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Reader-Response Criticism

Reader-response criticism does not designate any critical

theory, but it refers to a focus on the process of reading literary texts,
which has come into prominence since the 1960s. Reader-response
critics turn from the traditional conception that a text embodies an
achieved set of meanings, and focus instead on the ongoing mental
operations and responses of readers as their eyes follow a text on the
page before them.1

Reader-response critics believe that the meanings of a literary

text is the production of the individual reader, and hence there is no
one correct meaning for a text. In other words, what is central to
reader-response criticism is the notion that 'the text does not make
meaning, but readers who make meaning'. That is, once the author
finishes the text and gives it to readers, the author has no control
over the text, the text will have life of its own which is given through
its readers.2

Nonetheless, the work of Reader-response criticism is based on

the works of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938),
who presents the notion of 'phenomenology'. 'Phenomenology' refers
to the study of 'phenomena', and the Greek word 'phenomenon'
means 'that which appears'. According to Edmund Husserl, cited in
Raman Selden's (1989) Practicing Theory and Reading Literature:
An Introduction, the only thing that one can be certain of is his own
consciousness of the world. That is, one cannot say any
philosophical certitude of objects that exist outside his own mind,
but one can say that objects appear to his own consciousness.
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Husserl argues that consciousness of the world is not a passive

accepting of the existence of things, but rather an active forming and
intending of the world. All objects are intentional objects. It follows
that the individual consciousness is the only source of the
understanding of the world.3

Further, the German critic Wolfgang Iser has developed the

'phenomenological' analysis of the reading process. In Iser's view,
cited in M. H. Abrams & Geoffrey Galt Harpham's (2009) A
Glossary of Literary Terms, the literary text, as a product of the
writer's intentional acts, in part controls the reader's responses, but
contains, to a degree, a number of gaps or indeterminate elements.
These elements the reader must fill in by a creative participation
with what is given in the text before him. Therefore, the experience
of reading becomes an "evolving process of anticipation, frustration,
retrospection, reconstruction, and satisfaction." 4

Iser also distinguishes between two types of readers. That is,

there is, on one hand, the 'implied reader', who is established by a
particular text itself as someone who is expected to respond in a
specific way to the response-inviting structures of the text. On the
other hand, there is 'actual reader', whose responses are inevitably
coloured by his or her accumulated private experiences. However, in
both cases the process of the reader's consciousness serves to
constitute both the partial patterns and the coherence of the text as a
whole. As a consequence, literary texts always permit a varied range
of possible meanings. However, "the author's intentional acts
establish limits, as well as incentives, to the reader's creative
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additions to a text which help rejecting some readings as

misreading." 5

It follows that Reader-response criticism is not a conceptually

unified critical position, but a term that has come to be associated
with the work of critics who use the words 'reader', 'the reading
process' and 'response' to mark out an area of investigation. In the
context of Anglo-American criticism it arises in direct opposition to
Anglo-American critical dictum issued by Wimsatt and Breadsley's
(1949) ''The Affective Fallacy''. That is, Reader-response critics
argue that a poem cannot be understood apart from its results. 6

The so-called Geneva School of critics, which included the

Swiss writers Jean Rousset and Jean Starobinski, the French Jean-
Pierre Richard, and the American J. Hillis Miller, applied Husserl's
form of phenomenology to literary criticism. These critics consider
the literary text the site of an authentic consciousness. That is, a
poem expresses the way a writer subjectively experiences the world
as an object of consciousness which is embodied in the poem, not
the things to which it could be related.7

To sum up, at the very center of this trend of criticism is the

assumption that the features of the literary work itself (including
narrator, plot, characters, style, and structure, as well as meanings)
are dissolved into an evolving process, consisting primarily of divers
expectations, and the violations, deferments, satisfactions, and
restructurings of expectations, in the flow of a reader's experience.8
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However, in analyzing Robert Frost's "All Revelation", one can

have access to the poet's consciousness about 'Revelation'. That is, in
the first stanza, the poet presents the image of getting one's head into
something for the sake of having view:

A head thrusts in as for the view,

But where it is it thrusts in from
Or what it is it thrusts into
By that Cyb’laean avenue,
And what can of its coming come,

Here, "Cyb'laean avenue" refers to the goddess of earth in its

primitive state, of caverns, nature, and fertility. Therefore the poet
tries to have a peak into the divine world, rather than to wait the
revelation from the divinity to come.

The first line in the second stanza the poet raises the questions
of the withdrawal, " And whither it will be withdrawn," of the head,
and showing the fruitlessness of this thrusting in the second line of
the same stanza: "And what take hence or leave behind."

Then, the poet concludes that Revelation is something achieved

through one's mind: "These things the mind has pondered on/ A
moment and still asking gone." This conclusion ends with an
exclamatory gesture: "Strange apparition of the mind!" This line
shows an epiphanic moment within the course of searching for
revelation.9
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In the third stanza, "impervious geode" seems to refer back to

the head which "Was entered and its inner crust/ Of crystals with a
ray cathode." It is as if the epiphany of the inquiry causes

At every point and facet glowed

In answered to the mental thrust.

At the end of this poem, Robert Frost declares that " All
revelation has been ours." Therefore, readers realize that Revelation
comes from within rather than from divine or outside, as commonly
supposed.

Poirier, cuted in Nancy Lewis Tuten and John Zubizarreta's

(2001) The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, suggests that "All
Revelation" concerns "man's efforts to penetrate the stuff of life, to
discover life through the pleasure of genitalia, the probing of
science, or the faculties of vision." 10

Jay Parini, cited in John H. Timmerman's (2002) Robert Frost:

The Ethics of Ambiguity, says that Forst's poems would live on that
perilous fault line between skepticism and faith. At times these
contrarieties would merge in moments of complicated, synthetic
vision, as in "All Revelation." 11
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Notes

1
M. H. Abrams & Geoffrey Galt Harpham (2009), A Glossary
of Literary Terms, Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, P: 299.

2
Robert M. Fowler (1991), Let the Reader Understand:
Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark, Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, P: 26.

3
Raman Selden (1989), Practicing Theory and Reading
Literature: An Introduction, Hertfordshire: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, p: 103.
4
Abrams & Harpham, P: 299.

5
Ibid.: 300
6
Jane P. Tompkins (1980), Reader-Response Criticism: From
Formalism to the Post-Structuralism, London: John Hopkins
University Press, P: ix.

7
Selden, P: 104.
8
Abrams & Harpham, P: 299.

9
Deirdre Fagan (2007), Robert Frost: A Literary Reference to
His Life and Work, New York: Infobase Publishing, P: 27.

10
Nancy Lewis Tuten and John Zubizarreta's (2001) The Robert
Frost Encyclopedia, New York: Greenwood Press, P: 7.

11
John H. Timmerman's (2002) Robert Frost: The Ethics of
Ambiguity, London: Associated University Presses, P: 141.