Reader response theory

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 primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.

It is a theory, which gained prominence in the late 1960s; it also focuses on the reader or
audience reaction to a particular text, perhaps more than the text itself. Reader-response
criticism can be connected to post structuralism’s emphasis on the role of the reader in actively
constructing texts rather than passively consuming them.

Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence"
to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation.

Argument:

 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, 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, nor to the psychology of the reader, was allowed in the discussions of New
Critics.

 Rejecting the idea that there is a single, fixed meaning inherent in every literary work, this
theory holds that the individual creates his or her own meaning through a "transaction"
with the text based on personal associations. Because all readers bring their own emotions,
concerns, life experiences, and knowledge to their reading, each interpretation is
subjective and unique. Similarly reader interprets the text differently in different moods.

 Reader-response criticism argues that a text has no meaning before a reader experiences
by reading it. Text acts as a blue print, so both reader and text is important.

Reader-response critic

The reader-response critic’s job is to examine the scope and variety of reader reactions and
analyze the ways in which different readers, sometimes called “interpretive communities,”
make meaning out of both purely personal reactions and inherited or culturally conditioned
ways of reading.
Types:

There are multiple approaches within the theoretical branch of reader-response criticism, yet
all are unified in their belief that the meaning of a text is derived from the reader through the
reading process. They are Transactional reader-response theory, subjective reader-response
theory, Social reader-response theory and Psychological reader-response theory.

Psychological reader-response theory

Employed by Norman Holland, believes that a reader’s motives heavily affect how they read,
and subsequently use this reading to analyze the psychological response of the reader.

In 1968, Norman Holland drew on psychoanalytic psychology in The Dynamics of Literary

Response to model the literary work. Each reader interjects a fantasy "in" the text, then
modifies it by defense mechanisms into an interpretation. In 1973, however, having recorded
responses from real readers, Holland found variations too great to fit this model in which
responses are mostly alike but show minor individual variations.

Like in psychoanalytical theory dreams become source and here text becomes source to
understand and analyze the experiences. Moods and emotions can also come into this
umbrella.

Impact on teaching literature

 Language arts teachers at all levels now widely accept central tenets of the theory,
particularly the notion that learning is a constructive and dynamic process in which
students extract meaning from texts through experiencing, hypothesizing, exploring, and
synthesizing.

 Using reader response in the classroom can have a profound impact on how students view
texts and how they see their role as readers. Rather than relying on a teacher or critic to
give them a single, standard interpretation of a text, students learn to construct their own
meaning by connecting the textual material to issues in their lives and describing what they
experience as they read. Because there is no one "right" answer or "correct" interpretation,
the diverse responses of individual readers are key to discovering the variety of possible
meanings a poem, story, essay, or other text can evoke.

 Students in reader-response classrooms become active learners. Because their personal

responses are valued, they begin to see themselves as having both the authority and the
responsibility to make judgments about what they read.

Main point

 Literature is a performativity art and each reading is a performance. Literature exists only
 when it is read; meaning is an event

 The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning. Literary meaning is created by the
interaction of the reader and the text.

 The theory is popular in both the United States and Germany; its main theorists include
Stanley Fish, David Bleich, and Wolfgang Iser