Reader-Response Criticism

In the reader-response critical approach, the primary focus falls on the reader and the process of reading rather than on the author or the text.

Theoretical Assumptions:

• Literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance, analogous to playing/singing a musical work, enacting a drama, etc. Literature exists only when it is read; meaning is an event (versus the New Critical concept of the "affective fallacy").
• The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning or value; there is no one "correct" meaning. Literary meaning and value are "transactional," "dialogic," created by the interaction of the reader and the text. According to Louise Rosenblatt, a poem is "what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text."

Varying Emphases:

How readers interpret texts: Sometimes called "subjective." May deal with published "readings" of texts and/or study nonprofessional readings (e.g., students). These critics explain similarities in readings in varying ways:

• "styles" or "identity themes" of readers are similar (Norman Holland--psychoanalytic approach): cf. George Dillon's classification of students' responses to Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily":
  • "Character-Action-Moral Style" ("connected knowers")--treat literature as coextensive with experience
  • "Diggers for Secrets"--find hidden meanings in literature, psychoanalyze motives of characters, etc.
  • "Anthropologists"--look for cultural patterns, norms, values [e.g. feminists, New Historicists].
• readers belong to same "interpretive communities" (Stanley Fish) with shared reading strategies, values and interpretive assumptions (i.e., shared "discourse"); concept of the "informed reader."
• readers are situated in a common cultural/historical setting and shaped by dominant discourses and ideologies (New Historicist emphasis). "Reception theory/aesthetics" studies the changing responses of the general reading public over time.

How texts govern reader: Focus on how texts guide, constrain, control reading; often use linguistic, stylistic, narratological methods of analysis. Wolfgang Iser argues that the text in part controls the reader's responses but contains "gaps" that the reader creatively fills. There is a tension between

• "the implied reader," who is established by the "response-inviting structures" of the text; this type of reader is assumed and created by the work itself
• "the actual reader," who brings his/her own experiences and preoccupations to the text

Additional Links:

• Reader-Response: Various Positions (John Lye, Brock University)
• Reader Response: Empirical Research on Literary Reading (David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, University of Alberta)
• "A Paradigm of Reader-Response Criticism" (student essay by Kim Jansen)