Reader Response Theory

Reader Response TheoryLiterature is a performative art and each reading is a performance, analogous to playing/singing a musical work, enacting a drama, etc. Literature exists only when it is read; meaning is an eventThe literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning or value; there is no one "correct" meaning. Literary meaning and value are "transactional," "dialogic," created by the interaction of the reader and the text. Historical DevelopmentRRC emerges as a form of literary analysis in the 1970s, and remains a powerful force in the academy. However, critics have long been interested in the relationship between readers and literary texts.1. Plato and Aristotle-- The reader as Passive Agent. Looks at the effect of the literary work on the reader or audience.Rhetorical Criticism-- One of the earliest forms of language study and literary criticism. The study of how language (written and spoken) shapes or affects readers/audience. Looks at techniques for moving or persuading an audience or reader. Historical Development2. Romanticism (Wordsworth)-- Emphasis on the Author. The author is the locus of meaning and interpretation. The text is an extension or expression of the author's thoughts and feelings.3. Textual Emphasis (New Criticism)-- The text reveals its own meaning. The emphasis on the objective nature of the text creates a passive reader who is not allowed to bring personal experiences or private emotions to bear on textual analysis. To do so is to create the affective fallacy.Historical DevelopmentLouise Rosenblatt (Literature as Exploration, 1937). One of the first theoretical works outlining a reader-oriented approach to the study and analysis of literature. Both the reader and the text work together to produce meaning. They are partners in the interpretive process.Both the reader and the text share a transactional experience. The text acts as a stimulus for eliciting various past experiences, thoughts and ideas from the reader. At the same time, the text SHAPES the reader's experiences, selecting, limiting, and ordering the ideas that best conform to the text.Historical DevelopmentThrough the transactional process the reader and the text produce a new creation or poem. The text is now defined as an EVENT (or Literary Experience) that takes place and is created during the process of reading and interpretation. A new poem or literary work is created each time a reader interacts with a text.Readers can read in two different ways: a. Efferent Reading-- Reading that is only interested in gaining factual information. b. Aesthetic Reading-- Reading that engages and experiences the text or reading that pays attention to its use of language, sounds, form and meaning.Methods or ApproachesThere are three major areas which exist along a continuum and tend to differ in the emphasis they place on the text and/or the reader in the interpretive process.

I. Emphasis on the Text--Includes such critical fields as structuralism, formalism, narratology, and rhetorical criticism.While they believe that the reader must be an active participant in the creation of meaning, they assert that the text has primary control over the interpretive process.Distinguish between a text's meaning and its significance.

Look for specific codes or signs embedded in a text that allow for meaning to occur. Often these codes are part of an overall system of meaning that a society has developed to give meaning or structure to existence.

Methods or ApproachesNarratology-- The process of analyzing a story, examining all of the elements involved in its creation, such as narrator, genre, and audience.

Narratology often focuses on the narrator, attempting to identify who the narrator is and the narrator's relationship to the author, readers of the text, and the text's overall meaning. How does the narrator shape our reading and interpretation of the story?Often such analysis focuses on the narratee, the person to whom the narrator is speaking. Such narratees might include the real reader, the virtual reader, or the ideal readerMethods or ApproachesII. Emphasis on the interaction between reader and textPhenomenology-- the modern philosophical study that emphasizes the role of the perceiver in determining questions of knowledge, existence, and meaning. Objects can have meaning only if an active consciousness (a perceiver) absorbs or notes their existence. From this perspective a literary work only exists in the mind or consciousness of the reader, not on the printed page. When the text and the reader interact, the real work and its meaning are created. The process is therefore aesthetic, an experience of art.

Hans Robert Jauss-- Reception Theory and Horizons of Expectation

Wolfgang Iser-- The Implied Reader vs. The Actual ReaderMethods or ApproachesIII. Emphasis on the Reader (Subjective Criticism)For critics like Norman Holland, all interpretations of a text are subjective, the work of the reader's imagination and experiences. While the text is indeed important, the reader transforms the text into a private world, a place where s/he works out private experiences, fantasies and desires. It is essentially a psychological experience.

Other subjective critics like David Bleich and Stanley Fish will emphasize the communal or collective meaning of a literary work. Meaning does not reside in the text but is developed when the reader works in cooperation with other readers to achieve meaning. The key to developing a text's meaning is working out our responses so that they can be challenged, amended, and accepted by one's social group. Fish calls these groups our interpretive communities.From Work to TextBy Roland BarthesIntroduction

Language change is due to current developments(linguistics, anthropology, marxism, psychoanalysis)

Barthes argues that the relation of writer, reader and observer is changed by movement from work to text. In this light, we can observe Barthes's propositions of the differences between work and text in terms of method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading, and pleasure. From Work to TextBarthes propositions:

The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed.

It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts. Besides, the tendency to say that the work is classic and the text is avant-garde must be avoided. Barthes implies that there is a concrete quality to some writing, which identifies it as a text and not as a work.1D: the work is a fragment of substance, the Text is a methodological field2D: the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language3D: the text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the text

From Work to TextBarthes propositions:

II. In the same way, the Text does not stop at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres.

What constitutes the text is its subversive force with regard to old classifications. The text poses problems of classification because it always involves a certain experience of limits. The text tries to place itself very exactly behind the limit of genres all literary texts are woven out of other literary texts. There is no literary 'originality': all literature is 'intertextual' and paradoxical. From Work to TextBarthes propositions:

III. The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign.

The work itself functions as a general sign and it is normal that it should represent an institutional category of the civilization of the Sign. The text, on the contrary, practices the infinite deferment of the signified. The infinity of the signifier refers to some idea of a playing to play with the disconnections, overlappings, and variations between signifier and signified.

In this respect, the work is moderately symbolic and the text is radically symbolic, filled with symbolic nature like language, it is structured but off-centered, without closure. From Work to TextBarthes propositions:

IV. The Text is plural.

It accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible plurality, which answers not to an interpretation but to an explosion, a dissemination.

The plurality of the text depends not on the ambiguity of its contents but on the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifier. The weave of signifiers in the Text reveals a complex network of sign (citations, references, echoes, cultural languages) in this extent, no sign is ever 'pure' or 'fully meaningful'.

So the Text can be itself only in its differences, not monistic determination. From Work to TextV. The work is caught up in a process of filiation.

According to Barthes, literary science teaches us two things i.e. to respect for the work and to respect the authors declared intentions (the law/his copyright) therefore if we respect or admire the work we must also respect its author.

The text can be read without the inscription of the author who is refuted the father and the owner of his work. Hence, no vital respect is due to the text because text can be broken and read without the guarantee of its father. The author who exists in his text is only as a textual element or factor. He is merely a symbol of the function at the level of the work.

The biography of the author is merely another text, which does not indicate any privilege it is the language, which speaks in the Text, not the author himself. Also, it is the reader who focuses the multiplicity of the text, not the author. From Work to TextVI. The work is normally the object of a consumption

We focus on the quality of the work rather than reading a text as a process. On the occasion as we focus on the reading as a process, we create text. We cannot consume the text, we can only play with it.

Reading is the consumption of the work, not that of the text. In this light, the text itself plays and the reader plays twice over through reading the text asks of the reader a practical collaboration, then it becomes writable.

The radical fundamentality of text is that text is the practice; it actively plays the volume. From Work to TextVII. The final approach to the Text is pleasure.

According to Barthes, there exists a pleasure of certain works but this pleasure is in the level of consumption (passive).

As for the text, the pleasure is bound to jouissance or the pleasure without separation. That is, the Text is a space of social utopia, which transcends social relations (author, reader, critic) and language relations (no language has a hold over any other). From Work to TextAt the end of his essay, he again insists that his "few propositions" do not constitute the articulations of a Theory of the Text and fail to form a meta-language, which would dictate how a text should be read. The theory of the Text is nothing but practice.Thank You!