READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM

Reader-response criticism focuses on reader’s responses to literary texts. Reader’s responses are important to enough to become the focus of literary interpretation. Reader-response is a broad, exciting, evolving domain of literary studies that can help us learn about our own reading processes and how they related to specific elements in the text we read, our life experiences, and the intellectual community of which we are a member. Reader-response theory maintains that what a text is cannot be separated from what it does. Reader-response theorists share i) the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and ii) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature. The second belief that readers make meaning, suggests that different readers may read the same text quite differently.

Transactional reader-response theory

Transactional reader-response theory is often associated with the work of Loise Rosenblatt. He formulated many of its premises. It analyzes the transaction between the text and reader. Text and readers both are necessary in the production of meaning. For the transaction between text and reader to occur, our approach to text must be aesthetic rather than efferent. When we read in the “efferent” mode, we focus just on the information contained in the text. In contrast, when we read in the “aesthetic” mode, we experience a personal relationship to the text that focuses our attention on the emotional subtleties of its language and encourages us to make judgment. Without the aesthetic approach there could be no transaction between text and reader to analyze.

Rosenblatt refers to as the blueprint and a stimulus function of the text in terms of two kinds of meaning every text offers: ‘determinate’ and ‘indeterminate’ meaning. Determinate meaning refers to the facts of the text, certain events in the plot. In contrast, indeterminate meaning refers to the “gaps” in the text which allow readers to create their own interpretations. The interplay between determinate and indeterminate meanings result in a number of ongoing experiences for the reader: retrospection, or thinking back to what we have read earlier in the text; anticipation of what will came next; fulfillment or disappointment of our anticipation, revising of our understanding of characters and events, and so on. According to transactional reader-response theorists, different readers come up with different acceptable interpretations because the text allows for a range of acceptable meanings.

Affective stylistics

Affective stylistic is derived from analyzing further the notion that a literary text is an event that occurs in time rather than an object that exists in space. The text is examined closely, often line by line or even word by word, in order to ‘how’ it ‘affects’ the reader in the process of reading. Affective stylistics is not description of the reader’s impressionistic responses but a cognitive analysis of the mental processes produced by specific elements in the text. It is the phrase-by-phrase analysis of how the text structures the reader’s response. It maps the pattern by which a text structures the reader’s the reader’s response while reading. This response is then used to show that the meaning of the text does not consist of the final conclusion we draw about what the text ‘says’; rather, the meaning of the text consists of our experience of what the text ‘does’ to us as we read it. Reader-response critic might say that the text reaches us, through a pattern of raised expectations disappointed, how to read that text and, how to read the world. Affective stylistics believes that the text is an independent object which disappears in their analysis and becomes what it really is. The use of thematic evidence underscores the important role played by the text in establishing what the readers’ experience is.

Subjective reader-response theory

Subjective reader-response theory is led by the work of David Bleich. For reader-response theory reader’s responses are the text, both in the sense that there is no literary text beyond the meanings created by reader’s interpretations and the meanings created by readers’ interpretations and in the sense that the text the critic analyzes is not the literary work but the written responses of readers.

To understand how there is no literary text beyond the meanings created by readers’ interpretations; we need to understand how Bleich defines the literary text. He differentiates between what he calls ‘real objects’ and ‘symbolic objects’. Real objects are physical objects such as tables, chairs, cars, books and the like. The printed pages of a literary text are real objects. However, the experience created between when someone reads those printed pages is a symbolic object because it occurs not in the physical world but in the conceptual world. This is why Bleich calls reading ‘symbolization’: our perception and identification of our reading experience create a conceptual or symbolic world in our mind as we read. Therefore, when we interpret the meaning of the text, we’re actually interpreting the meaning of our own symbolization: we’re interpreting the meaning of the conceptual experience we created in response to the text. Thus, he calls the act of interpretation‘re-symbolization’. Re-symbolization occurs when our experience of the text produces in us a desire for explanation. Our evaluation of the text’s quality is also an act of re-symbolization. Thus, the text we talk about isn’t really the text on the page: it’s the text in our mind.

Psychological reader-response theory

Psychoanalytic critic Norman Holland believes that reader’s motives strongly influence how they read. According to him, we react to literary texts with the same psychological responses we bring to events in our daily lives. While reading the text, there is an exploration of reader’s psychology. For example, if I dislike a drunkard as he reminds me my drunkard father I probably will be quick to dislike any character of the text who reminds me of my father. If I have desire to control the world around me, while reading the text I easily may identify myself with powerful protagonist/antagonist who has control over the world of the text. The immediate goal of interpretation, like the immediate psychological goal of our daily lives, is to fulfill our psychological needs and desires. When we read literature, we project our identity theme, or variations of it, onto the text. Our interpretations are the products of the fears, defenses, needs and desires we project on to the text. Interpretation is primarily a psychological process rather than an intellectual one. A literary interpretation may or may not reveal the meaning of the text, but it always reveals the psychology of the reader.

Social reader-response theory

For social reader-response theory which is associated with the work of Stanley Fish, there is no purely individual subjective response over the text. According to Fish, what we take to be our individual subjective responses to literature are really products of the ‘interpretive community’ to which we belong. By interpretive community, Fish means those who share the interpretive strategies we bring to texts when we read, whether or not we realize we are using interpretive strategies and whether or not we are aware that other people share them. These interpretive strategies always result from various sorts of institutionalized assumptions (assumptions established in high schools, churches, and colleges by prevailing cultural attitudes and philosophies) about what makes a piece of literature. Interpretive communities are not static; they evolve over time. Consciously or unconsciously readers can belong to more than one community at the same time, or they can change from one community to another at different times. 

Social reader-response theory doesn’t offer us a new way to read texts. Nor does it promote any form of literary criticism that already exists. Its point is that no interpretation and no literary criticism can claim to reveal what’s ‘in’ a text. By understanding the principles of social reader-response theory, we can become more aware of what it is we’re doing when we interpret a text and more aware of what our peers and students are doing as well.

Defining readers

While doing reader-response theory in literary criticism, we need to know about the concept of “readers”. Some reader-response critics refer to ‘readers’ while others refer to ‘the reader’. When theorists discuss actual readers whose responses they analyze, they refer to them as ‘readers’ or ‘students’ or call them real people. Many theorists analyze the reading experience of a hypothetical ideal reader encountering a specific text. Stanley Fish talks about informed reader: the reader who has attained the literary competency necessary to experience the text. Similarly, we may also come across with ‘hypothetical readers’, and the ‘optional reader’. Wolfgang Iser uses the term ‘implied reader’ by which he means the reader that the text seems to be addressing. Yet other terms for readers are ‘intended reader’ and ‘the naratte’.