Why We Read:
Very popular in the 80s (but part of a long, long attention to readers, going back to ancient rhetoric), reader-response or "reception theory" argues against the text-centered criticism of formalism. Literature is not an object, but an experience, a text always in the making. As Leitch explains, "the meaning of the work, therefore, [is] to be encountered in the experience of it, not in the detritus left after the experience. Literature [is] process, not product." These premises should also remind us of Roland Barthes who observes that "a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations to dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost: a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." And Jane Tompkins explains it this way: "Reader-response critics would argue that a poem cannot be understood apart from its results. Its 'effects,' psychological and otherwise, are essential to any accurate description of its meaning, since that meaning has no effective existence outside its realization in the mind of a reader."
There is a wide range of reader-oriented theories, for one could say that we could take many literary theories and focus on the reader's contribution. However, there are at least two key premises that help us group reader- response critics: First, the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature. Second, readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather, they actively make the meaning they find in literature.
What We Read:
Any "text" (anything "readable") is fair game, but one could also say that reader response critics are keenly interested in how others have made sense of texts. Tompkins again reminds us that reception theory "examines author's attitudes toward their readers, the kind of readers various texts seem to imply, the role actual readers play in the determination of literary meaning, the relation of reading conventions to textual interpretation, and the status of the reader's self."
How We Read:
I'm not ambitious enough to explain all the various reader-response methodologies (but I will become that ambitious soon enough), but you can begin by focusing on a couple key issues.
(1) Look again at the general tasks cited by Tompkins above.
(2) Keep in mind that there are "implied authors" (the "author" the reader constructs as she reads a text) and "implied readers" (the "reader" an author or text writes for but also constructs). One could say that the text presents us with a role to play, and if we play that role perfectly, then we will completely "understand" the text. But we have to ask at this point, what does it mean to "play the role perfectly"? What are the ethics and implications of responding to or identifying with the role an author posits for us? (i.e. "What happens when we are asked to identify with characters who threaten us? (i.e. Imagine a text that asks female readers to sympathize with a rapist. What are the issues? the implications?)) How and why do we resist the roles created for us? (These questions have profound implications for teachers because they ask students to play a role for them everyday.) And why do readers construct the kind of "implied author" that they do? What features in the text help contribute to that "implied author"?
(3) Remember that "different readers come up with different acceptable interpretations because the text allows for a range of acceptable meanings, that
is, a range of meanings for which textual support is available. However,
because there is a real text involved in this process to which we must refer to justify or modify our responses, not all readings are acceptable and some are more so than others." Your task as a reader, then, is to map out the possibilities and impossibilities of meaning.
(4) Focus on Stanley Fish's notion of "interpretive communities" which are made up of "readers who share interpretive strategies for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as it usually assumed, the other way around." Fish also explains that "each community of interpreters deciphered texts in the manner demanded by its interpretive strategies." This observation should remind us of deconstruction and structuralism in that how we read determines what we see. This is a more socially and ideologically-oriented aspect of reader response. How are readers taught to see? Try to account for why certain parts of the text come alive for some readers but not for others. As Fish puts it, "the obviousness of the utterance's meaning is not a function of the values its words have in a linguistic system that is independent of context rather, it is because the words are heard as already embedded in a context that they have a meaning that some readers can then cite as obvious." (i.e. The racism in Disney's The Jungle Book is "obvious" to me, but not for some of my students. Why do I see it but they don't?) Put in more esoteric language, these kinds of reader-response critics are interested in the "systems of constraints controlling interpretive activity and with the communally based rationality engendering predicable interpretations." Therefore, one can identify reading patterns among different groups. (i.e. When we look at the Columbine massacre, it's "obvious" to some that the killings were a result of poor parenting, or violent video games, or mean peers, or lack of spiritual guidance, or poor security, or glamorization of Nazi iconography, etc. The reader-response critic is keenly aware that these "answers" reveal more about the reader and the "interpretive community" that the reader is part of than about the killings themselves. There are no such thing as "personal" or purely subjective responses, for all responses are informed by public codes or interpretive communities. ) So, your task is to discuss the ideology, the codes, objectives, purposes, etc. of the interpretive community itself.
(5) Analyze how the text affects the reader in the process of reading (you are essentially linking style with effect and affect). Produce a cognitive analysis of the mental processes produced by specific elements in the text. Map the pattern by which a text structures the reader's response while reading.
(6) Try these questions suggested by Lois Tyson:
How does the interaction of text and reader creative meaning? How, exactly, does the text's indeterminacy function as a stimulus to interpretation? (i.e. What events are omitted or unexplained? What descriptions are omitted or incomplete? What images might have multiple associations?) And how, exactly, does the text lead us to correct our interpretation as we read?
What does a phrase-by-phrase analysis of a short literary text, or of key portions of a longer text, tell us about the reading experience prestructured by (built into) that text? How does this analysis of what the text does to the reader differ from what the text "says" or "means"? In other words, how might the omission of the temporal experience of reading this text result in an incomplete idea of the text's meaning?
How might we interpret a 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? To simplify, how is a particular kind of reading experience an important theme in the text?
What does the body of criticism published about a literary text suggest about the critics who interpreted that text and/or about the reading experience produced by that text? What does your analysis suggest about the ways in which the text is created by readers' interpretive strategies or by their psychological or ideological projections?
