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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. It has more immediate sources in the writings of the French structuralists (who stress the role of the perceiver as a maker of reality), the semioticians, and such American critics as Kenneth Burke (esp. his “Psychology and Form,” which defined “form” in terms of the audience’s appetite), Louise Rosenblatt, Walker Gibson (who developed the notion of a “mock reader”), and Wayne Booth . But reader criticism became recognized as a distinct critical movement only in the 1970s, when it found a particularly congenial political climate in the growing anti-authoritarianism within the academy.

Calling it a movement, however, is misleading, for reader-response criticism is less a unified critical school than a vague collection of disparate critics with a common point of departure. That is, reader-response critics share neither a body of critical principles (as Marxist critics, for instance, do), nor a subject matter (as Renaissance critics do). Indeed, they barely share a name. “Reader theory” and “audience theory” are perhaps the most neutral general terms, since the more popular term “reader-response theory” most accurately refers to more subjective kinds of reader criticism, and “ Reception Theory ” most accurately refers to the German school of Receptionkritik represented by Hans Robert Jauss . But these and other terms are often used indiscriminately, and the boundaries separating them are cloudy at best.

What affinity there is among reader-critics comes from their rejection of the New Critical principle (most clearly enunciated in W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley ‘s pivotal essay, “ The Affective Fallacy “) that severs the work itself from its effect and strongly privileges the former, treated in formal terms. Refusing to accept this banning of the reader, reader-critics take the existence of the reader as a decisive component of any meaningful literary analysis, assuming, as Michael Riffaterre puts it, that “readers make the literary event” (116). But once past that first step, there is little unanimity. Indeed, even the meaning of that first step has generated considerable debate, for different critics mean different things when they talk about “the reader.”

Stanley Fish (Christine Buckley/UConn Photo)

For some critics, readers are abstract or hypothetical entities, and even these are of various sorts. The category of hypothetical readers is often thought, for instance, to take in what Gerald Prince calls the “narratee,” the person to whom the narrator is addressing his or her narration (e.g., the “you” to whom Huckleberry Finn directs his opening sentence). For as Prince himself insists, the narratee, like the narrator, is really a character (even if sometimes only implicitly present in the text) and should therefore not be conflated with readers who are outside the text. Also included among hypothetical readers are readers who are implied by the text, that is, readers whose moves are charted out by (and hence more or less controlled by) the work in question. This is the kind of reader referred to, for instance, when one says, “The reader is surprised by the end of an Agatha Christie novel.” Wolfgang Iser describes the implied reader’s progress in phenomenological terms: although he pays particular attention to the indeterminacies in the texts—the gaps that the reader has to fill in on his or her own—his reader remains very much controlled by the author, since those gaps are part of the strategy of the text. On a more general level, some reader-critics examine the hypothetical reader who is implied, not by any specific text, but rather by the broader culture. In Structuralist Poetics , for instance, Jonathan Culler, influenced by French Structuralism and especially by Semiotics , develops the notion of “literary competence,” highlighting the ways in which the reader’s knowledge of conventions allows him or her to make sense of literary texts.

Narratees and implied readers need to be distinguished, however, from at least two other types of hypothetical reader. Since they are in principle the product of textual features, narratees and implied readers both differ from the intended reader (what Rabinowitz calls the “authorial audience”). The intended reader is presumed by rather than marked in the text and therefore can be discovered only by looking at the text in terms of the context in which it arose. In addition, there are postulated readers. Such readers’ characteristics do not emerge from a study of the text or its context; rather, the text’s meaning emerges from perceiving it through the eyes of a reader whose characteristics are assumed by the critic to begin with. Thus, in his early and influential “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” Stanley Fish follows the experiences of a “reader” word by word, insisting, in a self-conscious reversal of the Wimsatt-Beardsley position, that what “ happens to, and with the participation of, the reader” is in fact “the meaning” of a text ( Is There 25). But that is not the implied reader; it is, rather, an abstraction Fish calls the “informed reader.” He argues that real readers can become informed readers by developing linguistic, semantic, and literary competence, by making their minds “the repository of the (potential) responses a given text might call out” and by “suppressing, in so far as that is possible,… what is personal and idiosyncratic” (49). As is often the case with postulated readers, Fish’s informed reader is presented as an ideal, the best reader of the text. The distinctions among narratees, implied readers, intended readers, and postulated readers are significant, but they are subtle and not always recognized. As a consequence, they are sometimes blurred as critics (including Fish and Iser) fuse them or move from one to another without notice.

In contrast to those who write about hypothetical readers are those critics who focus on the activities of real readers. In Readings and Feelings , for instance, David Bleich, starting from the assumption that “the role of personality in response is the most fundamental fact of criticism” (4), talks about the specific students in his classes and uses the actual interpretations they have presented in papers they have written, in order to learn where they originate and how the classroom, as a community, can negotiate among them. Janice Radway moves further from the academic center by studying the ways nonacademic women interpret popular romances.

Reader-critics not only differ with respect to what entity they mean by “reader”; they also differ with regard to the perspective from which they treat it. To put it in different terms, most reader-critics admit, to some extent, the necessity of “contextualizing” the act of reading. Stanley Fish, in essays written after “Affective Stylistics,” has made some of the strongest arguments along these lines, claiming that meaning is entirely context-dependent and that there is consequently no such thing as literal meaning. Even audience critics who do not take this extreme position recognize the close relationship between meaning and interpretation on the one hand and context on the other. But readers are not simply in a single context; they are always in several. And there is no more agreement about what constitutes the most appropriate context to study than there is about what the term “reader” means.

For example, one can look at what might loosely be called the cultural context of the reader. Culler, in his discussions of literary conventions, examines the process of reading in the context of the shared cultural practices of the academic community. Fish takes a related but more radical position, rejecting the notion of a generalized literary competence and arguing instead for the study of literature in terms of disparate “interpretive communities” united by shared “article(s) of faith” (e.g., commitment to authorial intention) and “repertoirefs] of [interpretive] strategies.” According to Fish, these strategies do not decode some preexisting meaning, for the meaning of a literary work is not in the text at all. Rather, the very “properties” of the text are in fact “constituted” by whatever strategies the reader happens to bring to bear on the text: “These strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around” ( Is There 171). More recently, Steven Mailloux has expanded on this notion by developing a “rhetorical hermeneutics” that examines, with particular attention to institutional politics, the ways in which interpretations become accepted by given groups.

Reader Response Criticism: An Essay

Alternatively, one can look at the psychological context of the reader. In Dynamics of Literary Response Norman Holland deals primarily with hypothetical readers; in Five Readers Reading he turns his attention to actual students. In both cases, he tries to make sense of interpretive activity by passing it through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis. Still other critics look at the historical context of the reader. This is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Receptionkritik , most familiar through the writings of Hans Robert Jauss, who argues that the reader makes sense of literature in part through a “horizon of expectations.” Since that horizon varies with history, the literary work offers different “views” at different times (Jauss 21-22). Jane Tompkins, following Fish, pushes the idea further, claiming in her study of American literature ( Sensational Designs ) that the reader’s historical situation does not simply affect our view of the work but actually produces whatever it is that we call the text in the first place: “The circumstances in which a text is read … are what make the text available .. . [and] define the work ‘as it really is’—under those circumstances” (7).

Betty Tompkins is a feminist as well as a historian, and her work reminds us that yet another perspective is offered when the act of reading is studied in the context of gender. Like other forms of reader criticism, feminist reader criticism has moved in several different directions. In The Resisting Reader , for example, Judith Fetterley talks about the effects that reading particular texts can have on women. Radway, more willing to credit the reader’s power to “make” the meaning of the text, asks instead how women (especially women of a particular socioeconomic class) read differently from men (especially male academic critics).

Betty Tompkins, Apologia /Artsy.net

There is disagreement among reader-critics not only about the subject of inquiry but also about the whole purpose of critical activity. It is here that debates can become especially acrimonious. In particular, there is disagreement about the proper relation between the critic and interpretation, and consequently about the descriptive/prescriptive nature of the critical enterprise. Granted, most audience critics agree that to some extent, readers produce literary meaning; but since there are such widespread disagreements about who that “reader” is and what that production consists of, this apparent agreement yields no unity whatever on the issue of the reader’s ultimate freedom to interpret as he or she wishes.

At one extreme, there are critics who start with the text and use the concept of the reader as an analytic tool to perfect traditional interpretive practices. As Mary Louise Pratt has argued, the study of many types of hypothetical readers is consistent with formalism. In traditional formalist interpretive practice, certain textual details are foregrounded, and an interpretation explaining those details is posited as “the” interpretation of the text. To the extent that the implied reader is simply a mirror of those textual features, an implied-reader analysis is often a formalist analysis in different language. Thus, for instance, Wolfgang Iser ‘s interpretations, despite their heavy reliance on descriptions of “the reader’s” activities, could in many cases be translated into formalist terms.

Problems become more acute when we come to analyses based on postulated readers whose activities serve as models for correct behavior. In practice, such readers often turn out to be the critic himself or herself, and the readerly terminology serves primarily as a rhetorical device to persuade us of the general validity of individual interpretations. Riffaterre’s semiotic analyses in Semiotics of Poetry rely heavily on notions of what activities the text requires the reader to perform; readers are forced or compelled by the text, and individuals who, for one reason or another, wander in the wrong direction simply cannot find “the true reading” (142). For all the brilliance of his analyses, Riffaterre (as Culler has argued in Pursuit of Signs ) tells us less about what readers do or have done than about the way he himself reads; in fact, he often explicitly notes that no previous readers have followed what he sees as the dictates of the text. In the end, his use of reader terminology gives his prescriptions of how we ought to read the appearance of objective descriptions of what readers actually do.

Other critics, in contrast, use the concept of the reader not to engage in the act of interpretation but rather to explain how interpretations come about. Culler, for instance, like Riffaterre, describes much of his work as semiotic. But his actual practice is quite different. Arguing that “the interpretation of individual works is only tangentially related to the understanding of literature,” Culler strives to construct a criticism “which seeks to identify the conventions and operations by which any signifying practice (such as literature) produces its observable effects of meaning” ( Pursuits , 48). In contrast to Riffaterre, he builds his arguments not on the text but on interpretations already produced; and he aims not to persuade his own readers of the rightness or wrongness of those interpretations but rather to describe the practices that allowed them to come into being.

Culler’s work in this line is not, strictly speaking, concerned with evaluating interpretations. Indeed, he explicitly claims that the semiotic “project is disrupted whenever one slips back into the position of judge” ( Pursuit 67). Nonetheless, there is a sense in which his work tends to justify those interpretations he discusses. This is especially true because, as Pratt suggests, his arguments are frequently based on his notion of literary competence, and that notion is not really interrogated in terms of who determines competence or under what cultural and political circumstances. Since he tends to start with interpretations produced by professionally trained critics (rather than, as Bleich does, with students’ readings), academic practices are implicitly valorized.

Other reader-critics, therefore, use the notion of reader in yet a different way, neither to persuade nor to explain but to question interpretations. In The Resisting Reader, for instance, Fetterley, without giving up the notion that there are more or less correct intended interpretations of the classical American texts she reads, argues that those interpretations are harmful because they “immasculate” women (i.e., train them to identify with male needs and desires). She therefore calls upon readers to recognize them and resist them. Radway questions interpretations in an even more fundamental way. She criticizes those who use traditional academic interpretive practices to determine the cultural meaning of mass-market romances. Starting with a position fairly close to Fish’s, she insists that the cultural importance of those romances depends on the meaning they have for the actual women who consume them. She goes on to demonstrate, through ethnographic study, that since those women use different interpretive strategies than academic critics do, the texts for them have substantially different meanings.

Given the wide variety of interests and concerns exhibited by various reader-critics, it should not be surprising that audience criticism, as a whole, has not taken any definitive stands, except a negative attitude toward New Criticism , an attitude shared by virtually all other critical schools that have developed since the 1960s. Nonetheless, the very raising of certain questions (even unanswered questions) has had profound consequences for the commonplaces of the literary-critical profession and has, in conjunction with such movements as Deconstruction and Feminism , encouraged general shifts in the direction of literary studies. In the first place, talk of the reader opens up talk of psychology, sociology, and history, and reader criticism has helped break down the boundaries separating literary study from other disciplines. In addition, by highlighting the reader’s interpretive practice, even such prescriptive critics as Riffaterre have clarified the degree to which meaning is dependent upon the reader’s performance. Even if one does not agree with such critics as Robert Crosman (who claims that “‘validity’ is a matter of individual conscience” [381]) or Bleich (who argues that “reading is a wholly subjective process” [ Readings 3]), reader criticism has made it increasingly difficult to support the notion of definitive meaning in its most straightforward form. One can hardly claim that no critics, not even audience critics, continue to support the notion of “right” and “wrong” readings, but it is safe to say that the position is being increasingly discarded, and even critics who do argue for it have become ever more wary of how precarious interpretation is as a procedure and how little we can depend on the texts themselves to provide proper interpretive guidance.

What is most important, perhaps, as definitive meaning is undermined, so is the notion of definitive evaluation, since value is even more contextually determined than meaning. Statements of value are increasingly being put under pressure by the question, Value for whom? and value is increasingly being viewed not as a quality inherent in texts but rather as a function of particular social, historical, and cultural circumstances. By helping to throw into question the belief that texts have determinable, unvarying literary quality, reader-critics have helped fuel the attacks on the canon that have been launched from a number of other quarters, most notably, in the 1970s and 1980s, from feminist critics.

Further Reading David Bleich, Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism (1975), Subjective Criticism (1978); Robert Crosman, “Some Doubts about ‘The Reader of Paradise Lost/ ” College English 37 (1975); Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (1981), Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (1975); Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (1979); Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (1978); Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989), Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980); Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism (1987); Norman N. Holland, Five Readers Reading (1975); Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (1976, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, trans. Iser, 1978), Der implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett (1972, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, trans. Iser, 1974); Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (trans. Timothy Bahti, 1982); Steven Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (1982), Rhetorical Power (1989); James Phelan, Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative (1989); Mary Louise Pratt, “Interpretive Strategies I Strategic Interpretations: On Anglo-American Reader Response Criticism,” Boundary 2 11 (1981-82); Gerald Prince, “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee” (Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism); Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (1987); Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984); Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (1978); Louise Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978); Michael Steig, Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding (1989); Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, eds., The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (1980); Jane P. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (1985); Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (1980). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Reader-response theory

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Reader response criticism.

“We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story.” – Review of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) “Lewis Carroll, on the other hand, disappoints most of these students. They prefer ‘sense’ to ‘nonsense’… ” – Gillian Adams (1985)

Introduction

Reader Response is a critical theory that stresses the importance of the role of the reader in constructing the meaning of a work of literature. Lois Tyson offers this definition: “Reader-response theory…maintains that what a text is cannot be separated from what it does…reader-response theorists share two beliefs: (1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and (2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text” ( 170 ). Reader-response theorists recognize that texts do not interpret themselves. Even if all of our evidence for a certain interpretation comes from the work itself, and even if everyone who reads the text interprets it in the same (as improbable as that might be) it is still we, the readers, who do the interpreting, assigning meaning to the text. Reader response criticism not only allows for, but even interests itself in how these meanings to change from reader to reader and from time to time.

Reader Response to Alice

In a way, this entire website is a study in Reader Response. After all, every critic, film-maker, illustrator, musician, and fan site I have examined represents a reader with his or her own interpretation of what Alice is, ought to be, or ought to make us feel. And it is difficult to argue that the culmination of all of these interpretations, the “collective Alice myth” does not affect the text. After all, we can’t quite read Alice the same way if we know that “alice” is a street name for LSD, or that Lewis Carroll took nude photographs of his “child friends,” or if we’ve seen the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland . Our culture has changed and so has Alice , even though Charles Dodgson has been dead for over 100 years. As Robert Phillips put it, "Alice is what you make of her. It should be quickly said that no one has known exactly what to make of her..." ( xxi ). One interesting way to track the reader response to Alice is to watch her “grow up” in the various media for which she has been adapted. Helen Pilinovsky noticed the trend in her article, “Body as Wonderland: Alice’s Graphic Iteration in Lost Girls ” ( 182 ). In the Alice books Alice is given the age of seven and a half and Tenniel’s Alice seems to be about that age, perhaps a little older. But as time has progressed, Alice keeps getting older, from Arthur Rackham’s ten or eleven year old Alice in 1907, to Harry Furniss’ “sexy” pre-teen Alice in 1926. Disney’s Alice seems to be a little younger, perhaps 9 years old, but then she begins to age again. She is teen-aged in Jonathan Miller’s 1966 film, as she is in the 1990’s television series. And finally the two latest Alices, Tim Burton’s in the 2010 film, and Nick Willing’s in the 2009 Syfy mini-series, are in their late teens or early twenties. These “grown up” Alices are a fascinating example of how the “Alice myth” has evolved and how Alice has changed in its readers’ imaginations.

Alice Growing Up:

----------------> --------------> ------------->

John Tenniel (1865) -------> Arthur Rackham (1907)-----> Harry Furniss (1926)----->

---------------> -------------->

Jonathan Miller (1966)-----------> Tim Burton (2010) ------------> Nick Willing (2009)

Student response.

Gillian Adams has also written an interesting article on her college students’ response to Alice when it was read in her class. She writes that “the lack of any explicit, clear instruction in the text not only as to how a child should behave in Alice's situation, but to the readers of the text on how they should interpret it, engenders a negative response in many students. Carroll's wit, his intellect, his artistry, his sense of play, is lost on them, and they cannot accept a text so open and so ambivalent. ” ( 9 )

Perhaps their disappointment lies in the fact that the Alice we think we know and love is no longer Carroll’s Alice. It is a semi-imaginary amalgamation of all her adaptations, half cloaked in myths and rumors. But since this new “Alice” affects our understanding and thus our interpretation of the Alice texts, a good understanding of the reader response to Alice is necessary and beneficial to our own response.

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Reader-response criticism Definition & Meaning
reader-response criticism noun : a literary criticism that focuses primarily on the reader's reaction to a text Word History First Known Use 1965, in the meaning defined above Time Traveler The first known use of reader-response criticism was in 1965 words from the same year Love words?
Reader Response Criticism: Definition & History
Reader Response Criticism. An approach to literary criticism and analysis that focuses on how readers are actively engaged in the creation of meaning in a text. The key idea of Reader Response Criticism is that readers create meaning rather than find it in a text.
Reader-Response Criticism
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.
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.
Reader Response Theory
Reader response theory identifies the significant role of the reader in constructing textual meaning. In acknowledging the reader’s essential role, reader response diverges from early text-based views found in New Criticism, or brain-based psychological perspectives related to reading.
Reader-Response Criticism
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, … Continue reading Literary Theory and Criticism 5
Reader-response theory
The reader-response critic’s job is to examine the scope and variety of reader reactions and analyze the ways in which different readers, sometimes called “interpretive communities,” make meaning out of both purely personal reactions and inherited or culturally conditioned ways of reading.
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.
Reader-Response Criticism Flashcards
reader-response criticism a variety of approaches that have in common the role of audience in determining meaning. Shifts attention from inherent properties of text to production of meaning in the reading process. reception theory
Reader Response Criticism
Lois Tyson offers this definition: “Reader-response theory…maintains that what a text is cannot be separated from what it does…reader-response theorists share two beliefs: (1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and (2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an …