READER-ORIENTED

CRITICISM
History, Assumptions, and Methodology
 Rhetorical Criticism- focusing on the ASSUMPTI
strategies, devices, and techniques authors
use to elicit a particular reaction or ONS
interpretation of a text.
 ‘Knowledge is made by
people, not found,’ according to
David Bleich (1978) ASSUMPTI
The reader is an active ONS
participant in the creation of
meaning.
TRANSACTIONAL
EXPERIENCE
The text acts as a stimulus The text shapes the reader's
for eliciting various past experiences by functioning as a
experiences, thoughts, and ideas blueprint, selecting, limiting, and
from the reader, those found in both ordering those ideas that best
our everyday existence and in past conform to the text.
reading experiences.
Reader + Text =Poem (Meaning)
ASSUMPTI
Poem is defined as the result of an event that ONS
takes place during the reading process, or
what Rosenblatt calls the "aesthetic
transaction."
 Efferent Reading
we are interested only in newly gained
information that we can "carry away" from
the text, not in the actual words as words ASSUMPTI
themselves.
ONS
Aesthetic Reading
we experience the text. We note its every
word, its sounds, its patterns, and so on. In
essence, we live through the transactional
experience of creating the poem.
ADHERENTS OF
READER-
ORIENTED
CRITICISM
Structuralism, Phenomenology, and Subjective Criticism
 The text has more control over the
interpretative process than does the reader
A reader brings to the text a predetermined
system for ascertaining meaning (a complex
system of signs or codes) and applies this sign STRUCTURALISM
system directly to the text.
The text becomes important because it
contains signs or signals to the reader that have
pre-established and acceptable interpretation.
 Both the text and the reader, they declare,
play somewhat equal parts in the interpretative
process. For them, reading is an event that
culminates in the creation of the poem.
Objects can have meaning only if an active PHENOMENOLOG
consciousness (a perceiver) absorbs or is conscious Y
of their existence.
When a reader and text transact, the poem
and, therefore, meaning are created; they exist
only in the consciousness of the reader.
 Third group of reader-oriented critics who
place the greatest emphasis on the reader in the SUBJECTI
interpretative process.
According to David Bleich, meaning does not
VE
reside in the text but is developed when the reader CRITICIS
works in cooperation with other readers to achieve
the text's collective meaning. M
Bleich differentiates between the reader's
responses to a text and the reader's interpretation
or meaning, which must be developed communally
in a classroom or similar setting.