Saturday 2 October 2010


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.