literary theory and criticism using reader response approach

1. Reader-response
Criticism

2. Transactional Reader-Response
Theory
►Louise Rosenblatt
►Analyzes the transaction between text
and reader—both are necessary in the
production of meaning

3. Transactional Reader-response Theory
TEXT- refers to the printed word on the page
READER
POEM- refers to the literary work produced
by the text and reader together

4. How does this transaction take place?
►Text acts as a stimulus to which we respond
in our own personal way (feelings,
associations, memories)
►Other factors: encounter with other texts;
accumulated knowledge; current physical
condition and mood

5. Transactional Reader-response Theory
►Text acts as a blueprint that can be used to
correct our interpretation
►Approach to the text must be AESTHETIC
rather than EFFERENT

6. Transactional Reader-response Theory
EFFERENT MODE- focus on the information
contained in the text; text as storehouse of
facts and ideas
AESTHETIC MODE-establish a personal
relationship with the text; focus on the
emotional subtleties of language; encourages
readers to make judgments

7. Efferent Mode
Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” is
a play about a traveling salesman who
kills himself so that his son will receive
his life insurance money.”

8. Aesthetic Mode
Willy Loman’s plight is powerfully
evoked by the contrast between his
small house, bathed in soft blue
light, and the large, orange-colored
apartment buildings that surround
it.

9. Wolfgang Iser’s Determinate and
Indeterminate Meaning
►Determinate Meaning- refers to the
facts of the text, certain events in the
plot or physical descriptions clearly
provided by the words on the page

10. Transactional Reader-response Theory
►Indeterminate Meaning- refers to gaps
in the text which allow/invite readers
to create their own interpretation
(e.g. actions that are not clearly
explained or seem to have multiple
explanations)

11. Death of a Salesman, Arthur
Miller
Determinate meaning- Willy habitually lies
to Linda about his success on the job, about
how well liked he is, and about his
importance/role in the company

12. Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
Indeterminate Meaning-how much Linda
knows about her husband’s career; at what
point she realizes the truth, and why she
doesn’t want Willy to tell her about her
shortcomings when he tries to do so

13. Transactional Reader-response Theory
►Interplay between determinate and
indeterminate meaning
►text allows a range of acceptable meanings
for which textual support is available

14. Transactional Reader-response Theory
►Not all readings are acceptable
►Authorial intention is one kind or reading or
interpretation

15. Transactional Reader-response Theory
►relies on the authority of the text, while
bringing the reader’s response into the
limelight
►accounts for the range of successful New
Critical readings despite their belief that
every text authorizes a single best reading

16. Affective Stylistics
►The text is examined closely, line by line,
word for word, in order to understand how
it (stylistics) affects (affective) the reader
in the process of reading.
►The text does not have a fixed meaning
independent of readers.

17. Affective Stylistics
►not a description of the reader’s
impressionistic responses but a cognitive
analysis of the mental processes produced
by specific elements in the text

18. Stanley Fish’s sample analysis
That Judas perished by hanging himself,
there is no certainty in Scripture; though in
one place it seems to affirm it, and by a
doubtful word hath given occasion to
translate it; yet in another place, in a more
punctual description, it maketh it
improbable, and seems to overthrow it.

19. Affective Stylistics
►The question “What does this sentence
mean” yields little because the sentence
provides no facts at all.
►The right question to ask: What does the
sentence do to the reader?

20. Affective Stylistics
►The passage moves the reader from
certainty to uncertainty.
►The meaning of the text consists of our
experience of what the text does to us as
we read it.

21. Affective Stylistics
►The text isn’t primarily about Judas or
Scripture but about the experience of
reading.
►“We must expect to have our expectation
of acquiring sure knowledge raised and
disappointed.”

22. Affective Stylistics
Evidence gathered to support the claim that the
text is about the experience of reading:
► Citing interpretations/readings of other critics,
especially those that differ from their own critical
opinions
► Thematic evidence from the text itself is
provided

23. Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darknes”
►The reader’s experience of uncertainty is
mirrored in Marlowe’s uncertainty—his
inability to interpret Kurtz—and in the
recurring references to darkness and
obscurity (metaphors for uncertainty; also
the book that Marlowe finds in the jungle
which he is unable to read.

24. Subjective Reader-response Theory
► There is no literary text beyond the meanings
created by readers’ interpretations.
► The critic analyzes the written responses of
readers and not the literary text.

25. Subjective Reader-response Theory
►Real objects- physical objects, such as
tables, chairs, cars, books, etc. The printed
pages of a literary text are real objects.
►Symbolic objects- occurs not in the
physical world but in the conceptual
world—in the mind of the reader.

26. Subjective Reader-response Theory
► READING (David Bleich)- the feelings,
associations, and memories that occur as we
react subjectively to the printed words on the
page
► SYMBOLIZATION- our perception and
identification of our reading experience that
creates a conceptual, or symbolic world in our
mind as we read

27. Subjective Reader-response Theory
►RESYMBOLIZATION- the act of interpreting
the meaning of our own symbolization;
experience of the text produces a desire
for explanation; evaluation of the text’s
quality(like or dislike)
►The only text is the text in the mind of the
reader.

28. Subjective Reader-response Theory
TRUTH is not an objective reality waiting to
be discovered; it is constructed by
communities of people to fulfill specific
historical, sociological, and psychological
situations.

29. Subjective Reader-response Theory
Bleich’s Procedure:
1. Write a response statement based on the
text.
2. Write an analysis of their own response
statement.

30. Subjective Reader-response Theory
►Response Statement (experience
oriented)- discuss the reader’s reaction to
the text, describing exactly how specific
passages made the reader feel, think, or
associate; may include judgments about
specific characters, events, etc.

31. Subjective Reader-response Theory
►Response statements are used within a
context determined by the group. The
group decides, based on the issues that
emerge from experience-oriented response
statements, what questions they want
answered and what topics they want to
pursue.

32. Subjective Reader-response Theory
Basic Parts of a Response Statement:
The reader
1. Characterizes his or her response to the text as a
whole
2. Identifies the various responses prompted by
different aspects of the text
3. Determines why these responses occurred

33. Psychological Reader-Response
► Norman Holland- focuses on what readers’
interpretations reveal about themselves, not
about the text; employs psychoanalytic concepts
► “The situations that cause my defenses to emerge
in my interpersonal life will cause my defenses to
emerge when I read.”

34. Psychological Reader-Response
► The immediate goal of interpretation is to fulfill
our psychological needs and desires.
► E.g., the reader identifies with the aggressor,
rather than with the victim, and temporarily
relieves his/her psychological pain; or the reader
denies/minimizes the victim’s pain in order to
deny her own.

35. Psychological Reader-Response
► IDENTITY THEME- the pattern of our
psychological conflicts and coping strategies
► Our interpretations of the text are a product of
the fears, defenses, needs, and desires we
project onto the text. E.g., Pecola as the
representative of self-destructive human frailty or
as a representative of spiritual innocence

36. Psychological Reader-Response
Three Stages of Reading:
1. Defense Mode- our psychological defenses are
raised by the text(Pecola as a threat because she
reminds us of our own victimization)
2. Fantasy Mode- we find a way to interpret the
text that will tranquilize those defenses (we
minimize Pecola’s pain by focusing on her
childlike innocence

37. Psychological Reader-Response
3. Transformation Mode- we transform the first two
steps into an abstract interpretation to avoid an
emotional response to it. (We decide that Pecola
represents spiritual innocence)
► Valuable for therapeutic psychological knowledge
► Can be used as a biographical tool to study the author
(discovering his/her identity theme)

38. Social Reader-response Theory
► What we consider as our purely individual
subjective response is actually a product of the
interpretative community to which we belong.
► INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITY- those who share the
interpretative strategies we bring to texts when
we read which results from various institutional
assumptions about what makes a text a piece of
literature and what meanings we are supposed to
find in it.

39. Social Reader-response Theory
► Readers can belong consciously or unconsciously
to more than one community at the same time, or
they can change from one community to another
at different times in their lives.
► Every literary judgment we make, including what
makes a poem a poem, results from the
interpretive strategies we bring with us when we
read the text.

40. Defining Readers
► Informed Reader/Ideal Reader/Optimal
Reader/Educated Reader- the reader who has
attained the literary competence necessary to
experience the text in the fullness of its linguistic
and literary complexity, and who tries to suppress
the personal or idiosyncratic dimension of his or
her response.

41. Defining Readers
► Implied Reader/Intended Reader/Narratee- the
reader that the text seems to be addressing,
whose characteristics we can deduce by studying
the style in which the text is written and the
apparent “attitude” of the narrative toward the
reader.

42. Questions Reader-response Critics Ask
About Literary Texts
1. How does the interaction of text and
reader create meaning? How, exactly does
the text’s indeterminacy function as a
stimulus to interpretation? (for
example,omitted/unexplained events;
omitted/incomplete descriptions; images
with multiple associations)

43. 2. What does a phrase-by-phrase analysis of a
short literary text, or of key portions of a
longer literary text, tell us about the reading
experience prestructured (built into) that
text? How does this analysis of what the text
does to the reader differ from what the text
says or means?

44. 3. Drawing on a broad spectrum of thoroughly
documented biographical data, what seems
to be a given author’s identity theme, and
how does that theme express itself in the
sum of his/her literary output? Or using your
own interpretation of a literary work to
which you respond strongly, see if you can
identify what might be your own identity
theme.

45. 4. What does the body of criticism published about
a literary text during a given time period suggest
about the social assumptions of the critics who
interpreted that text. In other words, what social
beliefs—about morality, women, children, religion,
and about the purpose and value of literature—seem
to have influenced the ways in which the literary
critics responded to a particular literary text?

46. 5. How might we interpret the literary text
to show that the reader’s response is, or is
analogous to, the topic of the story? In other
words, how is the text really about readers
reading, and what exactly does it tell us
about this topic? How is a particular reading
experience an important theme in the text?

47. Projecting the Reader: A Reader-response
Analysis of the ‘The Great Gatsby’
► The meaning of the novel is largely a product of
our own beliefs and desires, which the tale’s
indeterminacy invites us to project.
► The novel dramatizes the theory’s concept of
reading as the making of meaning.

48. Projecting the Reader: A Reader-response
Analysis of the ‘The Great Gatsby’
► Reading Experience Formula:
PROJECTION + DATA GATHERED = CONFIRMATION OF
PROJECTION

49. Projecting the Reader: A Reader-response
Analysis of the ‘The Great Gatsby’
Two Opposing Interpretations of Gatsby:
1. Gatsby, the criminal
2. Gatsby, the romantic hero

50. Projecting the Reader: A Reader-response
Analysis of the ‘The Great Gatsby’
► Most critics who idealize Gatsby also idealize
what they see as America’s uncorrupted past,
which they believe Gatsby represents.
► The power of reader’s projection is foregrounded,
both in terms of thematic content and in the
active reading experience the text promotes.