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READER
 Reception Theory
• Definition

In his book, Reception Theory (1984), Robert C. Holub (1949- )

characterizes Reception Theory as “a general shift in concern
from the author and the work to the text and the reader.”

According to Holub, Reception Theory was a revolutionary

approach to contemporary literary criticism.
 RECEPTION HISTORY
 Definition
According to Harold Marcuse, reception
history is the history of the meanings that
have been imputed to historical events.

It traces the different ways in which

participants, observers, historians and other
retrospective interpreters.
 READER-RESPONSE
CRITICISM
• Definition

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.
 Types of Reader-
Response Criticism

Subjective Social reader-
Affective stylistics
analysis response

Psychological Transactional
reader-response reader-response
 Subjective analysis
 Definition

Subjective analysis often called subjective criticism, this

form of reader-response criticism is championed by David
Bleich, who believes that a reader’s response becomes the
text itself, ripe for analysis (or psychoanalysis).
 Subjective analysis
 Example :

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (by J. K. Rowling)

“Harry had taken up his place at wizard school, where he and his scar were famous
… but now the school year was over, and he was back with the Dursleys for the
summer, back to being treated like a dog that had rolled in something smelly.
TheDursleys hadn’t even remembered that today happened to be Harry’s twelfth
birthday …”
 Affective stylistics
Definition

According to Fish, affective stylistics is the

experience the reader has while reading, which
he defines as a three-fold process.
 Affective stylistics
O Example
A student in a modernist poetry class, for
example, would interpret Wallace
Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” in terms
of modernism and the poetic movements
in modernism and be at ease making
claims about the poem’s meaning.
Literary theory, which you are learning as
you work your way through this text, also
demonstrates the interpretive community.
Social reader-response
 definition

Often referred to as “reception

theory,” social reader response
is interested in how a literary
work is received over time. In
fact, the status of a literary
work is dependent on the
reader’s reception of the work.
 Social Reader-Response

 Example
 Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

Hurston was a popular author in America, but contemporary

writers like Richard Wright and Langston Hughes were
critical of Their Eyes Were Watching God because it seemed
far away from the “protest fiction” other African American
writers (mainly men) were publishing. Here is an excerpt
from Richard Wright.
 Psychological Reader-Response

 Definition

When we read, we are continually connecting the text

to our lives, almost as if the literary work is speaking to
us personally. 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.
Psychological Reader-Response
• Example

• Theory of Mind (ToM) is a complex set of human mental abilities that

enable us to attribute and reason about the mental states of others (their
beliefs, desires, intentions, imagination, emotions, etc.). Many
psychological processes, involved in literary reading, may be connected
with ToM (identification with a fictional character, empathy, immersion in
the fictional world, reader’s sensual reactions).
 Transactional Reader-Response

Definition

Transactional reader-response theory in order for

“transaction” to occur, the approach to the text must be
aesthetic rather than efferent.
• Example
“Death of a Salesman” by ArthurMiller (1949)

• Efferent “a play about a traveling salesman who kills himself so that his son
will receive his life insurance money.”
• Aesthetic “Willy Loman’s plight is powerfully evoked by the contrast between
his small house, bathed in soft blue light, and the large, orange colored
apartment buildings that surround it.”

Transactional Reader-Response
 Conclusion

Reader response theory is the best theory which makes the

reader and student to be active and to analysis a text by their.
In reader-response suggests that the role of the reader is
essential to the meaning of a text, for only in the reading
experience does the literary work come alive. Reader response
critics hold that to understand the literary experience of the
meaning of a text.