Reader Response Theory

Dale Sullivan
dale.sullivan@ndsu.edu
There are no determinate meanings . . . the stability
of the text is an illusion.

Stanley A. Fish
I always control the text, not vice versa.

Norman N. Holland
Norman Holland

We theorists of literature used to think that a given story

or poem evoked some "correct" or at least widely shared response.
When, however, I began . . . to test this idea, I rather ruefully
found a much subtler and a more complex process at work. Each
person who reads a story, poem, or even a single word construes
it differently. These differences evidently stem from personality.

Reading and Identity

Norman Holland on Reading and Identity

For instance, these three [students] read this clause in

Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" describing Colonel
Saratoris: "he who fathered the edict that no Negro
woman should appear on the streets without an apron."

Sandra adjusted the phrase to just the amount of strength

she could identify with: "It's a great little touch of ironic
humor, I think [of] the voice in the story as meaning it
that way . . . Using these heroic terms to describe such a
petty and obvious extension of bigotry . . . It was such a
perfect undercutting of the heroic Colonel Sartoris."
Sebastian discovered an aristocratic, sexualized master-slave
relationship: "I react to the term `fathered' the edict . . . Fathering
the edict seems to in some way be fathering the women, to be
fathering that state of affairs. So it implied for me the sexual -
well [he laughed] - intercourse that took place between whites
and Negroes."

Saul, however, had to reduce the force and cruelty of

the original: "`Fathered' . . . is the word you're asking
about, I suspect . . . It means practically the same as
`sponsored,' I think. I don't know. Although I suppose
you could talk about paternalism . . . No one should
appear on the streets without an apron. That's just
identifying the servants . . . . That's a social thing."
Norman Holland’s Comments on Sandra’s Reading
I see Sandra bringing to this sentence both the general expectations
I think she has toward any other (that it will nurture or protect) and
also specific expectations toward Faulkner or the South or short
stories. She also brings to bear on the text what I regard as her
characteristic pattern of defensive and adaptive strategies
("defenses," for short) so as to shape the text until, to the degree
she needs that certainty, it is a setting in which she can gratify her
wishes and defeat her fears about closeness and distance: "a great
little touch." Sandra also endows the text with what I take to be her
characteristic fantasies, that is, her habitual wishes for some strong
person who will balance closeness, nuture, and strength, here, "the
voice in the story" which undercuts the bigot. Finally, as a social,
moral, and intellectual being, she gives the text a coherence and
significance that confirm her whole transaction of the clause. She
reads it ethically.
Holland on DEFTing:

These four terms, defense, expectation, fantasy, and transformation

(DEFT, for short) connect to more than clinical experience. One
can understand expectation as putting the literary work in the sequence
of a person's wishes in time, while transformation endows the work
with a meaning beyond time. Similarly, I learn of defenses as they
shape what the individual lets in from outside, while fantasies are what
I see the individual putting out from herself into the outside world.
Thus these four terms let me place a person's DEFTing at the
intersection of the axes of human experience, between time and
timelessness, between inner and outer reality.
A paraphrase of Holland’s theory:

In brief, Holland’s “transactive model of response” holds that

an individual’s reading experience is a reflection of her own
identity, for the reader (1) perceives the work in terms of her
own private expectations, (2) filters the text through those
expectations defensively, (3) imbues the text with clusters of
wishes or fantasies, and (4) transforms the text and the fantasies
into a coherent, self-identity theme.
 Louise M. Rosenblatt

The Reader, The Text,The Poem

Efferent & Aesthetic Readings

Louise Rosenblatt:
“. . . only a reader in aesthetic transaction with the text can
synthesize the parts into a ‘whole’ or structure which is a work
of art. The reader draws on his own reservoir or past life
experience; he has notions of what to expect of a novel or
poem or satire. But he has to use whatever he brings to the text
and build out of his responses to the patterned verbal cues a
unifying principle. The structure of the work of art corresponds
ultimately to what he perceives as the relationships that he has
woven among the various elements or parts of his lived-
through experience. Instead of thinking of the structure of the
work of art as something statically inherent in the text, we
need to recognize the dynamic situation in which the reader, in
the give-and-take with the text, senses or organizes a
relationship among the various parts of his lived-through
experience.”
 . . . the theories of the theory boom took the power of
meaning making away from the author (exclusively),
but only reader-response gave that power to any old reader.
At its most radical, for instance in the work of Bleich and Holland,
reader-response offered no principle for ruling any reading out.

Patricia Harkin
“The Reception of Reader-
Response Theory”