Archive for Reader Response Criticism
Reader response criticism
Theoretical Assumptions
- We always make assumptions
- Interpretation falls between the reader and the text itself
- Gains meaning by the purposeful act of the reader reading and interpreting it.
- Does a poem exist if no one reads it?
Louise Rosenblatt
- Literary text has no fixed meaning- there is no correct meaning
- Literature is like Drama- each reading is a performance
- She is known for her text: Literature as exploration
- -Reader plays a vital role in the life of any piece of literature
- Wrote: the reader, the text, the poem: the transactional theory of literary work: no one else can read the poem or the story for us
- You can get different feelings, attachements to different things depending on past experience
Varying Emphasis
- How reader interprets text is subjective
Interpretive communities- Stanley Fish
- We interpret text because we are part of an interpretive comunity that gives us a particular way of reading the text
- Ex: Class of sixth graders
- The interpretive community is made up of those who share interpretive strategies
- Knowledge is not objective but socially conditioned
- All that we know made possible by the social context in which we live
- Thoughts are made by presupposition of community in which one lives- cannot think beyond the limits made possible by the culture
- Can we really have our own ideas if we are limited by society?
Authorial content
- You can completely ignore what the author meant
- Regardless of what the author meant, it can be impossible to truly know
- But we can get a general idea of whar he/she intended
Using our knowledge
- Being able to apply what we know to our reading, we can have a more thourough interpretation of the text.
The way we read
- Louise- “efferent-aesthetic continuum”, a scale to categorize the way we read
- The way we read should change depending on what we read- newspaper vs peom
Wolfgang Iser
- Text contains gaps, meant for the reader to fill in
- Gaps- unanswered questions that the author leaves for us
- Imagine what would happen if the author tried to remove every single gap?
