Reader Response Criticism

Classical Roots

Although an attention to the reading process was emerged during the 1930s, as a reaction
against the growing tendency to reject the reader’s role in creating meaning, Reader Response
Criticism was emerged as an approach to literary analysis and received much attention in the
1960s and 1970s. However, critics have long been interested in the relationship between the
reader and literary texts. Hence, the history of this approach to literature can go back as far as
the classical period. For example, Plato and Aristotle assumed the reader as a passive agent
who receives what is already written in the text. In other words, both Plato and Aristotle
believed that the text (literary text) works on the mind of the reader as if the mind were acted
upon.

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 misleads 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.

Reader-Response Criticism in the 20th Century

Although literary theorists have long paid some attention to the reader’s role in creating the
meaning and experience of a literary work, modern reader response criticism began in the
1960s and 1970s, particularly in America and German, in works by Norman Holland, Stanley
Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, Ronald Barthes, and others.

New Criticism, which its emphasis is the text itself, is based on the assumption that the text
reveals its own meaning. The emphasis on the objective nature of the text creates a passive
reader who is not allowed to bring personal experiences or private emotions to bear on
textual analysis. To do so is to create the affective fallacy. This approach, 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, those readers who do not support
(adopt) the tenets of New Criticism were not taken seriously as readers or critics. Hence, as a
reaction to this objective approach to the analysis of works of literature, and an approach that
perceives readers as passive recipients of the meaning of a text, Louise Rosenblatt in her
Literature as Exploration (1937), became the first and most important critic to start
theoretical works outlining a reader-oriented approach to the study and analysis of literature.

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As mentioned above, in the midst of this hegemony (supremacy) of New Criticism approach
to literature, 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, for
example, 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.

Reader-response criticism, is therefore, developed in opposition to the Formalism and New

Criticism approaches to literature, the predominant movements in literary criticism in
America and Britain from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s. Hence, unlike Formalism and New
Criticism, that stress the primacy of the text and an objective interpretation of it based on
established criteria, advocates of the reader-response criticism focus on the importance of the
reader and their individual, subjective response to the text. According to the Formalists and
New Critics, literature does not exist to propagate ideas, good or bad; nor does it exist to
promote or denigrate authority or convention. Both Critics (Formalists and New critics)
believe that our concern must of necessity be primarily with the literary work, not with an
attempt to make sense of the author's biography or psychology or with historical context.
They also believe that an individual reader's appreciation of a poem, for example, did not
matter. W.K. Wimsatt, a famous New Critic, coined the phrase affective fallacy to explain
what he considered the erroneous notion that the impressions a literary work make upon a
reader are worthy of consideration. However, critical approaches to literature that stress the
validity of reader response to a text, theorized that each interpretation is valid in the context
from which a reader approaches a text.

Foundational Beliefs

Louise Rosenblatt is often credited with pioneering the approaches in Literature as

Exploration (1937). In her 1969 essay Towards a Transactional Theory of Reading, she
summed up her position as follows: A poem is what the reader lives through under the
guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text. Recognizing that many critics
would reject this definition, Rosenblatt wrote: The idea that a poem presupposes a reader
actively involved with a text is particularly shocking to those seeking to emphasize the
objectivity of their interpretation. She implicitly and generally refers to Formalists (the most
influential of whom are the New Critics) when she speaks of supposedly objective
interpreters shocked by the notion that a poem is cooperatively produced by a reader and a
text. Formalists spoke of the poem (text) itself the concrete work of art, the real poem (text).
They had no interest in what a work of literature makes a reader live through.

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Stanley Fish, whose early work is seen by some as marking the true beginning of
contemporary reader- response criticism, also took issue with the beliefs of Formalism. In
Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics (1970), he argued that any school of criticism
that sees a literary work as an object, claiming to describe what it is and never what it does,
misunderstands the very essence of literature and reading. Literature exists and signifies
when it is read, Fish suggests, and its force is an affective one. Furthermore, reading is a
temporal process. The German critic Wolfgang Iser in his A Theory of Aesthetic Response
(1976), argues that texts contain gaps (or blanks) that powerfully affect the reader, who must
explain them, connect what they separate, and create in his or her mind aspects of a work that
are not in the text but are incited by the text.

Basic Ideas

Reader Response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and his or
her experience of literary work, in contrast to other theories that focus attention primarily on
the author or the content and form of the work. Reader response criticism recognizes the
reader as an active agent who imparts real existence to the work and completes its meaning
through interpretation. It argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which
each reader creates his or her own, possibly unique, text related performance. It stands in total
opposition, as already stated earlier, to the theories of Formalism and New Criticism, in
which the reader’s role in re-creating literary works is ignored. New criticism had
emphasized that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text. No appeal to
the authority or intention of the author, or to the psychology of the reader, was allowed.

Hence, theorists and critics of this approach redefine literature, literary work (text), and
reader. According to them, literature is something that only exists meaningfully in the mind
of the reader. A literary work or text is defined as a catalyst of mental events. With these
definitions of literature and literary work comes the definition of the reader. No longer is the
reader the passive recipient of those ides that an author has planted in the text. The reader is
active, Rosenblatt had insisted. Iser, in focusing critical interest on the gaps in texts, on the
blanks that readers have to fill in, similarly redefines the reader as an active maker of
meaning.

Generally, reader response critics believe that the literary work relies on the reader's
interpretation of the text. No two readers will experience the literary work in exactly the same
way. The reader response critic does not validate one interpretation over the other, but
compares them and views the text as having a plurality of meaning. Contradictions are
inevitable, and that is what the reader response critic explores. The text itself does not exist
without these individual interpretations of the reader. Therefore, the text is not complete until
someone reads and interprets it, according to the reader response critic. It is the spectator and
not life that art really mirrors (Kennedy, pp. 2044).

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These different interpretations are not limited to different people, but can also apply to the
same reader at different points in his or her life. Reader response critics readily note that a
literary work the first time a reader reads it, may have a completely different meaning for the
same reader in subsequent readings of the same work. A character that someone admires in
the first reading may actually be abhorred in future readings by the same person because of
the development of the person as an individual in the meantime. This is notably a common
occurrence with religious text.

Although a reader response critic rejects the idea that there is any one single way to read a
text, it does not endorse or support the idea that any interpretation is a valid interpretation of
the work either. It is not a free-for-all type of interpretation of the work. Each text within
itself, according to the reader response critic, creates its own limits to the possible
interpretations of the work.

The central premise of all the schools within Reader Response-Criticism is this: The text does
not and cannot interpret itself. To determine a text's meaning, one must become an active
reader and a participant in the reading process. Reader-Response criticism uses various
theoretical assumptions and methodologies to discover a text's meaning as it is created
through interaction with the reader.

In reader response criticism, the act of reading is like a dialogue between the reader and the
text that has meaning only when the two are joined in conversation. It redefines the role of
the text from an independent object into something that can only exist when it is read and
interacts with the mind of the reader. In this way, the reader is not a passive recipient of what
the text says, but rather takes an active role. The text then serves as a catalyst to stimulate
memories and thoughts within the reader allowing him or her to link the text to personal
experiences and thereby fill in the spaces left by the text. This allows theorists to explain why
people can have different responses to and interpretations of the same text.

Generally, reader response criticism is based on the assumption that:

 Both the reader and the text work together to produce meaning. They are partners in
the interpretive process.

 Both the reader and the text share a transactional experience. The text acts as a
stimulus for eliciting various past experiences, thoughts and ideas from the reader. At
the same time, the text SHAPES the reader's experiences, selecting, limiting, and
ordering the ideas that best conform to the text.

 Through the transactional process the reader and the text produce a
new creation or poem. The text is now defined as an EVENT (or Literary
Experience) that takes place and is created during the process of reading and
interpretation. A new poem or literary work is created each time a reader interacts
with a text.

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Readers can read in two different ways:
 Efferent Reading: Reading that is only interested in gaining factual information.
 Aesthetic Reading: Reading that engages and experiences the text or reading that
pays attention to its use of language, sounds, form and meaning.

Notice that from this perspective, the author and the text are no longer the sole determinators
of meaning. Instead the reader is an essential participant in the reading process and in the
creation of meaning.

There are different forms of Reader-Response Criticism and they vary in how they interpret
literary works. However, they do share some common presuppositions and concerns:

1. Interaction between reader and text: All focus directly on the reading process and ask
(often in different ways), "What happens when a text and reader interact?" They want to
discover whether the reader, the text, or some combination finally determines the text's
interpretation. They want to analyze the effect that a text and a reader have on each other.

2. Defining a reader and a text: All ask the question, "What is a text?" Is it simply words on
a page? Does the real text actually exist in the mind of the reader? Or does it exist through
the interaction of text and reader? They also ask, "What is a reader?" Are there different
kinds of readers? What makes readers different? Do different texts demand particular
kinds of readers?

3. Defining the Reader's Response to a Text: Is our response to a text the same as the text's
meaning? What shapes our knowledge (epistemology) of reading? Do people read in
different ways? Are these differences cultural or cognitive? Do people from different eras
or cultures read in different ways? What is the purpose of reading? Is reading an
individual event or do other readers or communities of readers play in the interpretive
process? Is it a solitary affair or are we shaped by different interpretive communities?
Can one reader's response be more correct than another's, or are all responses equally
valid?

4. Defining the Role of the Author: Does the author have any role to play in a text's
interpretation? Can the author's attitudes toward the reader actually influence a work's
meaning? Does the author’s intention have any relationship to the text's meaning or
interpretation?

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Approaches within Reader Response Criticism

As stated earlier, Reader response criticism starts with what formalist literary criticism called
the affective fallacy- that the response of the reader is not relevant to understanding a text —
and uses it as the focus of approaching a work of literature. There are different approaches
within this school of critical theory, however; some look at the work from the
individual reader's point of view, while others focus on how groups or communities view the
text. For these schools of criticism, it's what the text does to the reader that's important, and
not necessarily the work itself, the author's intent, or the social, political, or cultural context
in which it was written.

Individual Readers

As already mentioned earlier, Louise Rosenblatt is generally credited with formally

introducing the idea that the reader's experience and interaction with the text creates the true
meaning. This idea developed into what came to be known as
Transactional Reader Response Criticism. Rosenblatt argued that, while the reader is guided
by the ideas and words that the author laid out, it is ultimately each
individual reader's experience in reading the work that actually gives it meaning. Since each
person brings unique knowledge and beliefs to the reading transaction, the text will mean
different things to different people. It is that meaning — the reader's meaning — that should
be assessed, as opposed to solely looking at the author's text in a vacuum.

Other critics focus on how the reader's mind relates to the text, in what is known as
Psychological Reader Response Criticism. The reader is seen as a psychological subject who
can be studied based on his or her unconscious drives brought to the surface by his or her
reaction to a text. Reading the text can become almost a therapeutic experience for the reader,
as the connections that he or she makes reveal truths about his or her personality.

Psychological Reader Response Criticism in many ways fueled another similar theory —
Subjective Reader Response Criticism — which takes the personal, psychological component
even further. In this theory, the reader’s interpretation of a text is thought to be deeply
influenced by personal and psychological needs first, rather than being guided by the text.
Each reading is thought to bring psychological symptoms to the surface, from which
the reader can find his or her own unconscious motives.

The Uniform Reader

Other schools of reader response criticism look not at the reader as an individual, but as a
theoretical reader. The "implied reader," for example, an idea introduced by Wolfgang Iser, is
the reader who is required for the text — the reader who the author imagines when writing,
and who he or she is writing for. This reader is guided by the text, which contains gaps meant
for the reader to fill, explaining and making connections within the text.

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The reader ultimately creates meaning based not only on what is in the text, but what the text
has provoked inside him or her. Theorist Stanley Fish introduced what he called the
"informed reader," who brings prior, shared knowledge to the experience of reading.

Social Reader Response

Social Reader Response Criticism focuses on "interpretive communities" — groups that have
shared beliefs and values — and how these groups use particular strategies that affect both
the text and their reading behaviors. It is the group that then determines what an acceptable
interpretation of the text is, with the meaning being whatever the group says that it is. A book
club or a group of college students for example, based on their own cultural and group
beliefs, will generally agree on the ultimate meaning on a text.
As an extension of the social theory, these like-minded groups can also approach and view
the text from different lenses. If the group finds certain elements to be more significant than
others, it might examine the text from this particular viewpoint, or lens. For example,
feminist literary critics may find focus on the female elements of writing, whereas new
historicists might focus on the culture and era in which the text is read.

Objections against Reader Response Criticism

Reader response critics hold that, to understand the literary experience or the meaning of a
text, one must look to the processes readers use to create that meaning and experience.
Traditional, text-oriented critics often think of reader-response criticism as an anarchic
subjectivism, allowing readers to interpret a text any way they want. They accuse reader
response critics of saying the text does not exist. In other words, it is often argued
that reader response criticism allows for any interpretation of a text to be considered valid,
and can devalue the content of the text as a result. Others argue that the text is being ignored
completely or that it is impossible to properly interpret a text without taking into
consideration the culture or era in which it is written. In addition, a larger complaint is that
these theories do not allow for the reader’s knowledge and experience to be expanded by the
text at all.