Name : Ninda Arista Putri

Reading Report
Reader-Response Theory
Reader-response criticism focuses on reader’s responses to literary text. Attention to the
reading process emerged during the 1930s as a reaction against the growing tendency to
reject the reader’s role in creating meaning, a tendency that became a formal principle of the
new Criticism that dominated critical practice in the 1940s and 1950s. New critics believed
that the timeless meaning of the text is contained in the text alone. Its meaning is not a
product of the author’s intention and does not change with reader’s response. New Critics
claimed that attention to the reader’s response confuses what the text is with what the text
does. Reader-response theory, which didn’t receive much attention until the 1970s, maintains
that what a text is cannot be separated from what it does. For despite their divergent views of
the reading process, reader-response theory share two beliefs: (1) that the role of the reader
cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and (2) that 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. (Tyson, 2006)
This second belief, that readers actively make meaning, suggests, of course, that differet
readers may read the same text quite differently. In fact, reader-response theorists belive that
even the same reader reading the same text on two different occasions will probably produce
different meanings because so many variables contribute to our experience of the text.
According to (Eliot, Simon & W.R. Owens, 1998), Reader-response criticism and reception
theory are principaly concerned with the kinds of reader that various texts seem to imply, the
codes and conventions to which readers refer in making sense of texts, the mental processes
that occur as readers move through a text and the sociological and historical differences that
might distinguish one reading response from another.
The different between Structuralism and Reader response is according to structuralist critics,
a reader brings to the text a predetermined system of ascertaining meaning (a complex system
of signs or codes) and applies this sign system directly to the text. The text becomes
important because it contains signs or signals to the reader that have established and
acceptable interpretations. Meanwhile, reading response follow Rosenblatt’s assumption that
the reader is involved in a transactional experience when interpreting a text. The text and the
reader play somewhat equal parts in the interpretative process. (Bressler, 2011)
Often associated with the work of Louise Rosenblatt, who formulated many of its premises,
transactional reader-response theory analyses the transaction between text and reader.
According to (Tyson, 2006), Rosenblatt doesn’t reject the importance of the text in favor of
the reader;rather she claims that both are necessary in the production of meaning. She
differentiates among the terms text, which refers to the printed words on the page; reader; and
poem, which refers to the literary work produced by the text and the reader together. How
does this transaction take place? As we read a text, it acts as a stimulus to which we respond
in our own personal way. The text as stimulus for elicting various past experiences, thoughts,
and ideas from reader, those found both in real life and in past reading experiences.
Simultaneously, the text shapes the reader’s expriences, selecting, limiting, and ordering
those ideas that best conforms to the text. Through this transactional experience, the reader
and the text produce a new creation, a poem. For Rosenblatt and many other reader-response
critics, a poem now becomes an event that takes place during the reading process or what
Rosenblatt calls the aesthetic transaction.
For Rosenblatt, readers can and do read in one of two ways: efferently or aesthetically. For
example, when we read for information like ‘how to heat a can of soup’, we are engaging in
efferent reading. During this process we are interested only in newly gained information, not
in the actual words themselves. But in order for this transaction between text and reader to
occur, according to Rosenblatt, our approach to the text must be aesthetic rather than efferent.
In contrast, when we engage in aesthetic reading, we experience the text. We note every
word, its sounds, its patterns, and so on. So, without the aesthetic approach, there could be no
transaction between text and reader to analyze. (Bressler, 2011)
What differentiates Rosenblatt’s and all reader response approaches from other critical
approaches (especially formalism or New Criticism) is their diverting the emphasis away
from the text as the sole determiner of meaning to the significance of the reader as an
essential participant in the reading process and in the creation of meaning.
There are also several key concepts in Reader-respons criticism. According to (Tyson, 2006),
Affevtive stylistic is one of them. Affective stylistic id derived from analyzing further the
notion that a literary text is an event that occurs in time rather than an object that exists in
space. The text is examined closely, often line by line or even word by word, in order to
understand how (stylistics) it affects the reader in the process of reading. Although there is
thus a great deal of focus on the text, which is why some theorists consider this approach
transactional in nature, many practitioners of affective stylistics do not consider the text an
objective, autonomous entity-it does not have a fixed meaning independent of readers-
because the text concists of the results it produces, and those results occur within the reader.
For example,when Stanley Fish describes how a text is structured, the structure he describes
is the structure of the reader’s response as it occurs from moment to moment, not the
structure of the text as we might assemble it after we’ve finished reading. There are also
subjective reader-response theory which contrast to affective stylistic and to all forms of
transactional reader-response theory. Subjective reader-response theory does not call for the
analysis of textual cues. For subjective reader-response critics, led by the work of David
Bleich, reader’s response are the text, both in the sense that there is no literary text beyond
the meanings created by reader’s interpretations and in the sense that text the critic analyses
is not the literary work but the written responses of readers. Beside that, there is
Psychological reader-response theory, which Norman Holland believs that reader’s motives
strongly influence how they read. Holland belives that we react to literary texts with the same
psychological responses we bring to events in our daily lives. The immediate goal of
interpretation, like the immediate psychological goal of our daily lives, is to fulfil our
psychological needs and desire. The last is Social reading-response theory which doesn’t
offer us a new way to read texts. Nor does it promote any form of literary criticism that
already exists.
References
Bressler, C. E. (2011). Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice (5th
Editio). Pearson Education, Inc.
Eliot, Simon & W.R. Owens, eds. (1998). A Handbook to Literary Research. Routledge.
Tyson, L. (2006). Critical Theory Today. A User-Friendly Guide (2nd editio). Routledge.