Reader-response criticism
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In literary criticism, reader-response criticism focuses on the reader or audience and their experience of a literary work.
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[edit] Relation to other criticism
Much more of literary criticism and theory has a reader-response element than people admit. Any literary theory that talks about how we feel as we read a literary work, what literature aims to do, how literature affects us morally, or how we perceive the world described by the writer is necessarily saying something about the literary experience. Both Plato, in banning poets from his Republic, and his opposites, those who assert that literature makes us more moral or wise, are making assumptions about responses to literature. Aristotle's catharsis, Longinus' sublime, and modern concepts like Bertolt Brecht's alienation-effect or the Russian Formalists' "defamiliarization" or "cultural criticism" all predicate things about the experience of literature. One could argue that literary theory always involves a model of the literary experience, even if critics and theorists do not spell it out (as with New criticism and postmodern criticism).
Reader-response criticism is a group of approaches to understanding literature that explicitly emphasizes the reader's role in creating the meaning and experience of a literary work. More specifically, reader-response criticism refers to a group of critics who study, not a literary work, but readers or audiences responding to a literary work. This school emerged in the 1960s and '70s, particularly in America and Germany, in work by Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, and others. Important predecessors were I. A. Richards, who in 1929 analyzed a group of Cambridge undergraduates' misreadings, and Louise Rosenblatt who, in Literature as Exploration (1938), argued that it is important for the teacher to avoid imposing any "preconceived notions about the proper way to react to any work."
Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and the New Criticism, in which the reader's role in re-creating literary works is ignored. New Criticism had emphasized that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text. No appeal to the authority or intention of the author, nor to the psychology of the reader, was allowed in the discussions of orthodox New Critics. The New Critics' position assumed an objective, fixed text that could be studied apart from any human, and this assumption persisted even into postmodern criticism.
An early obstacle to a reader-response approach came from W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley who in 1954 attacked the "affective fallacy." They argued that to evaluate a literary work in terms of its emotional effect was to confuse the literary work with its result. They thus assumed an "objective" text, separate from its reader but entailing certain appropriate responses. The "affective fallacy" and the objective text became theoretical cornerstones of New Criticism.
[edit] Kinds of reader-response criticism
One can sort reader-response theorists into three groups: those who focus upon the individual reader's experience; those who conduct psychological experiments on a defined set of readers; and those who assume a fairly uniform response by all readers. One can therefore draw a distinction between reader-response theorists who see the individual reader driving the whole experience and others who think of literary experience as largely text-driven and uniform (with individual variations that can be ignored). The former, who think the reader controls, derive what is common in a literary experience from shared techniques for reading and interpreting which are, however, individually applied by different readers. The latter, who put the text in control, derive commonalities of response, obviously, from the literary work itself. The most fundamental difference among reader-response critics is probably, then, between those who regard individual differences among readers' responses as important and those who try to get around them.
[edit] Individualists
David Bleich had begun in the 1960s collecting statements by students of their feelings and associations. He used these both to theorize about the reading process and to refocus the classroom teaching of literature. He claimed that his classes "generated" knowledge, that is, knowledge of how particular persons recreate texts. Michael Steig and Walter Slatoff have, like Bleich, shown that students' highly personal responses can provide the basis for critical analyses in the classroom. Jeffrey Berman has encouraged students responding to texts to write anonymously and share with their classmates writings in response to literary works about sensitive subjects like drugs, suicidal thoughts, death in the family, parental abuse and the like. A kind of catharsis bordering on therapy results. In general, American reader-response critics have focused on individual readers' responses. American journals like Reader, Reading Research Quarterly, and others publish articles applying reader-response theory to the teaching of literature.
In 1965, C.S. Lewis published An Experiment in Criticism, in which he analyzed the reader's role in selecting literature. He analyzed their selections in light of their goals in reading.
In 1967, Stanley Fish published the first study (Surprised by Sin) of a large literary work, Paradise Lost focused on its readers' experience. In an appendix, "Literature in the Reader," Fish used "the" reader to examine responses to complex sentences sequentially, word-by-word. Since 1976, however, he has turned to real differences among real readers. He explores the reading tactics endorsed by different critical schools, by the literary professoriate, and by the legal profession, introducing the idea of "interpretive communities" that share particular modes of reading.
In 1968, Norman Holland drew on psychoanalytic psychology in The Dynamics of Literary Response to model the literary work. Each reader introjects a fantasy "in" the text, then modifies it by defense mechanisms into an interpretation. In 1973, however, having recorded responses from real readers, Holland found variations too great to fit this model in which responses are mostly alike but show minor individual variations.
Holland then developed a second model based on his case studies 5 Readers Reading. An individual has (in the brain) a core identity theme (behaviors then becoming understandable as a theme and variations as in music). This core gives that individual a certain style of being--and reading. Each reader uses the physical literary work plus invariable codes (such as the shapes of letters) plus variable canons (different "interpretive communities," for example) plus an individual style of reading to build a response both like and unlike other readers' responses. Holland worked with others at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Murray Schwartz, David Willbern, and Robert Rogers, to develop a particular teaching format, the "Delphi seminar," designed to get students to "know themselves."
[edit] Experimenters
Reuven Tsur in Israel has developed in great detail models for the expressivity of poetic rhythms, of metaphor, and of word- sound in poetry (including different actors' readings of a single line of Shakespeare). Richard Gerrig in the U.S. has experimented with the reader's state of mind during and after a literary experience. He has shown how readers put aside ordinary knowledge and values while they read, treating, for example, criminals as heroes. He has also investigated how readers accept, while reading, improbable or fantastic things (Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief"), but discard them after they have finished. In Canada, David Miall, usually working with Donald Kuiken has produced a large body of work exploring emotional or "affective" responses to literature, drawing on such concepts from ordinary criticism as "defamiliarization" or "foregrounding." They have used both experiments and new developments in neuropsychology; they have developed a questionnaire for measuring different aspects of a reader's response. There are many other experimental psychologists around the world exploring readers' responses, conducting many detailed experiments. One can research their work through their professional organizations, the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media, and International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, and through such psychological indices as PSYCINFO.
[edit] Uniformists
Wolfgang Iser exemplifies the German tendency to theorize the reader and so posit a uniform response. For him, a literary work is not an object in itself but an effect to be explained. But he asserts this response is controlled by the text. For the "real" reader, he substitutes an implied reader, who is the reader a given literary work requires. Within various polarities created by the text, this "implied" reader makes expectations, meanings, and the unstated details of characters and settings through a "wandering viewpoint." In his model, the text controls. The reader's activities are confined within limits set by the literary work.
Another important German reader-response critic was Hans-Robert Jauss, who defined literature as a dialectic process of production and reception (Rezeption--the term common in Germany for "response"). For Jauss, readers have a certain mental set, a "horizon" of expectations (Erwartungshorizont), from which perspective each reader at any given time in history, reads. Reader-response criticism establishes these horizons of expectation by reading literary works of the period in question.
Both Iser and Jauss, and the Constance School they exemplify, return reader-response criticism to a study of the text by defining readers in terms of the text. In the same way, Gerald Prince posits a "narratee" and Michael Riffaterre posits a "superreader" and Stanley Fish an "informed reader." And many text-oriented critics simply speak of "the" reader who typifies all readers.
[edit] Objections
Reader-response critics hold that, to understand the literary experience or the meaning of a text, one must look to the processes readers use to create that meaning and experience. Traditional, text-oriented critics often think of reader-response criticism as an anarchic subjectivism, allowing readers to interpret a text any way they want. They accuse reader-response critics of saying the text doesn't exist. (In fact, reader-response critics are only saying that to explore someone's literary experience, one must ask the someone, not pore over the text.) By contrast, text-oriented critics assume that one can understand a text immune to one's own culture, status, personality, and so on, and hence "objectively."
To the reader-response critic, however, reading is always both subjective and objective, and their question is not which but how. Some reader-response critics (uniformists) assume a bi-active model of reading: the literary work controls part of the response and the reader controls part. Others, who see that position as internally contradictory, claim that the reader controls the whole transaction (individualists). In such a reader-active model, readers and audiences use amateur or professional procedures for reading (shared by many others) as well as their personal issues and values.
[edit] Extensions
Reader-response criticism relates to psychology, both experimental psychology for those attempting to find principles of response and psychoanalytic psychology for those studying individual responses. Post-behaviorist psychologists of reading and of perception support the idea that it is the reader who makes meaning. Increasingly, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and neuropsychoananalysis have given reader-response critics powerful and detailed models for the aesthetic process.
Because it rests on psychological principles, a reader-response approach readily generalizes to other arts: cinema (David Bordwell) or visual art (E. H. Gombrich) and even to history (Hayden White). In stressing the activity of the scholar, reader-response theory justifies such upsettings of traditional interpretations as, for example, deconstruction or cultural criticism.
Since reader-response critics focus on the strategies readers are taught to use, they address the teaching of reading and literature. Also, because reader-response criticism stresses the activity of the reader, reader-response critics readily share the concerns of feminist critics and critics writing on behalf of gays, ethnic minorities, or post-colonial peoples.
