Handout

Reader Response Criticism

• Historical Background
o Classical Roots
§ Both Plato and Aristotle were aware of the effects of works of literature.
Plato, in fact, worried that poets would stir up the emotions of the
audience. He also believed that art, as a copy of a copy, was at a furthest
remove from "truth" and therefore misled people. In his Republic he
excludes poets from his ideal society.
§ Aristotle, the first formalist (and first "Structuralist" in literary criticism,
was also conscious of the significance of specific rhetorical effects of
works of art. In his discussion of tragic form (found in the Poetics ), he
tells us that tragic plays elicit from spectators the feelings of pity and
fear. Furthermore, another portion of his descriptive analysis of tragic
form refers to "proper magnitude" in plays. This probably meant that
dramatists must not overload the audience with complicated plots or
excess information.
§ As Bressler tells us, both of these ancient writers assumed that the
audience is passive: the text works on the mind as if the mind were acted
upon, much like a wax tablet or a mirror.
o Reader-Response Criticism in the 20th Century:
§ As we have learned, New Criticism exerted a powerful influence upon the
way critics read literature and teachers taught literature well into the
1960's. Especially in America and Britain, you were not taken seriously as
a reader or critic if you did not espouse the tenets of New Criticism.
§ In the midst of this hegemony of New Criticism, Louis
Rosenblatt proposed a different model for literary analysis. In Literature
as Exploration (1937) she proposed her transactional theory, in which
she saw reading as a transaction between reader and text. Meaning is as
dependent upon the reader as it is dependent upon the text. There is no
universal, absolute interpretation of a poem; rather, there can be
several probable interpretations, depending in part upon what the
reader brings to the text. For Rosenblatt, the reader is not passive.
§ Rosenblatt, by the way, agreed with New Critics' emphasis upon close
reading. Reading is a transaction in which readers, while bringing their
world of experience to activate the text, respect the text on its own
terms. She acknowledged that some interpretations were better than
others.
• Types of Reader-Response Critics
o Rhetorical criticism
 § Analyzes texts in terms of rhetorical strategies embedded to influence
readers. These critics, for example, might see plot as an arrangement of
certain effects: moving us to first question events, giving us partial,
teasing answers, deliberately delaying discovery of information,
surprising us with new information or reversal of expectations, and so on.
This approach assumes that the text exerts more control over the
interpretive process than the reader.
o Structuralist approaches to reader-response
§ Describes the codes readers acquire and use to ascertain meaning. Since
codes change across time, interpretations vary.
o Phenomenologists
§ Studies how the mind processes texts. Hans Robert Jauss, a reception
theorist, studies how horizons of expectation change with time, thereby
changing the way audiences interpret texts. Wolfgang Iser (pronounced
"ee-zer") analyzes the text's effect on both the implied reader and
the actual reader. Iser's implied reader is the reader implied by the text--
the hypothetical reader predisposed to appreciate the effects of the text.
In other words, what sort of reader does this text seem to address: how
informed about the nuances of words, history, conventions, strategies of
irony, etc. In experimental "modernist" texts (like Joyce's Ulysses or
Woolf's To the Lighthouse , we might ask, "What kind of reader does this
challenging text attempt to create?" (A question a rhetorical critic might
ask as well, by the way)
§ Iser also discusses ways in which texts are concretized in the mind. He
will discuss ways in which texts call upon and alter the reader's own
horizons of expectations. How, in other words, does a novel set us up to
expect something only to deliver something else. Iser also
discusses gaps in the text: places in which the text expects us to fill in
information or otherwise use our imagination.
§ From all of this it is clear that we have come a long way from Aristotle's
view of the audience as passive. For Iser, readers create the text, filling in
gaps, anticipating what is to come, all along using their own for-
understanding (their world of beliefs/values) to process the work.
Sometimes the text subverts that pre-understanding, creating disturbing
effects; sometimes it confirms it.
o Subjective Reader Response Criticism
§ Here the text is subordinated to the individual reader. The subject
becomes the individual reader as he reveals himself in the act of reading.
For example, imagine a reader outraged by a story in which a father
ignores his child. The intensity of the reader's reaction may lie in his or
her conflicted relationship with his or her father.
§ This kind of criticism has been attacked as too relativistic and of limited
usefulness in the classroom. Defenders of this approach point out that
literature must work on a personal, emotional level to move us
 powerfully. Steven Mailloux, urges that students be allowed their
personal, powerful reaction, but then expect to make his responses
relevant to an interpretive community.
• Assumptions
o Meaning = text + reader
• Methodology
o Varies with each of the types listed above. In general, the reader-response critic
looks to ways in which a literary text affects the reader intellectually and
affectively. Close reading is still an important activity; in this case the critic looks
carefully at how the text stimulates the work of the reader.