Reader Response Criticism
Reader Response Criticism is a critical theory. That emphasizes the reader’s participation in developing the meaning of a piece of literature.
Introduction
“Reader-response theory…maintains that what a text is cannot be isolated from what it does,” says Lois Tyson. The reader’s role cannot be ignored in our understanding of literature. And readers do not passively ingest the meaning supplied to them by an objective literary text” according to reader-response theorists. Texts do not interpret themselves, according to reader-response theorists.
Even if all of our argument for a particular interpretation began with the work itself. And if everybody who reads the text understands it in the same way, as unlikely as that may seem. We, the readers, are the ones who perform the interpreting and giving meaning to the text. Reader response criticism not only allows for. But even revels in, how these meanings shift from one reader to the next and over time.
Definition
A method of literary criticism and analysis. That emphasizes how readers participate actively in the construction of meaning in a book.
Goal
The goal of reader response criticism is to alter our perceptions of the text. The reader, and the process of meaning development.
Key idea
Reader Response Criticism is based on the premise that readers generate meaning rather than looking for it in a text. Without the reader doing their half of the labor to generate meaning, works of literature are always unfinished.
History
In the late 1960s, reader response criticism arose in Germany and the United States. Reader Response Criticism refers to literary criticism. That uses a reader-centered approach to textual analysis rather than a single theory or unified critical school. This critical movement arose as a response to the New Criticism. Which dominated American literary criticism from the 1940s until the 1970s. The idea that a text’s meaning is self-contained was challenged by Reader Response Criticism. It was argued that the meaning of a piece was instead produced by the readers’ responses to it. Reader Response Criticism, which arose in the 1960s, largely surpassed the Poststructuralist critical movement.
Cleanth Brooks, a proponent of the New Criticism, saw the text as an internally coherent, self-contained object, coining the term “affective fallacy” to describe the “error” of including the reader’s reaction in discussions of literary texts.
Instead, Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish argued that literary meaning could not be separated from the reader’s participation in the construction of meaning in a book. Iser questioned whether a text could ever be a self-contained unit of meaning, claiming that a text generates “blanks” or “gaps” which the reader must fill in; the reader, in this sense, fulfills a function in the process of generating textual meaning.
Approaches
:“Transactional” approach
Transactional reader-response theory examines the transaction between text and reader, and Louise Rosenblatt articulated many of its principles. Rosenblatt does not dismiss the value of the text in favor of the reader; rather, she asserts that both are required for the development of meaning. She distinguishes between the terms “text” and “reader,” which relate to the written words on the page, and “poetry,” which refers to the literary work created by the text and the reader together.
:”Historical context” approach
Reader response is influenced by historical context, and memories, tales, and people have less value without it. The details that surround an event are referred to as “historical context.” The social, religious, economic, and political conditions that prevailed at a certain period and location are referred to as the historical context. Essentially, it’s all the intricacies of the time and place in which a scenario happens, and it’s those elements that allow us to understand and evaluate works or events from the past, or even the future, rather than judging them just on the basis of modern norms.
:“Affective stylistics” approach
The text is scrutinized carefully, frequently line by line or even word by word, to determine how (in stylistics) it affects the reader during the reading process. Despite this concentration on the text, many practitioners of emotional stylistics do not regard the text as an objective, autonomous entity; it does not have a fixed meaning independent of readers since the text is made up of the effects it generates, which occur inside the reader.
:“Psychological” approach
Norman Holland, a psychoanalytic critic, argues that readers’ intentions have a significant impact on how they read. Despite his claim, at least in his early work, that an objective text exists (indeed, he calls his method transactive analysis because he believes that reading is a transaction between the reader and a real text), Holland is more interested in what readers’ interpretations reveal about themselves than in the text. He is frequently referred to as a subjective reader-response critic because of his assessments of readers’ subjective experiences. Many theorists conceive of Holland as a psychological reader-response critic since he uses psychoanalytic notions and focuses on readers’ psychological responses, which is probably the most appropriate way for us to think of him as well.
