared for. She could see Walter as a man with a fleeting grip on reality who daydreams that he is a fighter pilot, a brilliant surgeon, a gun expert, or a military hero, when he actually is a poor driver with a slow reaction time to a green traffic light. The female reader could read critics of Thurber who say that by allowing his wife to dominate him, Mitty becomes a “non-hero in a civilization in which women are winning the battle of the sexes” (Hasley 533) and become angry that a woman’s fight for equality is seen merely as a battle between the sexes. She could read Walter’s daydreams as his attempt to dominate his wife, since all of his fantasies center on him in traditional roles of power. This, for most women, would cause anger at Mitty (and indirectly Thurber) for creating and promoting a society which believes that women need to stay subservient to men. From a male point of view, it becomes a battle of the sexes. In a woman’s eyes, her reading is simply a struggle for equality within the text and in the world outside that the text reflects.

It is certain that women misread “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” I did. I found myself initially wishing that Mrs. Mitty would just let Walter daydream in peace. But after reading the story again and paying attention to the portrayal of Mrs. Mitty, I realized that it is imperative that women rebel against the texts that would oppress them. By misreading a text, the woman reader understands it in a way that is conventional and acceptable to the literary world. But in so doing, she is also distancing herself from the text, not fully embracing it or its meaning in her life. By rebelling against the text, the female reader not only has to understand the point of view of the author and the male audience, but she also has to formulate her own opinions and create a sort of dialogue between the text and herself. Rebelling against the text and the stereotypes encourages an active dialogue between the woman and the text which, in turn, guarantees an active and (most likely) angry reader response. I became a resisting reader.

Works Cited

Elias, Robert H. “James Thurber: The Primitive, the Innocent, and the Individual.”  Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 5. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 431–32. Print.

Fetterley, Judith.  The Resisting Reader . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Print.

Hasley, Louis. “James Thurber: Artist in Humor.”  Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 11. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 532–34. Print.

Iser, Wolfgang.  The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. Print.

Lindner, Carl M. “Thurber’s Walter Mitty—The Underground American Hero.”  Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 5. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 440–41. Print.

Rosenblatt, Louise M.  Literature as Exploration . New York: MLA, 1976. Print.

Thurber, James. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”  Literature: An Introduction to Critical Reading . Ed. William Vesterman. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1993. 286–89. Print.

Tompkins, Jane P. “An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism.”  Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism . Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. ix-xxvi. Print.

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What Is Reader Response Criticism?

Tricia Christensen

Whereas many discuss literary works objectively, absolutely and with respect to how the author developed the ideas on the page, reader response criticism focuses on the reader and how she or he receives the literary work. In a sense, this moves the text from existing on its own — on, for example, the physical pages of a book — and instead assumes that the text exists only when it is read. This theory makes literary works more like performance art where the reader's act of reading and interpreting the text is the performance. Critical theorists continue to develop this approach, considering the nature of the reader and what he or she brings to the text, along with the different "lenses" through which the text can be viewed.

Foundational Beliefs

In reader response criticism, the individual reader, including his or her background and beliefs, is taken into account.

In reader response criticism, the act of reading is like a dialogue between the reader and the text that has meaning only when the two are joined in conversation. It redefines the role of the text from an independent object into something that can only exist when it is read and interacts with the mind of the reader. In this way, the reader is not a passive recipient of what the text says, but rather takes an active role. The text then serves as a catalyst to spur memories and thoughts within the reader allowing him or her to link the text to personal experiences and thereby fill in the spaces left by the text. This allows theorists to explain why people can have different responses to and interpretations of the same text.

This form of criticism even goes so far as to examine the role that individual words and phrases in the text play when interacting with the reader. The sounds and shapes that words make or even how they are pronounced or spoken by the reader can essentially alter the meaning of the text, it is suggested. Some reader response critics go so far as to analyze a text phrase by phrase in order to determine how much of the experience of reading it is predetermined and then analyze how each reader's experience changes that initial meaning.

Approaches Within Reader Response Criticism

Reader response criticism starts with what formalist literary criticism called the "affective fallacy " — that the response of the reader is relevant to understanding a text — and uses it as the focus of approaching a work of literature. There are different approaches within this school of critical theory, however; some look at the work from the individual reader's point of view, while others focus on how groups or communities view the text. For these schools of criticism, it's what the text does to the reader that's important, and not necessarily the work itself, the author's intent, or the social, political, or cultural context in which it was written.

The label "reader-oriented criticism" has become popular since the reader's experiences and expectations often change as time passes. In addition, a reader may approach the text with different points of view, or lenses. That is, the reader may be able to see the value in his or her own personal response while also analyzing the text based on another critical approach.

Individual Readers

Louise Rosenblatt is generally credited with formally introducing the idea that the reader's experience and interaction with the text creates the true meaning. This idea developed into what came to be known as Transactional Reader Response Criticism. Rosenblatt argued that, while the reader is guided by the ideas and words that the author laid out, it is ultimately each individual reader's experience in reading the work that actually gives it meaning. Since each person brings unique knowledge and beliefs to the reading transaction, the text will mean different things to different people. It is that meaning — the reader's meaning — that should be assessed, as opposed to solely looking at the author's text in a vacuum.

Other critics focus on how the reader's mind relates to the text, in what is known as Psychological Reader Response Criticism. The reader is seen as a psychological subject who can be studied based on his or her unconscious drives brought to the surface by his or her reaction to a text. Reading the text can become almost a therapeutic experience for the reader, as the connections that he or she makes reveal truths about his or her personality.

Psychological Reader Response Criticism in many ways fueled another similar theory — Subjective Reader Response Criticism — which takes the personal, psychological component even further. In this theory, the reader’s interpretation of a text is thought to be deeply influenced by personal and psychological needs first, rather than being guided by the text. Each reading is thought to bring psychological symptoms to the surface, from which the reader can find his or her own unconscious motives.

The Uniform Reader

Other schools of reader response criticism look not at the reader as an individual, but as a theoretical reader. The "implied reader," for example, an idea introduced by Wolfgang Iser, is the reader who is required for the text — the reader who the author imagines when writing, and who he or she is writing for. This reader is guided by the text, which contains gaps meant for the reader to fill, explaining and making connections within the text. The reader ultimately creates meaning based not only on what is in the text, but what the text has provoked inside him or her. Theorist Stanley Fish introduced what he called the "informed reader," who brings prior, shared knowledge to the experience of reading.

Social Reader Response

Social Reader Response Criticism focuses on "interpretive communities" — groups that have shared beliefs and values — and how these groups use particular strategies that affect both the text and their reading behaviors. It is the group that then determines what an acceptable interpretation of the text is, with the meaning being whatever the group says that it is. A book club or a group of college students for example, based on their own cultural and group beliefs, will generally agree on the ultimate meaning on a text.

As an extension of the social theory, these like-minded groups can also approach and view the text from different lenses. If the group finds certain elements to be more significant than others, it might examine the text from this particular viewpoint, or lens. For example, feminist literary critics may find focus on the female elements of a writing, whereas new historicists might focus on the culture and era in which the text is read.

Arguments Against Reader Response Criticism Generally

It is often argued that reader response criticism allows for any interpretation of a text to be considered valid, and can devalue the content of the text as a result. Others argue that the text is being ignored completely or that it is impossible to properly interpret a text without taking into consideration the culture or era in which it is written. In addition, a larger complaint is that these theories do not allow for the reader’s knowledge and experience to be expanded by the text at all.

Tricia has a Literature degree from Sonoma State University and has been a frequent LanguageHumanities contributor for many years. She is especially passionate about reading and writing, although her other interests include medicine, art, film, history, politics, ethics, and religion. Tricia lives in Northern California and is currently working on her first novel.

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Discussion Comments

The argument that any interpretation can be valid is false, because one would need to support their claim with evidence from the text. It could seem nonsensical, but I think it is a solid literary analysis approach.

Fish argued that the struggle to find meaning in a text is the meaning of the text. For example, if you take a poem that could legitimately be interpreted in two different ways, the meaning would exist in the reader's struggle to choose, not in one of the two "real" meanings.

Thanks for this article.

is it the reader who manipulates the text or the text?

Any interpretation is considered valid because it is based on the reader's interaction, background knowledge, schema, and overall experience with the text. The author's intentions are acknowledged but do not mandate one interpretation of a text.

i really liked this article, it gave me an overall explanation of what is reader respond theory. thanks whoever posted.

How could a reader create the meaning of a text? Wouldn't that be the author of a text? If I tell my children something, or write them a note, do I expect them to decide what it means?

i don't fully understand this because if the reader is suppose to interpret the text, how can anyone say that their opinion might not be valid?

Reader Response theory is far older than Stanley Fish's very narrow take on the theory of the 1980s. Louise Rosenblatt should be credited as the initiator of reader response theory.

Rosenblatt posits that reading is a transaction between the reader and the text resulting in the evocation of what she term 'the literary work of art'.

What is the effect of a text on the reader when the reader dislikes it?

If, as you say in the last paragraph, children grow up to join other critical communities such as feminist of deconstructionist, does that mean that those who only use reader response are immature?

Hey, just wanted to say that this article was very useful. Thank you!

Does reader response theory suggest that any interpretation is valid?

Post your comments

In reader response criticism, the individual reader, including his or her background and beliefs, is taken into account.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Reader Response Criticism: An Essay

Reader Response Criticism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 23, 2016 • ( 5 )

Reader Response, primarily a German and American offshoot of literary theory, emerged (prominent since 1960s) in the West mainly as a reaction to the textual emphasis of New Criticism of the 1940s. New Criticism, the culmination of liberal humanist ideals, had stressed that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of the text; that the text is “autotelic” entity (complete within itself). Hence, it neglected authorial biography, social conditions during the composition of a work of art and the reader’s psychology. Reader Response Criticism wholly repudiated all these notions; instead, it focuses on the systematic examination of the aspects of the text that arouse, shape, and guide a reader’s response (for instance, Aristotelian Catharsis/ Brechtian alienation effect “. It designates multiple critical approaches to reading a text. According to Reader Response criticism, the reader is a producer rather than a consumer of meanings (parallel to Barthes’s Birth of the Reader ). In this sense, a reader is a hypothetical construct of norms and expectations that can be derived or projected or extrapolated from the work. Because expectations may be violated or fulfilled, satisfied or frustrated, and because reading is a temporal process involving memory, perception, and anticipation, the charting of reader-response is extremely difficult and perpetually subject to construction and reconstruction, vision and revision.

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Reader Response criticism does not denote any specific theory. It can range from the phenomenological theories of Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden (both were faculty members at the University of Constance, Germany) to the relativistic analysis of Stanley Fish , who argues that the interpretive strategy of the reader creates the text, there being no text except that which a reader or an interpretive community of readers creates. Being both a reception aesthetic and a reception history, Reader Response criticism examines how readers realize the potentials of a text and how readings change over the course of history; it believes that although the the reader fills in the gaps, the author’s intentional acts impose restrictions and conditions

One can sort Reader Response theorists into three groups: those who focus upon the individual reader’s experience (“individualists”); those who conduct psychological experiments on a defined set of readers (“experimenters”); and those, who assume a fairly uniform response by all readers (“uniformists”). In a more general sense, one can break down Reader Response theorists into those who concern with the reader’s experience and psychology, those who concentrate on the linguistic/rhetorical dynamic of audience, and those who deal with readers as cultural and historical ciphers.

Hans Robert Jauss (1921-97), the German theorist, inspired by the phenomenological method of Husserl and Heideggeris Hermeneutics, gave a historical dimension to reader-oriented criticism by developing a version of Reader Response Criticism known as Reception Theory in his book, New Literary History.  In this book, Jauss eschewed objectivist views of both literary texts and literary history and endeavoured to attain an agreement between Russian Formalism (which ignores historical and social contexts) and social theories as Marxism (which neglects the text). To him, a text is not simply and passively imbibed by the audience, but on the contrary, the reader makes out the meanings of the text based on his/her cultural background and experience. He exhorted that literature is a “dialogic” entity, a sort of dialogue between the text and the reader; a dialectic process of production and reception; he added that there is always “negotiation” and “opposition” on the part of the reader. “Horizons of expectations”, a term developed by Jauss to explain how a reader’s “expectations” or frame of reference, is based on the reader’s past experience of literature and what preconceived notions about literature the reader possesses (i.e., a reader’s aesthetic experience is bound by time and historical determinants). Reader Response Criticism tries to establish these “horizons” by analyzing the literary works of the age in question. Jauss also contended that for a work to be considered a classic it needed to exceed a reader’s horizons of expectations. The renowned cultural theorist, Stuart Hall , is one of the main proponents of reception theory; he developed it for media and communication studies from the literary- and history-oriented approaches.

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Another leading exponent of German reception theory, Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007), drew heavily on the phenomenological aesthetics of Roman Ingarden and the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer . To him, the literary work is not an object in itself, but an effect to be expounded; the text is the result of the author’s intentional acts and it controls reader’s responses. In his work, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976, trans. 1978), Iser posits that all literary texts have “Leerstellen” (blanks/gaps/ lacunae), which have to be filled in or “concretized” by the creative reader to interpret the text. “Implied Reader” is a term used by Wolfgang Iser to describe a hypothetical reader of a text. Such a reader is a “model” or a “role”. The implied reader “embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect – predispositions laid down,. not by an empirical outside reality, but by the text itself. Consequently, the implied reader as a concept has his roots firmly planted in the structures of the rext; he is a construct and in no way yo be identified with any real reader”.The Implied Reader is established by the text itself, who is expected to respondin specific ways to the “response-inviting structures” of the text. While the “Actual Reader” is the one whose responses are coloured by his/ her accumulated personal experiences; one, who receives mental images during the process of reading through the knowledge and experience of one’s own. However the implied and actual readers co-exist, and are truly one and the same person, responding to a text in two different ways and levels of consciousness.

lser also describes the process of first reading, the subsequent development of the text into a ‘whole’, and how the dialogue between the reader and text takes place. In his study of Shakespeare’s histories, in particular Richard II , Iser interprets Richard’s continually changing legal policy as the expression of his desire for self-assertion. Here, he follows Hans Blumenberg , and attempts to apply his theory of modernity to Shakespeare. He also maintained that there are two poles in a literary work – “the artistic pole” (the text created by the author), and the “aesthetic pole” (the realization accomplished by the reader).

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the 1960s, David Bleich began collecting statements from students of their feelings and associations. He based his analysis on classroom teaching of literature, and hold that reading is not determined by the text; instead, reading is a subjective process designed by the distinctive personality of the individual reader. He also claimed that his classes “generated” knowledge, the knowledge of how particular persons recreate texts.

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Norman Holland makes use of psychoanalytic analysis of the process of reading. He viewed the subject matter of a work as the projection of the fantasies that constitute the identity of its author. To him, reading is the encounter between the author’s and the reader’s fantasies; the reader transforms the fantasy content, that constitutes the process of tnterpretation. He also declared that there is no universally determinate meaning of a particular text

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Michael Riffaterre , Jonathan Culler and Terence Hawkes  proposed the idea of “literary competence”, which maintains that mere linguistic competence is inadequate to understand literary meaning, and that “literary competence’ is necessary to go beyond the surface meaning of a text.

There are really two kinds of Reader-Response Criticism that could be found in the writings of the American literary theorist, Stanley Fish ; one is a phenomenological approach and the other is an epistemological theory characteristic of Fish’s later works. The Phenomenological method has much to commend itself to us as it focuses on what happens in the reader’s mind as he or she reads.

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Reader-response critics hold that, to understand the literary experience or the meaning of a text, one must look to the processes readers use to create that meaning and experience. Traditional, text-oriented critics often think of reader-response criticism as an anarchic subjectivism, allowing readers to interpret a text any way they want. They accuse reader-response critics of observing that the text doesn’t exist. Another objection to reader-response criticism is that it fails to account for the text being able to expand the reader’s understanding. While readers can, and do put their own ideas and experiences into a work, they are at the same time gaining new understanding through the text. This is something that is generally overlooked in Reader Response Criticism.

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Tags: affective stylistics , Anxiety of Influence , apophrades , askesis , autotelic , clinamen , daemonization , Dasein , Edmund Husserl , Hans Blumenberg , Hans Georg Gadamer , Harold Bloom , Horizons of expectations , Implied Reader , Is There a Text in This Class? , JF Worthen , Jonathan Culler , kenosis , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Louise Rosenblatt. , Martin Heidegger , Michael Riffaterre , New Criticism , Norman Holland , Paradise Lost , Phenomenology , Reader Response Criticism , reception aesthetics , Roman Ingarden , Stanley Fish , Stuart Hall , Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost , Tansactional analysis , Terence Hawkes , tessera , Wolfgang Iser

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Notes in the Margin

Life Stories in Literature. Literary Notes & News

book review

“The Reader, the Text, the Poem” by Louise M. Rosenblatt

Girl Reading

Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work  

Carbondale, Ill., 1978 Hardcover, 196 pages ISBN 0-8093-0883-5

Highly Recommended

Rosenblatt is one of the proponents of the reader-response theory of literary criticism, a concept that emerged in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to New Criticism , which treated a literary work as an object that should be considered without reference to the reader’s experience of it. Reader-response criticism emphasizes the reader’s reaction while reading a literary work in what Rosenblatt in the preface of this book calls “the reader’s contribution in the two-way, ‘transactional’ relationship with the text” (p. ix). In reaction to the New Critics, Rosenblatt tells us, “I rejected the notion of the poem-as-object, and the neglect of both author and reader” (p. xii).

In Chapter 1: The Invisible Reader, Rosenblatt says that toward the end of the eighteenth century, the author emerged as a dominant entity in a work of literature. “Even those who seemed to continue the concern for reality admitted ultimately the preeminence of the author [. . .]. Thus the reader was left to play the role of invisible eavesdropper” (p. 2). Further, the “twentieth-century reaction against the obsession with the poet and his emotions” brought “even more unrelenting invisibility” to the reader (p. 3).

Chapter 2: The Poem as Event rejects New Criticism’s contention that a literary work exists on its own, independent of either its author or the reader:

The poem [. . .] must be thought of as an event in time. It is not an object or an ideal entity. It happens during a coming-together, a compenetration, of a reader and a text. The reader brings to the text his past experience and present personality. Under the magnetism of the ordered symbols of the text, he marshals his resources and crystallizes out from the stuff of memory, thought, and feeling a new order, a new experience, which he sees as the poem. This becomes part of the ongoing stream of his life experience, to be reflected on from any angle important to him as a human being.  (p. 12)

“The text of a poem or of a novel or a drama is like a musical score” (p. 13), Rosenblatt says. Further, “’The Poem’ seen as an event in the life of a reader, as embodied in a process resulting from the confluence of reader and text, should be central to a systematic theory of literature” (p. 16).

Chapter 3: Efferent and Aesthetic Reading sets out to define the difference between reading a work of literature and reading another kind of written communication such as a newspaper article or scientific treatise “by showing how the event that produces the reading of a poem differs from other reading-events” (p. 23). Rosenblatt defines the type of reading in which the main purpose is to take away information (e.g., reading a newspaper article, a recipe, a history book) as “efferent” (p. 24). “In aesthetic reading, in contrast, the reader’s primary concern is with what happens during the actual reading event” (p. 24). She acknowledges that sometimes “the same text may be read either efferently or aesthetically” (p. 25). In explaining her theory of the reader’s experience, Rosenblatt refers to Coleridge’s famous statement about poetry: “The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself” (p. 28).

In Chapter 4: Evoking a Poem Rosenblatt explains that the experience of evoking the poem goes on as the reader gets further into the work. The term poem here refers to the artistic creation that the reader constructs while reading a literary work. (Rosenblatt is not discussing only poetry here, but any artistic work of literature.) The reader, she continues, “is immersed in a creative process that goes on largely below the threshold of awareness” (p. 52). This process “imposes the delicate task of sorting the relevant from the irrelevant in a continuing process of selection, revision, and expansion” (p. 53):

As one decodes the opening lines or sentences and pages of a text, one begins to develop a tentative sense of a framework within which to place what will follow. Underlying this is the assumption that this body of words, set forth in certain patterns and sequences on the page, bears the potentiality for a reasonably unified or integrated, or at the very least coherent, experience. One evolves certain expectations about the diction, the subject, the ideas, the themes, the  kind of text, that will be forthcoming. Each sentence, each phrase, each word, will signal certain possibilities and exclude others, thus limiting the arc of expectations. What the reader has elicited from the text up to any point generates a receptivity to certain kinds of ideas, overtones, or attitudes. Perhaps one can think of this as an alerting of certain areas of memory, a stirring-up of certain reservoirs of experience, knowledge, and feeling. As the reading proceeds, attention will be fixed on the reverberations of implications that result from fulfillment or frustration of those expectations. (p. 54)

This process itself is part of the appeal of reading a work of literature:

interest seems to be the name given to the reader’s need to live through to some resolution of the tensions, questions, curiosity or conflicts aroused by the text. This need to resolve, to round out, gives impetus to the organizing activity of the reader. What we call a sense of form also manifests itself in such progression, the arousal of expectations, the movement toward some culmination or completion. (pp. 54-55)

Perhaps this notion of interest explains the appeal of a book like Corelli’s Mandolin , in which not much seems to happen for the first 150 pages or so. “Underlying all this organizing activity [. . .] is the assumption that the text offers the basis for a coherent experience [. . .]. If such a putting-together, such a com-position, does not eventually happen, the cause may be felt to be either a weakness in the text, or a failure on the reader’s part” (p. 55).

One potential objection to the reader-response theory of literary criticism is that it suggests that anyone’s reading of a work is just as valid as any other reading, since the whole point is for a particular person to react to the work. But Rosenblatt explains that some readings are more informed than others and that people can become better readers through practice and experience:

Past literary experiences serve as subliminal guides as to the genre to be anticipated, the details to be attended to, the kinds of organizing patterns to be evolved [ . . ]. Traditional subjects, themes, treatments, may provide the guides to organization and the background against which to recognize something new or original in the text [. . .]. Awareness—more or less explicit—of repetitions, echoes, resonances, repercussions, linkages, cumulative effects, contrasts, or surprises is the mnemonic matrix for the structuring of emotion, idea, situation, character, plot—in short, for the evocation of a work of art. (pp. 57-58)

“For the experienced reader, much of this has become automatic, carried on through a continuing flow of responses, syntheses, readjustment, and assimilation. Under such pressure, the irrelevant or confusing referents for the verbal symbols evidently often are ignored or are not permitted to rise into consciousness” (p. 58). Anyone who has seen the movie The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis knows how this process of ignoring what doesn’t fit works. The reader’s reading process allows “compatible associations into the focus of attention” (p. 60).

Rosenblatt further addresses this potential objection to reader-response criticism in Chapter 5: The Text: Openness and Constraint. Here she is concerned with “the wide range of referential and affective responses that might be activated, and the fact that the reader must manage these responses, must select from them” (p. 75). Remembering that the reading process is a “two-way, ‘transactional’ relationship,” she insists that a reader’s response to the text must be grounded in the text itself:  “when we turn from the broader environment of the reading act to the text itself, we need to recognize that a very important aspect of a text is the cues it provides as to what stance the reader should adopt” (p. 81).

The importance of the text is not denied by recognition of its openness. The text is the author’s means of directing the attention of the reader [. . .]. The reader, concentrating his attention on the world he [the author] has evoked, feels himself freed for the time from his own preoccupations and limitations. Aware that the blueprint of this experience is the author’s text, the reader feels himself in communication with another mind, another world.  (p. 86)

Finally, one becomes a better reader through practice and experience: “As with all texts, the reader must bring more than a literal understanding of the individual words. He must bring a whole body of cultural assumptions, practical knowledge, awareness of literary conventions, readinesses to think and feel. These provide the basis for weaving a meaningful structure around the clues offered by the verbal symbols” (p. 88).

Rosenblatt continues this argument in Chapter 6: The Quest for “The Poem Itself,” where she emphasizes that she does not “claim that anything any reader makes of the text is acceptable. Two prime criteria of validity as I understand it are the reader’s interpretation not be contradicted by any element of the text, and that nothing be projected for which there is no verbal basis” (p. 115). The New Critics, she argues, sought

to rescue the poem as a work of art from earlier confusions with the poem either as a biographical document or as a document in intellectual and social history. A mark of twentieth-century criticism thus became depreciation of such approaches to literature and development of the technique of “close reading” of the work as an autonomous entity [. . .]. The reaction against romantic impressionism fostered the ideal of an impersonal or objective criticism. Impressionist critics were charged with forgetting “the poem itself” as they pursued the adventures of their souls among masterpieces.  (p. 102)

In the final chapter, Chapter 7: Interpretation, Evaluation, Criticism, Rosenblatt addresses what she sees as a division that has resulted from too great an emphasis on New Criticism:

Recent critical and literary theory is replete with references to “the informed reader,” “the competent reader,” “the ideal reader.” All suggest a certain distinction from, if not downright condescension toward, the ordinary reader. This reflects the elitist view of literature and criticism that in recent decades has tended to dominate academic and literary circles.  (p. 138)
Let us look at the reality of the literary enterprise, of “literature” as a certain kind of activity of human beings in our culture. Instead of a contrast or break between the ordinary reader and the knowledgeable critic, we need to stress the basic affinity of all readers of literary works of art. The general reader needs to honor his own relationship with the text.  (p. 140)

She wishes to break down elitism based upon the supposed quality of one’s reading preferences: “Despite the differences between the readings of great or technically complex works and the readings of popular ‘trashy’ works, they share some common attributes: the aesthetic stance, the living-through, under guidance of the text, of feelings, ideas, actions, conflicts, and resolutions beyond the scope of the reader’s own world” (p. 143).

The literary critic is, after all, just another reader:

Like other readers, critics may reveal the text’s potentialities for responses different—perhaps more sensitive and more complex—from our own. The critic may have developed a fuller and more articulate awareness of the literary, ethical, social, or philosophic concepts that he brings to the literary transaction, and may thus provide us with a basis for uncovering the assumptions underlying our own responses. In this way, critics may function not as stultifying models to be echoed but as teachers, stimulating us to grow in our own capacities to participate creatively and self-critically in literary transactions. [. . .] we must at least hope for an increasingly independent body of readers, who take the critic not as model but as a fellow reader, with whom to agree or disagree, or whose angle of vision may in some instances seem remote from their own.  (pp. 148-149)

Finally, Rosenblatt wants to put the joy back into reading: “it is hard at times, in reading twentieth-century analyses of the themes and symbols and technical strategies of a work, to discover whether the critic had even a glimmering of personal pleasure in the literary transaction, or a sense of personal significance” (p. 158).

The concept of transactional analysis of literature has profound implications for the educational system, Rosenblatt says:

a primary concern throughout would be the development of the individual’s capacity to adopt and to maintain the aesthetic stance, to live fully and personally in the literary transaction. From this could flow growth in all the kinds of resources needed for transactions with increasingly demanding and increasingly rewarding texts. And from this would flow, also, a humanistic concern for the relation of the individual literary event to the continuing life of the reader in all its facets—aesthetic, moral, economic, or social.  (p. 161)

This theory of reading, she implies, will give literature back to the people: “The academic critical culture persists in ignoring, or at least laments, the mass and ‘middlebrow’ literary institutions in our society. The transactional formulation offers a theoretical bridge between the two literary cultures that now exist side by side” (p. 160). Indeed,

Perhaps we should consider the text as an even more general medium of communication among readers. As we exchange experiences, we point to those elements of the text that best illustrate or support our interpretations. We may help one another to attend to words, phrases, images, scenes, that we have overlooked or slighted. We may be led to reread the text and revise our own interpretation. Sometimes we may be strengthened in our own sense of having “done justice to” the text, without denying its potentialities for other interpretations. Sometimes the give-and-take may lead to a general increase in insight and even to a consensus. (p. 146)

And it is this final point that makes the reader-response theory of literary criticism so appealing right now. For what is Rosenblatt describing in this passage but a book group? And, even before Oprah jumped on the bandwagon, book groups were among the hottest crazes across America.

© 2000 by Mary Daniels Brown

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Teaching Text Rhetorically

Integrating Reading and Writing Instruction by John R. Edlund

reader response criticism poem

A Reader-Response Approach to Poetry

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I introduced two mini-modules at the 2018 ERWC Leadership Conferences as part of my presentation, “Big Ideas from My Literacy Seminar.” This one, “A Reader-Response Approach to Poetry” was inspired by Louise Rosenblatt’s book, The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work . Rosenblatt begins the book with the image of two figures on a stage, the author and the reader, with the book between them. In various ages the spotlight focuses brightly on either the author or the text, but rarely the reader (1).

Rosenblatt then argues that the reader, not the author, creates the poem. The text of the poem is like an orchestra score in that the music doesn’t exist until it is performed. Because each reader brings different life experiences and background knowledge to the text, each reader will create a different poem. Being comfortable with this process is part of learning to enjoy poetry.

New Criticism taught us the techniques of close reading, which are still in common use today. New Critics also taught us that to try to recover the author’s intention was the “Intentional Fallacy,” and that to focus on the effects on the reader was to engage in the “Pathetic Fallacy.” The spotlight of the New Critics focuses exclusively on the text, and on using the techniques of close reading to produce the very best reading of that text.

A typical literature course today will apply close reading, but unlike New Criticism will include reference to the author’s biography and historical context. The dominant question is usually, “What does it mean?” and a received interpretation is often given. The result, especially with poetry, is that students believe that there is a “correct” interpretation that they are struggling to find. This has a number of negative effects, such as going immediately to the internet to discover the “correct” reading and a fear of interpreting poetry on their own. Thus it is common for students to say, even English majors in college, that they don’t like poetry.

This mini-module is designed to counteract that fear and help students read and enjoy poetry on their own, sharing their experiences with others. In working through the module, students

  • Read the poem quickly and write down their impressions,
  • Re-read to confirm and and develop their impressions,
  • Share their impressions with others in a small group,
  • Consider important details,
  • Negotiate a consensus interpretation,
  • Write a paragraph describing their evolving interpretation of the poem.

In this approach, reading a poem is both a personal and a social experience. The emphasis is on engaging with the text and connecting it to experience, not on discovering authorial intention or a “correct” reading. Any poem could be plugged into this process. I often choose a poem that has some important detail that students may miss on first readings, but discover on closer readings, so that they can experience the shift in interpretation that happens when making a sudden connection. (Sometimes I give them the information.  I call this “throwing in a fact bomb.”)  In the workshop, I used “Declaration” by Tracy K. Smith. Students may not initially realize that the poem echoes language from the Declaration of Independence. I have also used “Sundown” by Jorie Graham, in which students may not know that the phrase “on Omaha” refers to a D-Day invasion beach. These poems can easily be found on the internet.

The mini-module can be downloaded from this link .

Update: English teacher extraordinaire Carol Jago has published an essay, “ Agents of Imagination ,” on the Poetry Foundation site.  It’s about teaching science fiction poetry and also includes a poem by Tracy K. Smith, who seems to have a talent for writing beautiful, evocative, yet approachable poems.   This essay is a mini-module in essay form!  Highly recommended!

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3 thoughts on “ a reader-response approach to poetry ”.

John, love this module. I’ve had an inherent fear teaching poetry. I’m challenged with when to guide students toward a specific interpretation vs. let them struggle. “Unstructured” struggle simply leads to frustration and disengagement on their part. This module creates accessible steps within that struggle, helping students achieve a more personal interpretation. I taught this module last session, grouping students, and allow the group to choose their own poem. I specifically asked them to rate their understanding of the poem based on a quick cursory read. On a scale of 1-10, they each needed to score a 3 or lower or a more challenging poem needed to be found. Just as your Omaha Beach example, some groups needed a small hint or two for concepts needing prerequisite knowledge. Otherwise, the structure allowed for an authentic analysis and group discussion where students wrestled with aligning their working interpretations with other ambiguous elements of the poem. The culminating project was a class reading of the poem, along with a presentation of the groups’ process to interpret the poem (using your guiding questions as a frame). The final slide included a list of suggestions the group created to help their classmates analyze poetry. These are 11th grade Alternative Ed students with an average Instructional Reading Level of 5-6th grade.

Thanks for your comment! It sounds like it is working as designed, which is always nice to hear. It sounds like the activities made both you and your students more confident in reading and enjoying poetry.

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Heart of Darkness pp 115–147 Cite as

Reader-Response Criticism and Heart of Darkness

  • Joseph Conrad  

338 Accesses

Part of the Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism book series (CSICC)

Students are routinely asked in English courses for their reactions to the texts they are reading. Sometimes there are so many different reactions that we may wonder whether everyone has read the same text. And some students respond so idiosyncratically to what they read that we say their responses are “totally off the wall.” This variety of response interests reader-response critics, who raise theoretical questions about whether our responses to a work are the same as its meanings, whether a work can have as many meanings as we have responses to it, and whether some responses are more valid than others. They ask what determines what is and what isn’t “off the wall.” What, in other words, is the wall, and what standards help us define it?

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Reader-Response Criticism: A Selected Bibliography

Some introductions to reader-response criticism.

Beach, Richard. A Teacher’s Introduction to Reader-Response Theories . Urbana: NCTE, 1993.

Google Scholar  

Fish, Stanley E. “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics.” New Literary History 2 (1970): 123–61. Rpt. in Fish, Text 21–67, and in Primeau 154–79.

Article   Google Scholar  

Freund, Elizabeth. The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism . London: Methuen, 1987.

Holub, Robert C. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction . New York: Methuen, 1984.

Leitch, Vincent B. American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties . New York: Columbia UP, 1988.

Mailloux, Steven. “Learning to Read: Interpretation and Reader-Response Criticism.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 12 (1979): 93–108.

—. “Reader-Response Criticism?” Genre 10 (1977): 413–31.

—. “The Turns of Reader-Response Criticism.” Conversations: Contemporary Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature . Ed. Charles Moran and Elizabeth F. Penfield. Urbana: NCTE, 1990. 38–54.

Rabinowitz, Peter J. “Whirl Without End: Audience-Oriented Criticism.” Contemporary Literary Theory . Ed. G. Douglas Atkins and Laura Morrow. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1989. 81–100.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Rosenblatt, Louise M. “Towards a Transactional Theory of Reading.” Journal of Reading Behavior 1 (1969): 31–47. Rpt. in Primeau 121–46.

Suleiman, Susan R. “Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criticism.” Suleiman and Crosman 3–45.

Tompkins, Jane P. “An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism.” Tompkins ix–xxiv.

Reader-Response Criticism in Anthologies and Collections

Flynn, Elizabeth A., and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.

Garvin, Harry R., ed. Theories of Reading, Looking, and Listening . Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1981. Essays by Cain and Rosenblatt.

Machor, James L., ed. Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Contains Mailloux essay “Misreading as a Historical Act: Cultural Rhetoric, Bible Politics, and Fuller’s 1845 Review of Douglass’s Narrative.”

Primeau, Ronald, ed. Influx: Essays on Literary Influence . Port Washington: Kennikat, 1977. Essays by Fish, Holland, and Rosenblatt.

Suleiman, Susan R, and Inge Crosman, eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation . Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. See especially the essays by Culler, Iser, and Todorov.

Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. See especially the essays by Bleich, Fish, Holland, Prince, and Tompkins.

Reader-Response Criticism: Some Major Works

Bleich, David. Subjective Criticism . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets . New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.

Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.

Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Fish, Stanley Eugene. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies . Durham: Duke UP, 1989.

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—. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature . Berkeley: U of California P, 1972.

—. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost.” 2nd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.

Holland, Norman N. 5 Readers Reading . New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.

—. “UNITY IDENTITY TEXT SELF.” PMLA 90 (1975): 813–22.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

—. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.

Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception . Trans. Timothy Bahti. Intro. Paul de Man. Brighton, Eng.: Harvester, 1982.

Mailloux, Steven. Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.

—. Rhetorical Power . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Messent, Peter. New Readings of the American Novel: Narrative Theory and Its Application . New York: Macmillan, 1991.

Prince, Gerald. Narratology . New York: Mouton, 1982.

Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.

Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature . Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration . 4th ed. New York: MLA, 1983.

—. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work . Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978.

Slatoff, Walter J. With Respect to Readers: Dimensions of Literary Response . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1970.

Steig, Michael. Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.

Exemplary Short Readings of Major Texts

Anderson, Howard. “ Tristram Shandy and the Reader’s Imagination.” PMLA 86 (1971): 966–73.

Berger, Carole. “The Rake and the Reader in Jane Austen’s Novels.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 15 (1975): 531–44.

Booth, Stephen. “On the Value of Hamlet .” Reinterpretations of English Drama: Selected Papers from the English Institute . Ed. Norman Rabkin. New York: Columbia UP, 1969. 137–76.

Easson, Robert R. “William Blake and His Reader in Jerusalem .” Blake’s Sublime Allegory . Ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph A. Wittreich. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1973. 309–28.

Kirk, Carey H. “ Moby-Dick : The Challenge of Response.” Papers on Language and Literature 13 (1977): 383–90.

Leverenz, David. “Mrs. Hawthorne’s Headache: Reading The Scarlet Letter .” Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Scarlet Letter.” Ed. Ross C Murfin. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1991. 263–74.

Lowe-Evans, Mary. “Reading with a ‘Nicer Eye’: Responding to Frankenstein .” Mary Shelley, “Frankenstein.” Ed. Johanna M. Smith. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1992. 215–29.

Rabinowitz, Peter J. “‘A Symbol of Something’: Interpretive Vertigo in ‘The Dead.’” James Joyce, “The Dead.” Ed. Daniel R. Schwarz. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1994. 137–49.

Treichler, Paula. “The Construction of Ambiguity in The Awakening .” Kate Chopin, “The Awakening.” Ed. Nancy A. Walker. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1993. 308–28.

Other Works Referred to in “What Is Reader-Response Criticism?”

Culler, Jonathan. Structural Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.

Koestenbaum, Wayne. “Wilde’s Hard Labor and the Birth of Gay Reading.” Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism . Ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism . New York: Harcourt, 1929. Rpt. in Criticism: The Major Texts . Ed. Walter Jackson Bate. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt, 1970. 575.

Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon . Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1954. See especially the discussion of “The Affective Fallacy,” with which reader-response critics have so sharply disagreed.

Reader-Oriented Approaches to Heart of Darkness

Lenta, Margaret. “Narrators and Readers: 1902 and 1975.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 20 (1989): 19–36.

Rosmarin, Adena. “Darkening the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism and Heart of Darkness .” Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness.” Ed. Ross C Murfin. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1989.

Straus, Nina Pelikan. “The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness .” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 20 (1987): 123–37.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness .” Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays . New York: Doubleday, 1989. 1–20. Rpt. of “An Image of Africa.” Research in African Literatures 9.1 (1978): 1–15.

Adelman, Gary. Heart of Darkness: Search for the Unconscious . Boston: Twayne, 1987.

Bergstrom, Robert F. “Discovery of Meaning: Development of Formal Thought in the Teaching of Literature.” College English 45.8 (1983): 745–55.

Berthoud, Jacques. Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978.

Blake, Susan L. “Racism and the Classics: Teaching Heart of Darkness .” College Language Association Journal 25.4 (1982): 396–404.

Bleich, David. Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism . Urbana: NCTE, 1975.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative . New York: Knopf, 1984.

Conrad, Joseph. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume 2: 1898–1902 . Ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.

Duffey, Mrs. E. B. The Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Etiquette: A Complete Manual of the Manners and Dress of American Society. Containing Forms of Letters, Invitations, Acceptances and Regrets. With a Copious Index . New rev. ed. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1911.

Fish, Stanley. “Affective Stylistics.” Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.

Guerard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958.

Holland, Norman N. The Dynamics of Literary Response . 1968. New York: Norton, 1975.

—. 5 Readers Reading . New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

Kahane, Claire. “Seduction and the Voice of the Text: Heart of Darkness and The Good Soldier .” Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation and Rhetoric . Ed. Dianne Hunter. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989. 135–53.

Kartiganer, Donald M. “The Divided Protagonist: Reading as Repetition and Discovery.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30.2 (1988): 151–78.

London, Bette. “Reading Race and Gender in Conrad’s Dark Continent.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 31:3 (Summer 1989): 235–52.

Miller, J. Hillis. “ Heart of Darkness Revisited.” Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness.” Ed. Ross C Murfin. 2nd ed. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1996. 206–20.

Phelan, James. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

—. “Whiting the Wrongs of History: The Resurrection of Scott Joplin.” Black Music Research Journal 11.2 (1991): 157–76.

Reeves, Charles Eric. “A Voice of Unrest: Conrad’s Rhetoric of the Unspeakable.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 27.3 (1985): 284–310.

Reitz, Bernhard. “The Meaning of the Buddha-Comparisons in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness .” Fu Jen Studies 13 (1980): 41–53.

Ridley, Florence H. “The Ultimate Meaning of ‘Heart of Darkness.’” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 18 (1963): 43–53.

Sams, Larry Marshall. “Heart of Darkness: The Meaning Around the Nutshell.” International Fiction Review 5.2 (1978): 129–33.

Shaffer, Brian W. “‘Rebarbarizing Civilization’: Conrad’s African Fiction and Spencerian Sociology.” PMLA 108.1 (1993): 45–58.

Stewart, Garrett. “Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness .” PMLA 95.3 (1980): 319–31.

Trilling, Lionel. Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning . New York: Harcourt, 1965.

Wasserman, Jerry. “Narrative Presence: The Illusion of Language in Heart of Darkness .” Critical Essays on Joseph Conrad . Ed. Ted Billy. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. 102–13.

Watt, Ian. “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Critics.” North Dakota Quarterly 57.3 (1989): 5–15.

Young, Gloria. “Kurtz as Narcissistic Megalomaniac in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness .” Working Papers in Linguistics and Literature . Ed. A. Kakouriotis and R. Parkin-Gounelas. Thessaloniki: Aristotle U, 1989. 255–63.

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Conrad, J. (1996). Reader-Response Criticism and Heart of Darkness . In: Murfin, R.C. (eds) Heart of Darkness. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05227-8_4

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16 Reader Response Lecture Notes and Presentation

Slide One: Reader Response Criticism

Welcome. I’m Dr. Liza Long, and in this presentation, we’re going to learn about reader response theory. I’m expecting that you are already at least a little familiar with reader response, whether you’ve heard it called that or not. This is a type of literary analysis that you have likely engaged in throughout high school and perhaps even in your other English courses.

But now we’ll formalize our study of reader response as a critical theory, learning more about methods and history of this critical approach to texts. You’ll notice that unsurprisingly, the reader is at the center of the analysis when we do reader response. We’re actually going to look at two types of reader response and two type of readers: a subjective reader response (that’s all about you and your interactions with the text), and a receptive reader response, where we consider the implied reader, a hypothetical reader who doesn’t actually exist but for whom the text seems to have been written.

Why focus on the reader? I love this quote from reader response theorist Louise Rosenblatt. She said, “I find it helpful to visualize a little scene: on a darkened stage I see the figures of the author and the reader, with the book—the text of the poem or play or novel—between them. The spotlight focusses on one of them so brightly that the others fade into practical invisibility. Throughout the centuries, it has become apparent, usually either the book or the author has received major illumination. The reader has tended to remain in shadow, taken for granted, to all intents and purposes invisible. Like Ralph Ellison’s hero, the reader might say, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” Here or there a theoretician may start to take him seriously, and the spotlight may seem from time to time to hover over him, but actually he has never for long held the center of attention.”

When doing subjective reader response, some questions you could ask might be, how am I responding to this idea or language? What does this make me think? What am I expecting next? As we read our assigned novel for this class, you’re probably already doing this in your reading responses. In those assignments, I’m explicitly asking you to respond to the text in this subjective, personal way.

Receptive reader response is more common in literary scholarship. With this approach, we’re asking ourselves to consider how a typical or implied reader might respond to the text. Again, this reader is a hypothetical construct, just as, if you think about it, the implied author is also a hypothetical construct. Remember that we learned how the New Critics abandoned author intent because, among other reasons, it’s not actually possible to know what the author intended, even if the author is around to tell us. This is an especially interesting point in light of a concept called paratext, or text that is written about a text. We will learn more about this, with J.K. Rowling and YA author John Green as examples, when we watch Lindsey Ellis’s video “Death of the Author.”

It’s probably already abundantly clear how this type of criticism is different from New Criticism. In fact, it’s in many respects a strong reaction to the sterile and clinical approach that New Critics took to literature, placing the text at the center of the target. Now, with reader response criticism, instead, we’re going to look at how the text affects the reader: either you in subjective criticism, or the implied reader in receptive criticism. As part of our receptive approach, we will also consider how readers from different demographic groups might respond to texts in different ways.

Slide Two: Subjective Reader Response

Just as we took the tool of close reading from New Criticism, we will take subjective reader responses to texts from reader response theory. Going forward, for every text we read, you should engage in a brief reader response exercise. Here are some guidelines for how to do this:

  • Read the text:  Begin by reading the text closely, paying attention to the language, structure, and themes. This should feel familiar from your experiences with New Criticism.
  • Reflect on your own experiences:  Think about how your own experiences and emotions relate to the themes and characters in the text. Consider how the text makes you feel and what thoughts or memories it evokes.
  • Respond to the text:  Write down your thoughts and reactions to the text, either in a journal or as annotations in the margins of the text itself. Consider how your interpretation differs from or aligns with traditional interpretations of the text.
  • Consider how your response might differ from others’ responses.   Share your responses with others and engage in discussion and debate about the different interpretations and perspectives that the text can generate.
  • Reflect on the process : Reflect on how your personal experiences and emotions influenced your interpretation of the text and consider how this approach differs from other approaches to literary analysis.

Let’s take a look at the poem “What an Indian Thought He Saw When He Saw a Comet” by Tso-le-oh-who, a Cherokee author whose poem was published in the Cherokee Advocate in 1853. We don’t know much else about the poem’s author, but we can conclude that he had literary talent if we look at the complexities throughout the poem. Don’t get too hung up on the poem’s creative spelling. English spelling was not standardized at this point in time. When we’re doing subjective reader response, it’s inevitable that we will all have different reactions to the poem. As I read the poem, think about your responses.

(Reads “What an Indian Thought He Saw When He Saw a Comet”)

For me, the first thing I think of is a book I read last summer called B ury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. This book sought to tell American history from the Native Indigenous perspective, and it really opened my eyes to some of the injustices that Americans perpetrated on Native Americans, including the Trail of Tears, where Cherokee nation members from 1830 to 1850 were forced from their homelands, with many dying along the way. That this poem was written shortly after the worst of that forced relocation was a detail I personally noticed because I had recently read about this historical period. The reference to the explorer John C. Fremont, who came West and found gold, felt especially harsh in light of this historical event. I read the description of the comet as a “sky  rocket of eternity” as potentially exacting judgment and retribution on behalf of the Native Americans.

But another thought that comes to me is the clear sense of awe and wonder at a heavenly sight this poem captures so brilliantly. In this, I can connect empathetically with the author and the text. I thought of my own experiences in 2017 when I witnessed the total eclipse of the sun from Ontario, Oregon. It was one of the most magical and mysterious moments of my life.  These lines really brought this to mind for me: “Thou that art cloth’d in mistery/ More startling and more glorious than thine own/Encircling fires—profound as the oceans/Of shoreless space.”

And the idea of riding the comet, though impossible, felt exhilarating to me. In crafting a subjective reader response thesis statement, I decide to focus on that second response: “Reading “What an Indian Thought When He Saw a Comet” by Tso-le-oh-woh, I feel connected to our nation’s past through a common experience of celestial wonder as I recall how the 2017 total solar eclipse influenced me. This common experience of wonder can serve to unite us in our humanity.”.

This is what I’m going to be looking for when you write your theoretical response. You’re going to do a subjective reading of the text you choose, then use the questions below the text to create a thesis statement. Then you will support that thesis statement with evidence from the text.

You can engage in a sort of counterargument with this type of criticism as well by considering how other people might interpret the evidence that you use and then explain as you would with a counter argument, why your way is a more correct or a more appropriate reading. As my annotations to the AI draft essays show you, I want to see very specific, concrete examples from the text itself. Focus on the language and how it works to make the reader feel something. What does the reader expect? What does the reader anticipate? Use the checklist and the questions to guide your response.

Slide Three: Terms to Use in Reader Response

Here are some terms to use in reader response. I’ve also bolded some terms that work well in this type of criticism in my annotation to the AI models.

Affect/effect in both senses of these words can be useful to consider. How does the text affect you or the implied reader? Expectation and anticipation are also important concepts for this type of criticism. How does the text meet or not meet your expectations? What do you anticipate will happen and why?

Here’s a simple checklist to follow, starting with your subjective reading of the text you choose to use for your theoretical response. I recommend that you read all three texts, then choose the one that resonates most with you personally.

  • Practice active reading. Make notes, ask questions, respond to the text, and record your responses.
  • Focus on the details (much as you do with a close reading) and ask how your response to the text might change if those details changed.
  • Decide whether you will write a subjective or a receptive response to the text.

You might write in the third person if you’re doing receptive reader response, but subjective should always use the first-person pronoun “I.” I think this will probably be relatively easy, especially compared with New Criticism, but remember that you should still consider formal elements. Also, with this type of criticism, if you have actual information about the actual intended reader, this is worth noting in your response. You may choose either subjective or receptive when you are completing this assignment this week, so have fun with it. As always, if you have questions, feel free to reach out to me. I’m really looking forward to seeing how you interact with the text and how you apply reader response criticism.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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4.9: Reader-Response Criticism In Brief

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Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or “audience”) and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.

Person reading behind a building column

Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts “real existence” to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates their own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and the New Criticism.

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  • Image of person reading. Authored by : Stefano Corso. Located at : https://flic.kr/p/7euof . License : CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
  • Reader-response criticism. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response_criticism . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

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The Power of Readers’ Interpretation on "Negro" by Langston Hughes: A Literary Criticism Employing Reader-Response Theory

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COMMENTS

  1. Reader-Response Criticism

    © 2023 by Angela Eward-Mangione - Hillsborough Community College Reader-Response Criticism is a research method, a type of textual research, that literary critics use to interpret texts a genre of discourse employed by literary critics used to share the results of their interpretive efforts.

  2. Reader-response theory

    Reader-response theory A theory, which gained prominence in the late 1960s, that focuses on the reader or audience reaction to a particular text, perhaps more than the text itself. Reader-response criticism can be connected to poststructuralism's emphasis on the role of the reader in actively constructing texts rather than passively consuming them.

  3. What Is Reader Response?

    Reader response criticism is a literary theory that focuses on the individual reader's experience and interpretation of a text. It asserts that the meaning of a text is not fixed and objective but rather subjective and dependent on the reader's interpretation and response to it.

  4. Reader-response criticism

    Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or "audience") and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. Development

  5. Reader-Response Criticism

    By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 17, 2020 • ( 0 ) Reader-response criticism can be traced as far back as Aristotle and Plato, both of whom based their critical arguments at least partly on literature's effect on the reader.

  6. Reader-Response Criticism

    Reader-Response Criticism Summary We have examined many schools of literary criticism. Here you will find an in-depth look at one of them: Reader-Response. The Purpose of Reader-Response Reader-response suggests that the role of the reader is essential to the meaning of a text, for only in the reading experience does the literary work come alive.

  7. Reader-Response Criticism Critical Essays

    Reader-Response Criticism Critical approaches to literature that stress the validity of reader response to a text, theorizing that each interpretation is valid in the context from which a...

  8. What Is Reader Response Criticism?

    In reader response criticism, the individual reader, including his or her background and beliefs, is taken into account. In reader response criticism, the act of reading is like a dialogue between the reader and the text that has meaning only when the two are joined in conversation.

  9. PDF Reader-Response Criticism in the Teaching of Poetry

    READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM Reading is far too rich and many-faceted an activity to be exhausted by a single theory (Suleiman 31). In this chapter I first focus on defining the reader-response theory in terms that teachers can understand. Next, the survey of the literature on reader-response provides teachers with further resource suggestions.

  10. 6.3: Focus on Reader-Response Strategies

    A pioneer in reader-response criticism is Louise Rosenblatt, whose Literature as Exploration (5th ed ... A student in a modernist poetry class, for example, would interpret Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar" in terms of modernism and the poetic movements in modernism and be at ease making claims about the poem's meaning. Literary ...

  11. 8.4: Reader-response to "My Papa's Waltz"

    Click on the link below to read an essay responding to the poem "My Papa's Waltz," using reader-response criticism. "Reaction to Poem: 'My Papa's Waltz,' Theodore Roethke" from Hubpages

  12. The reader, the text, the poem: the influence and challenge of Louise

    This paper is a re-examination of Louise Rosenblatt's seminal work of reader-response theory, The Reader, The Text, The Poem. I argue that poems are essentially social in nature and that they open up a space in which conversation and interpretation can take place. ... This includes the tradition of the New Criticism, with its emphasis on ...

  13. Reader Response Criticism: An Essay

    By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 23, 2016 • ( 5 ) Reader Response, primarily a German and American offshoot of literary theory, emerged (prominent since 1960s) in the West mainly as a reaction to the textual emphasis of New Criticism of the 1940s.

  14. "The Reader, the Text, the Poem" by Louise M. Rosenblatt

    Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work Carbondale, Ill., 1978Hardcover, 196 pagesISBN -8093-0883-5 Highly Recommended Rosenblatt is one of the proponents of the reader-response theory of literary criticism, a concept that emerged in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to New Criticism, which treated

  15. A Reader-Response Approach to Poetry

    This one, "A Reader-Response Approach to Poetry" was inspired by Louise Rosenblatt's book, The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Rosenblatt begins the book with the image of two figures on a stage, the author and the reader, with the book between them.

  16. 4.10: Reader-Response Criticism

    The purpose of a reading response is examining, explaining, and defending your personal reaction to a text. When writing a reader-response, write as an educated adult addressing other adults or fellow scholars. As a beginning scholar, be cautious of criticizing any text as "boring," "crazy," or "dull.".

  17. PDF Reader-Response Criticism and

    lleartofI>arkne~ WHAT IS READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM? Students are routinely asked in English courses for their reactions to the texts they are reading. Sometimes there are so many different reactions that we may wonder whether everyone has read the same text.

  18. Reading Western Visual Poetry from the Perspective of Reader-Response

    The Reader-Response Criticism theory holds that the major objective of literary criticism is to study readers' reading experience and attach importance to readers' subjective initiative in the ...

  19. Reader Response Lecture Notes and Presentation

    Going forward, for every text we read, you should engage in a brief reader response exercise. Here are some guidelines for how to do this: Read the text: Begin by reading the text closely, paying attention to the language, structure, and themes. This should feel familiar from your experiences with New Criticism.

  20. 4.9: Reader-Response Criticism In Brief

    Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or "audience") and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. Although literary theory has long paid some attention to the reader's role ...

  21. Reconsidering Readers: Louise Rosenblatt and Reader-Response Pedagogy

    reader encounters a text and the "transactional" theory of reader response was born. In 1978, her second book, The Reader, the Text , the Poem, refined and augmented the transactional theory of reading set forth in her earlier work. According to Rosenblatt, the role of the reader had been overlooked in previous theoretical discussion on reading ...

  22. Reader Response in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and ...

    Reader Response Criticism is a school of Literary Criticism that focuses on the connection between readers and the text. ... This poem is a great poem for Reader Response Criticism as it makes the ...

  23. (PDF) The Power of Readers' Interpretation on "Negro" by Langston

    Reader-Response criticism stresses on the vital and crucial role of the reader in the process of analyzing text and believes that the reader can be very effective in this process. ... By reading the above poem, the readers who happen to be the students taking Prose Class B at English Language and Literature Study Program at Universitas Jenderal ...