Reader response criticism

It focuses on reader's responses to literary texts. A reader response theory mentions that:

1. The role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature

2. 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.

German "rezeption"theory is only one's trend of the main theories of the reader response with
critics like :Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser .

Jauss gave a historical dimension to reader oriented criticism. He tried to achieve a compromise
between Russian formalism which ignores history and social theories which ignore the text. In his essay
called "Literary history as a challenge to literary theory " he describes the HORIZON OF EXPECTATION.

The term designates the shared set of assumptions which can be attributed to any given generation of
readers. It encompasses the social norms and historical situation of a given time and space. Horizon of
expectation change. Each age reinterprets literature in the light of its own knowledge and experience,its
own cultural environment.

Literary value is measured according to esthetic distance namely the degree to which a work departs
from the horizon of expectations of its first readers.

Social reader response

Stanley Fish said that individual subjective responses to literature are really products of the
interpretative community to which they belong. We share the interpretative strategy we bring to the
text we read. These strategies result from prevailing cultures latitudes and philosophies. Interpretative
communities aren't static,they evolve over time and readers can belong to more than one community at
the same time

In other words ,readers do not interpret texts,they create them.