An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory

Readers and
Reading
Prepared and presented
by Avilyn Rich Cyriel C. Paghasian
BSED III - English
 Ozymandias
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 Ozymandias
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, sculptor - reads the face
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
of the king
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read traveller- reads the
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, inscription on the
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
monument
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; I - listen to the traveller's
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! tale
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
we - read the poem
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The poem can be thought about as what Paul de Man calls
an ‘allegory of reading’: it is not only a poem which can be
read, it is also a poem which tells an allegory or subtextual
story about reading.

One of the crucial questions of reading, for example, is how

we can justify any particular reading: how can we tell if a
particular reading or interpretation is valid?
 Reader-Response
Criticism

The reader-response criticism was a response against the

Anglo-American ‘new criticism’ of the post-war period.

New Criticism - meaning came completely from the literary

text itself
 What is
Reader-Response Criticism?
Reader-Response criticism offers a subjective or egocentric,
reading of a text. Egocentrism refers to anything that
regards the self of the individual as the center of all things.

Reader-Response critics believe that a reader's interaction

with the text gives the text its meaning. The text cannot
exist without the reader.
 What is
Reader-Response Criticism?

If a text sits on
If a tree falls in
a shelf in a
the forest and
bookstore and
no one is
no one is
around to hear
around to read
it does it make
it, does the text
a noise?
have meaning?
 What is
Reader-Response Criticism?
A successful reader-response critic does not just
respond to a text-anyone can do that- but analyzes his
or her response, or the response of others.
Our life experiences and the communities we belong to
greatly influence our reading of a text.
Each reader will interact with the text differently,
therefore the text may have more than one valid
interpretation.
As Robert Young comments, Shelley’s poem
‘demonstrates that meaning, like power, is not stable or
fixed, and that even power cannot guarantee a tyranny
of meaning: although authors may have intentions when
they write, once they have written they cannot control
and fix the meaning of any reading’ (Young 1991a, 238)
Judith Fetterley - argued that female
In Jonathan Culler’s
readers of classic US fiction have been
terms, the question of what it
‘immasculated’, by which she means
would mean to read ‘as a
that they have traditionally been
woman’ (Culler 1983,
taught to read ‘as men’
43–64): how might ‘reading as
a woman’ be different from
Fetterley argues that women should begin
‘reading as a man’?
to liberate themselves from the notion of a

‘universal’ reader (who is implicitly male)

and from an identification with male

viewpoints in reading, and to develop And do we know what it
specifically female models of reading means to read ‘as a man’?
THEORISTS
 Theory theorist definition

Psychological Reader Response Theory analyzes

norman
what the readers' interpretations and responses
psychological
holland
reveal about the reader, not the text. We use literary
work to symbolize and finally replicate ourselves.

"If I am quick to dislike new acquaintances who remind me

of my alcoholic father, then I probably will be quick to
dislike any fictional character who reminds me of him."
 Theory theorist definition

Subjective Reader Response Theory believes that

the readers' responses are the text, and that all
meaning of a text lies in the readers'
david
interpretations.
subjective
bleich

The way individuals respond to texts can be

related to those "identity themes" - desires, needs,
experiences, resistance and so on
 Theory theorist definition

Transactional Reader Response Theory analyzes the

transaction between the text and reader. Both are seen as
equally important. Neither the text nor the reader should
be studied in isolation.
wolfgang
transactional

iser
Rather, the text produces certain "blanks or gaps" that the
reader must attempt to complete: the reader is drawn into
the events and made to supply what is meant from what is
not said.

text - Sense/meaning
stimulus of the text
Theory theorist definition

Social Reader Response Theory believes that readers approach

a text with interpretative strategies that are the products of the
"interpretive communities" in which they belong.
stanley
social

fish
Any individual is part of a "community of readers". Every
reader reads according to the conventions of his or her
"intepretive community"
 EDWARD SAID
Edward Said - argues for what he calls
‘contrapuntal reading’ whereby, in reading
a text, one ‘open[s] it out both to what went
into it and to what its author excluded’.

Specifically, contrapuntal analysis, developed by Edward W. Said, is

used in interpreting colonial texts, considering the perspectives of
both the colonizer and the colonized.
 HENRY LOUIS GATES
Henry Louis Gates makes questions of reading central to black literary
criticism and theory when he argues that black people in the United
States have had to develop particular strategies of reading and
interpretation for survival:

Black people have always been masters of the figurative: saying one
thing to mean something quite other has been basic to black survival in
oppressive Western cultures. Misreading signs could be, and indeed
often was, fatal. ‘Reading’, in this sense, was not play; it was an essential
aspect of the ‘literacy’ training of a child. (Gates 1984, 6)
 JACQUES DERRIDA

Jacques Derrida has referred to the delirium of reading, a

pun or ‘portmanteau’ word which combines the French ‘lire’
(‘to read’) with ‘delirium’, to suggest ways in which reading
can be delirious or hallucinatory.

The relation between reading and being read is strangely

twisted: not only do we read the poem but the poem reads
us.
THANK
YOU!