WRITTEN REPORT
ELE 137
Contemporary, Popular and Emergent
Literature
Islamic greetings of peace and blessing “Assalamualaykum” and a wonderful day everyone,
most especially to you Ma’am.
Due to COVID pandemic situation, students are limited to come to school as well as the
daily class concern, flexible learning being utilized in this situation. The pandemic situation is
not hindrance for us not to learn and pursue our study, it just having a change of educational
situation in order to avoid infections and proper observe the health protocol.
Since face-to-face class is not utilized, I do make my course report through written and
video. For me, it has very different feeling, styles and confidence in written and video to face-to-
face actual report. Nevertheless, I will do what the teacher asked to do.
Above all, allow me to start discussing my report in ELE 137, the particular topic
assigned to me is “READER RESPONSE CRITICISM”.
What is Reader response criticism?
Reader Response is a critical theory that stresses the importance of the role of the reader
in constructing the meaning of a work of literature. Lois Tyson offers this definition: “Reader-
response theory maintains that what a text is cannot be separated from what it does. reader-
response theorists share two beliefs:
that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and
those readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective
literary text.
Reader-response theorists recognize that texts do not interpret themselves, but it is on us
to interpret it. Even if all of our evidence for a certain interpretation comes from the work itself,
and even if everyone who reads the text interprets it in the same (as improbable as that might be)
it is still we, the readers, who do the interpreting, assigning meaning to the text. Reader response
criticism not only allows for, but even interests itself in how these meanings to change from
reader to reader and from time to time.
On the other hand, Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on
the reader (or “audience”) and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and
theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.
Although literary theory has long paid some attention to the reader’s role in creating the meaning
and experience of a literary work.
Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts “real
existence” to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response
criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates
their own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total opposition to the theories
of formalism and the New Criticism.
For example, in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the monster doesn’t
exist, so to speak, until the reader reads Frankenstein and reanimates it to life, becoming a co-
creator of the text.
Thus, the purpose of a reading response is examining, explaining, and defending your
personal reaction to a text.
Your critical reading of a text asks you to explore:
why you like or dislike the text;
explain whether you agree or disagree with the author;
identify the text’s purpose; and
critique the text.
There is no right or wrong answer to a reading response. Nonetheless, it is important that
you demonstrate an understanding of the reading and clearly explain and support your reactions.
Reader-Response criticism is not a subjective, impressionistic free-for-all, nor a
legitimizing of all half-baked, arbitrary, personal comments on literary works. Instead, it is a
school of criticism which emerged in the 1970s, focused on finding meaning in the act of reading
itself and examining the ways individual readers or communities of readers experience texts.
These critics raise theoretical questions regarding how the reader joins with the author "to help
the text mean." They determine what kind of reader or what community of readers the work
implies and helps to create. They also may examine the significance of the series of
interpretations the reader undergoes in the reading process.
Like New Critics, reader-response critics focus on what texts do; but instead of regarding
texts as self-contained entities, reader-response criticism plunges into what the New Critics
called the affective fallacy: what do texts do in the minds of the readers? In fact, a text can exist
only as activated by the mind of the reader. Thus, where formalists saw texts as special, reader-
response critics view them as temporal phenomena. And, as Stanley Fish states, "It is not that the
presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain
kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities. Interpretation is not the art of
construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.
I am very sure that it is already clear with us all about “readers respond criticism”
because on its name explain itself which readers response towards and text with critically. I hope
it will benefit us all as BSEd English students whose job to critic the literary text. Before I end
my discussion, I would like to say (jazakallahu khairan) Thank you everyone and
Assalamualaykum!!!
