Reader-Response Criticism 

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 spacial, 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" (326-327).

Reader response  theory :Explanation

Reader response stresses the importance of the reader's role in interpreting texts.
Rejecting the idea that there is a single, fixed meaning inherent in every literary work,
this theory holds that the individualcreates 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.
Many trace the beginning of reader-response theory to scholar Louise Rosenblatt's
influential 1938 work Literature As Exploration. Rosenblatt's ideas were a reaction to
the formalist theories of the New Critics, who promoted "close readings" of literature,
a practice which advocated rigid scholarly detachment in the study of texts and
rejected all forms of personal interpretation by the reader. According to Rosenblatt,
the New Critics treated the text as "an autonomous entity that could be objectively
analyzed" using clear-cut technical criteria. Rosenblatt believed instead that "the
reading of any work of literature is, of necessity, an individual and unique occurrence
involving the mind and emotions of some particular reader and a particular text at a
particular time under particular circumstances.
Impact on teaching literature
Over the last several decades, reader-response techniques have become firmly
established in American classrooms. 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. Most importantly,
teaching reader response encourages students to be aware of what they bring to texts
as readers; it helps them to recognize the specificity of their own cultural backgrounds
and to work to understand the cultural background of others.

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. (This
process is evident in the video programs, when students are asked to choose a line of
poetry and explain why it is important to them.) The responses of fellow students also
play a pivotal role: Through interaction with their peers, students move beyond their
initial individual reaction to take into account a multiplicity of ideas and
interpretations, thus broadening their perspective.

Incorporating reader response in the classroom

As increasing numbers of elementary, middle, and secondary school language arts
teachers have come to accept reader-response theory over the last 25 years, the
instructional techniques that support it have become more common in classrooms:
Literature circles, journal writing, and peer writing groups all grew out of the reader-
response movement. These teaching strategies value student-initiated analysis over
teacher-led instruction, promote open-ended discussion, and encourage students to
explore their own thinking and trust their own responses. 

Benefits and challenges of using a reader-response approach

Research has shown that students in reader-response-based classrooms read more and
make richer personal connections with texts than students using more traditional
methods. They tend to be more tolerant of multiple interpretations, and because they
learn techniques that help them recognize the ways in which their own arguments are
formed, they are better equipped to examine the arguments of others. In short, reader
response helps students to become better critical readers. 

While these techniques encourage a broad range of textual interpretations and

reactions, students must learn, however, that not every response is equally valid or
appropriate. The meaning of a text is not an entirely subjective matter, of course, and
it is crucial that responses be grounded in the text itself and in the context in which the
text is read. One way of guarding against students "running wild" is to make sure that
there's a community restraint on interpretation. That is, if the teacher structures reader-
response exercises carefully, each individual student is challenged by the discussion to
go beyond his or her first response. Even though an individual reader's reactions are
based on his or her own "schema" (the expectations that arise from personal
experiences), he or she will realize in class discussion that not everyone shares that
same perspective. 

   
 
Reader Response Literary Criticism
 
In the reader response critical approach the primary focus falls on the reading rather
than on the author or the text.
 
Theoretical assumptions:
 Literature is a performative 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. According Louise Rosenblatt a poem is “what the
reader lives through under the guidance of the text.”
 
How text govern readers:
Focus on how texts guide, constrain, control reading.
Wolfgang Iser argues that the text in part controls the reader´s responses but
contains gaps that the reader creatively fills.
There is a tension  between
 the implied reader , who is established by the response-inviting structures of the text
(this type of reader is assumed and created by the work itself)
 and the actual reader, who brings his/her own experiences and preoccupations to the
text.
The Implied Readern Structuralism
Saussure

The advent of critical theory in the post-war period, which comprised various complex
disciplines like linguistics, literary criticism, Psychoanalytic criticism, structuralism
postcolonialism etc., proved hostile to the liberal consensus which reigned the realm of
criticism between the 19305 and `50s. Among these overarching discourses, the most
controversial were the two intellectual movements, structuralism and poststructuralism
originated in France in the 1950s and the impact of  which created a crisis in English
studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Language and philosophy are the major
concerns of these two approaches, rather than history or author.

Structuralism which emerged as a trend in the 1950s challenged New Criticism and
rejected Sartre’s existentialism and its notion of radical human freedom; it focused
instead how human behaviour is determined by cultural, social and psychological
structures. It tended to offer a single unified approach to human life that would
embrace all disciplines. Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida explored the possibilities of
applying structuralist principles to literature. Jacques Lacan studied psychology in the
light of structuralism, blending Freud and Saussure. Michel Foucault’s The Order of
Thingsexamined the history of science to study the structures of epistemology (though
he later denied affiliation with the structuralist movement). Louis Althusser combined
Marxism_and Structuralism to create his own brand of social analysis.

Levi- Strauss

Structuralism, in a broader sense, is a way of perceiving the world in terms of

structures. First seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the
literary critic Roland Barthes, the essence of Structuralism is the belief that “things
cannot be understood in isolation, they have to be seen in the context of larger
structures they are part of”, The contexts of larger structures do not exist by
themselves, but are formed by our way of perceiving the world. in structuralist criticism,
consequently, there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the
individual literary work towards understanding the larger structures which contain them.
For example, the structuralist analysis of Donne’s poem “Good Morrow” demands more
focus on the relevant genre (alba or dawn song), the concept of courtly love, etc.,
rather than on the close reading of the formal elements of the text.

The fundamental belief of Structuralism, that all human activities are constructed and
not natural or essential, pervades all seminal works of Structuralism. Beginning with the
trailblazers, Levi Strauss and Barthes, the other major practitioners include A. J.
Greimas, Vladimir Propp, Terence Hawkes (Structuralism and Semiotics), Robert
Scholes (Structuralism in Literature), Colin MacCabe, Frank Kermode and David Lodge
(combined traditional and structuralist approaches in his book Working with
Structuralism). The American structuralists of the 1960s were Jonathan Culler and the
semioticians C. S. Peirce, Charles Morris and Noam Chomsky.

With its penchant for scientific categorization, Structuralism .suggests the

interrelationship between “units” (surfacephenomena) and “rules” the ways in which
units can be put iogether). In language, units are words and rules are the forms of
grammar which order words. In different languages, the grammar rules are different as
the words also are, but the structure. is make meaning. still the same, i.e., words are
put iogether within a grammatical system to

In literature, an illustration of this can be seenin fairy tales such as Cinderella, Snow

White; Sleeping Beauty, etc. In these stories, the units are Princess,— stepmother/
witch and , prince, and rules are stepmothers/ witches are evil, princesses are victims,
and princes and princessess have to marry. The units and rules may differ, but the
underlying structures are the same for all fairy tales. Structuralists believe that the
underlying structures .which organize rules and units into meaningful systems are
generated by the human mind itself and not by sense perception. Structuralism tries to
reduce the complexity of human experiences to certain underlying structures which are
universal, an idea which has its roots in the classicists like Aristotle who identified
simple structures as forming the basis of life. A structure can be defined as any
conceptual system that has three properties: “wholeness” (the system should function
as a whole), “transformation” (system should not be static), and “self-regulation (the
basic structure should not be changed.
Structuralism in its inchoate form can be found in the theories of the early twentieth
century Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics, 1916),
who moved away from the then prevalent historical and philological study of language
(diachronic) to the study of the structures, patterns and functions of language at a
particular time (synchronic). Saussure’s idea of the linguistic sign is a seminal concept-
in all structuralist and poststructuralist discourses. According to him, language is not
a naming process by which things get associated with a word or name. The linguistic
sign is made of the union of “signifier” (sound image, or “psychological imprint of
sound”) and “signified” (concept). in this triadic view, words are “unmotivated signs,” as
there is no inherent connection between a name (signifier) and what it designates
(signified).

The painting “This is Not a

Pipe’) by the Belgian Surrealist artist Rene Magritte explicates the treachery of signs
and can be considered a founding stone of Structuralism. Foucault’s book with the same
title comments on the painting and stresses the incompatibility of visual representation
and reality.

Saussure’s theory of language emphasizes that meanings are arbitrary and relational
(illustrated by the reference to 8.25 Geneva to Paris Express in Course in General
Linguistics; the paradigmatic chain hovel-shed-hut-house-mansion-palace, where the
meaning of each is dependent •upon its position in the chain; and the dyads male-
female, day-night etc. where each unit can be defined only in terms of its opposite).
Saussurean theory establishes that human being or reality is not central; it is language
that constitutes the world. Saussure employed a number of binary oppositions in his
lectures, an important one being speech/writing. Saussure gives primacy to speech, as
it guarantees subjectivity and presence, whereas writing, he asserted, denotes absence,
of the speaker as well as the signified. Derrida critiqued this as phonocentrism that
unduly privileges presence over absence, which led him to question the validity of all
centres.

Saussure’s use of the terms Langue (language as a system) and Parole an individual.
utterance in that language, which is inferior to Langue) gave structuralists a way of
thinking about the larger structures which were relevant to literature. Structuralist
narratology, a form of Structuralism espoused by Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov,
Roland Barthes and Gerard Genette illustrates how a story’s meaning develops from its
overall structure It, (langue) rather than from each individual story’s isolated theme
(parole). To ascertain a text’s meaning, narratologists emphasize grammatical elements
such as verb tenses and the relationships and configurations of figures of speech within
the story. This demonstrates the structuralist shift from authorial intention to broader
impersonal Iinguistic structures in which the author’s text (a term preferred over
“work”) participates.

Structuralist critics analyse literature on the explicit model of structuralist linguistics. In

their analysis they use the linguistic theory of Saussure as well as the semiotic theory
developed by Saussure and the American philosophe’r Charles Sanders Peirce.
According to the semiotic theory, language must be studied in itself, and Saussure
suggests that the study of language must be situated within the larger province of
semiology, the science of signs.

Semiology understands that a word’s meaning derives entirely from its difference from
other words in the sign system of language (eg: rain not brain or sprain or rail or roam
or reign). All signs are cultural constructs that have taken on their meaning through
repeated, learned, collective use. The process of communication is an unending chain of
sign productior which Peirce dubbed “unlimited semiosis”. The distinctions of symbolic,
iconic and indexical signs, introduced by the literary theorist Charles Sande  Peirce is
also a significant idea in semiology. The other major concepts asiociated with semiotics
are “denotation” (first order signification) and “connotation” (second order
signification).

Structuralism was anticipated by the Myth Criticism of Northrop Frye, Richard Chase,
Leslie Fiedler, Daniel Hoffman, Philip Wheelwright and others which drew upon
anthropological and physiological bases of myths,

Northrop Frye

rituals and folk tales to restore spiritual content to the alienated fragmented world ruled
by scientism, empiricism and technology. Myth_criticism sees literature as a system
based or recurrent patterns. Though Frye’s Anatomy of Ctiticism (1957) echoes the
formalist emphases of New criticism, at also to literary history as a repetitive and self-
contained cycle, where basic symbolic myths like deluge myth and trickster myth recur.

The French social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss applied the structuralist outlook to
cultural phenomena like mythology, kinship relations and food preparation. He applied
the principles of langue and parole in his search for the fundamental mental structures
of the human mind. Myths seem fantastic and arbitrary yet myths from different
cultures are similar. Hence he concluded there must be universal laws that govern
myths sand all human thought). Myths consist of 1) elements that oppose or contradict
each other and 2) other elements that “mediate” or resolve those oppositions (such as
trickster / Raven/ Coyote, uniting herbivores and carnivores). He breaks myths into
smallest meaningful units called mythemes. According to Levi-Strauss, every culture can
be understood, in terms of the binary oppositions like high/low, inside/outside,
life/death etc., an idea which he drew from the philosophy of Hegel who explains that
in every situation there are two opposing things and their resolution, which he called
“thesis, antithesis and synthesis”. Levi-Strauss showed how opposing ideas would fight
and also be resolved in the rules of marriage, in mythology, and in ritual.

In interpreting the Oedipus myth he placed the individual story of Oedipus within the
context of the whole cycle of tales connected with the city of Thebes. He then identifies
repeated motifs and contrasts, which he used as the basis of his interpretation. In this
method, the story and the cycle part are reconstituted in terms of binary oppositions
like animal/ human, relation/stranger, husband/son and so on.

Concrete details from the story are seen in the context of a larger structure and the
erall network of basic dyadic e larger structure is then seen as an ov pairs which have
obvious symbolic, thematic and archetypal resonance. This is the typical structuralist
process of moving from the particular to the general placing the individual work within a
wider structural content.

A very complex binary opposition introduced by Levi-Strauss is that of According to him,

mythology functions more like a bricoleur, leur whereas scientific bricoleur (savage
mind) and engineer (true craft man with a modern western science works more like an
engineer (the status of modem science is ambivalent in his writings). In Levi-Strauss’s
concept of bricolage, what is important is that the signs already in existence are used
for purposes that they were not originally meant for. When a faucet breaks, the
bricoleur stops the leak using a cloth, which is not actually meant for it. On the other
hand the engineer foresees the eventuality and he would have either a spare faucet or
all the spanners and bolts necessary to repair the tap.

Derrida

Derrida, the poststructuralist, opposes Levi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage in his

Structure, Sign and Play’, saying that the opposition of bricolage to engineering is far
more troublesome that Levi-Strauss admits and also the control of theory and method,
which Levi-Strauss attributes to the engineer would seem a very strange attribution for
a structuralist to make.

Roland Barthes, the other major figure in the early phase of structuralism (later he
turned to Post Structuralism), applied the structuralist analysis and semiology to broad
cultural phenomena. His work embodies transition from structuralist to poststructuralist
perspectives. Certain works of his-have a Marxist perspective and some others deal with
the concept of ‘intertextuality’, a coinage by his student and associate Julia Kristeva. His
early works like Writing Degree Zero (1953) and Mythologies (19
 57) derived inspiration from
Saussure, Sartre and. Brecht. His structuralist works include Introduction to
the Structural Analysis of i Narratives  (1966), and Death of the Author(1968), S/Z
(1970),  From Work to Text, Elements of Semiology (1964), The Pleasure of the
Text are some of the seminal poststructuralist works.

In Mythologies he examines modern France from the standpoint of a cultural theorist. It

is an ideological critique of products of mass bourgeois culture , like soaps,
advertisements, images of Rome etc., which are explained using the concept of ‘myth’.
According to Barth es, myth is a language,. ‘Mode of signification. He reiterates
Saussure’s view that semiology comprises three terms: signifier, signified and sign, in
which sign is a relation between the signifier and signified. The structure of myth
repeats this tri-dimensional pattern. Myth is a second order signifying system illustrated
by the image, I of the young Negro in a French uniform saluting the french flag,
published the cover page of the Parisian magazine, Paris Match, which reveals the myth
of French imperialism at the connotative level.

Roland Berthas underlies that the very principle of myth is “to transform history into
nature”. Ideology and culture as kinds of propaganda work best when they are not
recognized as such because they contribute to the construction of what people think of
as “common sense.” Berthes’ Death of the Author (1968) reveals his deconstructionist
and antihumanist approach as it deposes the Romantic idea of an author, symbolically
male and end of all meanings. The death of the author is followed by the birth of the
reader; not just the reader but the scriptor, an idea which has echoes of Eliot’s theory
of impersonality.

In his S/Z (a book which sits on the fence between

structuralism and poststructuralism) Barthes’ method of analysis is to divide the story
(Balzac’s (“Sarrasine”) into 561 lexias or units of meaning, which he classifies using five
‘codes’: Proairetic, hermeneutic, cultural, semic and symbolic, seeing these as the basic
underlying structure of all narratives. in this book appears the substantial reference to
the readerly (lisible) and writerly (scriptable) texts. In The Pleasure of the Text he
distinguishes between plaisir (pleasure) and jouissance (bliss).

The complexity and heterogeneity of structuralism, which is reflected even in the

architecture of this period (eg., structuralist artefacts like Berlin Holocaust Memorial,
Bank of China Tower, etc) paved the way to poststructuralism which attacked the
essentialist premises of structuralism. Poststructuralism argues that in the very
examination of underlying structures, a series of biases are involved. Also, structuralism
has often been criticized for being ahistorical and for favoring deterministic structural
being forces over.the ability of individual people to act. As the political turbulence of the
1960s and 1970s (especially the student uprising of May 1968) began affecting the
academy, issues of power and political struggle moved to the centre of people’s
attention. In the 1980s deconstruction and its emphasis on the fundamental ambiguity
of language—rather than its crystalline logical structure—became popular, which proved
fatal to structuralism.

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The author creates a relationship with a reader and enables him/her to discover the
meaning of the text.
The tone of voice or features of the narrative voice imply what kind of reader  - in
terms of knowledge and attitude is addressed, what kind of attention the book is
requesting  and what kind of relationship of the narrator and the reader is assumed to
be.
For the child- implied reader authors try to reinforce the relationship by a very sharply
focused point of view. (inthe centre of the story is a child)
Techniques”
 the author puts him/herself into the narrator (3rd person godlike all-seer) or the 1st person
child character
 the way s/he comments on the events in the story
 by the attitude s/he adopts towards his/her characters
Many writers cast their tales in the form of fantasy (with animal-human characters