Essay on Reader Response Criticism

Unit-IV
READER RESPONSE CRITICISM

Introduction

As the name suggests this group of approaches focuses on the reader's role in interpreting the text. This is not always to say that meaning is dependent upon the reader's individual life experiences, which might generate a subjective appreciation or disapproval of a text, but that it is up to the reader to recognize the codes of a text which will establish its meaning. Meaning lies in the text but this must be completed by the reader.

1. Reader-response theory

This approach in criticism focuses on the reader's role in interpreting the text, by attempting to describe what goes on in the reader's mind during the reading of a text. Hence, the consciousness of the reader produced by reading the work is the actual subject of reader-response criticism. These critics are not after a 'correct reading of the text or what the author supposed to be intended; instead, they are interested in the reader's Individual experience with the text. Thus, there is no single definitive reading of a work, because readers create rather than discover absolute meanings in texts. This kind of approach calls attention to how we read and what changes our readings and what that reveals about ourselves. The key theorists of the Reader-response theory are Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish.

2. Reader's response that matters

Reader-response criticism is the analysis of how we respond to a given text that matters. And that is what accounts for its success or the lack thereof. According to reader-response critics, the work has no independent existence. Rather, it is the experience of the reader who opens it up. For them what the text does is what matters; not so much what the text is. To sum up the critic's points: The readers do not merely consume the texts passively; instead they are actively involved in constructing meaning out of it. The part played by the reader can by no means be ignored in any literary understanding. Different readers have different expectations from a work: they ask different questions.

 

3. Implied Reader and Intended Reader

Wolfgang Iser uses the term implied reader to refer to the reader who will respond in full measure to the demands made by the text. It is the reader whom the text addresses. Iser develops the idea of the 'implied reader as both a textual entity and a process of meaning production.

The 'intended reader' is the one whom the author in mind when he writes the work. Technical writings and social documents are meant for particular audiences.

Jonathan Culler develops the term 'competent reader; one who has learnt or mastered the skills required to understand or interpret a text.

4. Reader-response theory classified into four sections

It is a known fact that different readers read one and the same text differently but the same reader may read one and the same text differently on different occasions. A text 1s not a physical object alone but is something like an event, and interaction with the reader creates the text.

 

Reader-response theory is classified into four sections:

1. transactional reader-response theory.

2. affective stylistics

3. subjective reader-response theory.

4. Psychological reader-response theory.

5. Transactional Reader response Theory

Formulated by Louise Rosenblatt, this theory states that literary work is the result of the transaction between the text and the reader. As we read on, the text corrects our interpretations. Our approach should be aesthetic, and not merely focus on the facts contained.

There are what are called the determinate meanings which refer to the facts in the text, and there are indeterminate meanings which refer to the 'gaps' in the text that force the readers to create the meanings.

6. Affective Stylistics

This theory is associated with Stanley Fish's essay 'Affective Stylistics'. It is based on the assumption that the literary text is not just an object that exists, but takes its existence from the act of reading. The text is put to a closer examination to know how stylistically it affects the reader, or rather how the sequence of words on a printed page gets converted to a felt experience. The attention is focused on what sentences do rather than on what they mean or what they propose. The process is described in slow-motion'; it is a word-by-word, or phrase-by-phrase, analysis of the response of the reader. The quote Fish, Meaning is an event, something that happens, not on the page, where we are often accustomed to looking for it, but in the interaction between the flow of print and the actively mediating consciousness of a reader-hearer'. Hence, the meaning of the text is not the outcome of what the text says, rather the meaning is the experience of what the text does to one as one reads it.

7. Subjective Reader-response Theory

David Bleich is the major spokesman for this theory. His theory is that our response is not determined by the text. The act of reading creates a conceptual, symbolic world. Reading is symbolization. We interpret the meaning of this symbolization. When we wish to explain our experience we re-symbolize. The text is there in our minds. The text, therefore, is the written response of the readers.

8. Psychological Reader-response Theory

Norman Holland advanced this theory. According to him a work of literature projects fantasies and our interpretations of literary texts fulfil our psychological needs. The source of pleasure for a reader lies in the transformation of the unconscious wishes through a literary Work. The individual's subjective response is a close encounter with the fantasies created by the work. The strategies by which we cope without psychological conflicts are called the identity theme. We project this into the text which we read and unconsciously create the text. Our interpretations are the result of the desire, fears, etc. which we read into the text. It is a psychological process.

9. Reception Theory

A branch of modern literary studies is concerned with the ways in which literary works are received by readers. The term has sometimes been used to refer to reader-response criticism in general, but it is more particularly with the 'reception-aesthetics outlined in 1970 by the German literary historian Hans Robert Jauss. Jauss argued that literary works are received against an existing horizon of expectations consisting of readers' current knowledge and presuppositions about literature and that the meanings of words change as such horizons shift. Reception theory is interested more in historical changes affecting the reading public than in the solitary reader. Reception Theory is called the 'aesthetics of reception', meaning thereby the ways in which a text has met with its reception over a historical period of time. If reader-response theory is concerned with the microcosm of response, reception theory is concerned with the macrocosm of response. The focus should be on the altering response of the general audience, the public at large. Historically, readers who come at a later point of time have access to the response of the earliest generation of readers. Thus out of cumulative response, there grows an evolving, modifying historical tradition. And this helps in rewriting literary histories.

10. Phenomenological approach

Wolfgang Iser developed the phenomenological approach to the reading process. For him meaning is not contained in the text itself, but generated in the reading process. Meaning is the result of an interaction between the text and the reader. By filling the gaps in the text, the reader completes the work and participates in the production of its meaning. For Iser, the reality of a text is not the reflection of the real world that exists prior to, and outside of, the text, but rather, a reaction to the world Constituted in a textual universe. Our encounter with the World is real, but with the text it is fictional. According to iser, the text contains and controls the responses of the reader. Though the reader creates the meaning. The text guides him through this construction. Every reading is a collaborative effort between the text (the given object) and the reader (the producing subject). The text proposes, the reader disposes. The text allows for a wide range of meanings and supports them. But not all readings are acceptable. Even the author's meaning is no exception.

11. Value of Reader-response Criticism

Reader-response criticism is not the analysis of a literary text, but the analysis of the response of readers to the text. This criticism has helped in close, slow, and deliberate reading of texts. Judgements and evaluation have never been its aims. The turn towards the reader has had an enormous impact on literary studies, by reorienting critical discussions and debates.