Reader response theory

Reader-response criticism is a 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 primarily on the
author or the content and form of the work.

It is a theory, which gained prominence in the late 1960s; it also focuses on the reader or audience
reaction to a particular text, perhaps more than the text itself. Reader-response criticism can be
connected to post structuralism’s emphasis on the role of the reader in actively constructing texts rather
than passively consuming them.

Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the
work and completes its meaning through interpretation.

Argument:

 Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each
reader creates their 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 New Critics.

 Rejecting the idea that there is a single, fixed meaning inherent in every literary work, this theory
holds that the individual creates his or her own meaning through a "transaction" with the text based
on personal associations. Because all readers bring their own emotions, concerns, life experiences,
and knowledge to their reading, each interpretation is subjective and unique. Similarly reader
interprets the text differently in different moods.

 Reader-response criticism argues that a text has no meaning before a reader experiences by reading
it. Text acts as a blue print, so both reader and text is important.

Reader-response critic

The reader-response critic’s job is to examine the scope and variety of reader reactions and analyze the
ways in which different readers, sometimes called “interpretive communities,” make meaning out of
both purely personal reactions and inherited or culturally conditioned ways of reading.

Types:

There are multiple approaches within the theoretical branch of reader-response criticism, yet all are
unified in their belief that the meaning of a text is derived from the reader through the reading process.
They are Transactional reader-response theory, subjective reader-response theory, Social reader-
response theory and Psychological reader-response theory.

Psychological reader-response theory

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.

In 1968, Norman Holland drew on psychoanalytic psychology in The Dynamics of Literary Response to
model the literary work. Each reader interjects 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.

Like in psychoanalytical theory dreams become source and here text becomes source to understand and
analyze the experiences. Moods and emotions can also come into this umbrella.

Impact on teaching literature

 Language arts teachers at all levels now widely accept central tenets of the theory, particularly the
notion that learning is a constructive and dynamic process in which students extract meaning from
texts through experiencing, hypothesizing, exploring, and synthesizing.
 Using reader response in the classroom can have a profound impact on how students view texts and
how they see their role as readers. Rather than relying on a teacher or critic to give them a single,
standard interpretation of a text, students learn to construct their own meaning by connecting the
textual material to issues in their lives and describing what they experience as they read. Because
there is no one "right" answer or "correct" interpretation, the diverse responses of individual
readers are key to discovering the variety of possible meanings a poem, story, essay, or other text
can evoke.
 Students in reader-response classrooms become active learners. Because their personal responses
are valued, they begin to see themselves as having both the authority and the responsibility to make
judgments about what they read.

Main point

 Literature is a performativity art and each reading is a performance. Literature exists only when it is
read; meaning is an event
 The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning. Literary meaning is created by the interaction
of the reader and the text.

 The theory is popular in both the United States and Germany; its main theorists include Stanley Fish,
David Bleich, and Wolfgang Iser