Reader Response Criticism

An approach to literary criticism and analysis that focuses on how readers are actively
engaged in the creation of meaning in a text.
The key idea of Reader Response Criticism is that readers create meaning rather than
find it in a text. Works of literature are always incomplete without a reader to put in
their half of the work to create meaning.

This is the starting point for all Reader Response critics. However, from this point, they
often disagree on whether there are valid and invalid interpretations and the extent to
which a text shapes the reader's responses to the text.

Context and History of Reader Response Criticism

Reader Response Criticism emerged in Germany and the United States in the late 1960s.
Reader Response Criticism does not refer to a specific theory or to a unified critical
school, but to literary criticism that takes a reader-based approach to textual analysis.

This critical movement emerged as a challenge to New Criticism, a movement that

dominated American literary criticism during the 1940s-1970s period.

Key Ideas of Reader Response Criticism with Examples

Reader response criticism is all about changing our perceptions of the text, the reader
and the creation of meaning. Meaning is created in the interaction between reader and
text.

The Reader

Reader Response Criticism focuses on the reader's psychological experience of reading a

text, and how the reader creates meaning from what the text has given them as they
read.
While this approach sees readers as creating their own, unique meanings, that is not to
say that they can come up with any random interpretation; interpretations always need
to have textual support. The reader must create meaning out of what the text has given
them; for example, through language, structure, etc.

The text cannot be ignored. If there is a scene or device in a text that contradicts your
interpretation of it, you must still consider how this scene or element fits into your
interpretation, even if this means need to reconsider the text's personal meaning to you.
Implied Reader
The term 'implied reader' was coined by the critic Wolfgang Iser.

The implied reader is who the author has in mind when they are writing the text, who
they expect to react to, pick up on, interpret and experience aspects of the text in a
certain way.
The implied reader is contrasted with the actual reader, the person who sits down to
read a book, who may belong to a different social or historical context, and whose
identity and opinions may mean that they read the text differently from how they are
"supposed to" - the responses that the text invites.

Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) is about a young woman who
is rewarded for keeping her "virtue" by eventually marrying the man who robbed her of
her innocence by assaulting and kidnapping her. This text's implied reader is someone
who believes that innocence and "virtue" are good values and who wants to take a moral
message from this text.

Interpretive Communities
Stanley E. Fish came up with the idea of interpretive communities to differentiate
between different groups of 'actual' readers. Fish argues that individual reader
responses must be seen as part of the bigger picture - in the context of the wider
interpretive community that they belong to.

A way of grouping readers that share historical and cultural contexts, which shapes the
way they read and interpret texts.
Fish's theory is that all meaning is dependent on the different interpretive strategies that
different interpretive communities use. There is no objectively correct interpretation of
a text because all interpretations are the product of different cultures.

The Text

Ordinarily, when we use the term 'text', we are referring to a physical or digital copy of a
work of literature.

Reader Response Criticism argues that the text is a performance; an event; an

interactive process. Reader Response critics also focus on the importance of the reading
experience.

Performing art, event, interaction

We often think of literature and the performing arts as very different subjects.
Performance is lively and dynamic, and reading is a quiet, serious activity. Some Reader
Response Critics think that the literary text can actually be viewed as a performing art,
with different readers creating different performances of texts.
Reader Response Criticism also invites us to look at the text as an event, rather than a
lifeless object. The text is not sheets of words bound together, the text needs you to read
it for it to be a text.

Therefore, the text is an interactive event. The text is alive in the interaction between the
reader and the words on the page.

Experience
If the text is an interaction or event, how do readers experience the text?

Stanley E. Fish thinks that the readers' experience of movement through a text is an
important factor in the creation of meaning. As we move onwards through a text, we fill
in the blanks and form expectations.

We may expect a character to meet a certain fate, anticipate a certain resolution,

interpret a character as hiding a secret if they act suspiciously, etc.
Wolfgang Iser focused on how readers react differently to texts based on where they are
in their reading journey. Different interpretations are produced on the first reading of a
text in comparison to the interpretations that the reader makes once they have finished
a text, and have a fuller picture of it. New meanings may also be produced when a text is
reread.
Reader Response critics focus on different aspects of the reader experience. Such as:

1. how the text tries to structure a specific experience,

2. the extent to which readers' experiences match the intended experience,
3. and the ways in which readers' experiences differ from the intended experience.

Have you ever read a book where you felt that the author wanted the reading experience
to be an important part of its meaning?
'Paradise Lost' (1663)
Stanley E. Fish wrote a whole book on the experience of reading John Milton's Paradise
Lost, which tells the story of Adam and Eve. He argues that the reading experience is
part of the poem's meaning. To Fish, the reading experience mirrors the fall of Adam
and Eve into sin.

Key Theorists of Reader Response Criticism

Let's go over the main Reader Response theorists and their theories.

Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997)

The work of Hans Robert Jauss takes a reader response approach that considers how
society and time period influence readers' interpretations of texts. Based on the culture
and time period the reader belongs to, they will have a certain kind of 'horizon of
expectations'.

Readers' horizons of expectations are always changing, as the years pass and times
change. It is the critic's job to consider the effects of context on how readers read, and
how authors write.

Note: Jauss served the Nazi Party in the SS during World War II. As such, his
contribution to academic fields is constantly debated.

Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007)

Wolfgang Iser worked alongside Hans Robert Jauss. Iser came up with the concept of
the 'implied reader' and placed importance on the reading experience of reading a
written work for the first time, and then as a 'whole'.

Iser argued that a text has what he calls 'response-inviting structures' that guide reader
interpretation.

Louise Rosenblatt (1904-2005)

Louise Rosenblatt is a highly influential critic who saw reading as a transaction between
reader and text, where both are equally important.
Rosenblatt is one of the Reader Response critics that thinks there are acceptable and
less-acceptable interpretations of texts - not all are valid.

To Rosenblatt, the text acts as a stimulus to the reader that invites them to find personal
interpretations; and as a blueprint that disciplines the reader's interpretation so that it
doesn't stray too far from the contents of the text.

Stanley E. Fish (1938)

The context in which readers read texts is important to Stanley E. Fish. Fish is interested
in the impact that the interpretive community to which a reader belongs influences the
meanings they garner from a text. A second key focus of Fish is how readers experience
texts as they progress through them, from beginning to end.
David Bleich (1940- Present)

David Bleich puts forward a radical reader response theory, known as Subjective Reader
Response Criticism. Bleich argued that reader responses are the text. There is no text
beyond the meanings that the readers come up with. This in turn means that when
critics analyse texts, what they are analysing are the readers' responses (which
constitute the text).

How to apply Reader Response Criticism

Here are some questions to help you get started with a Reader Response approach to
literary interpretation and analysis:

Questions about types of readers:

● Who is the implied reader? Who is the target audience of this text and how does
the text anticipate certain types of people (educated, privileged, disenfranchised,
etc.) reading it?
● How might different groups of readers - interpretive communities - respond to a
text? Think of students in different countries, in different decades, for example.
● How might readers' personal experiences influence how they read a certain text?
For example, childhood experiences, experiences of racism or sexism, etc.
● How might critics' own 'identity themes' and personal experiences influence or
bias their interpretations? For example, white male scholars may have a different,
perhaps more limited, view of gender and race issues in a text.

Questions about reader experience:

● What is the overall impact of the differences between the reader's experience of
reading the text when compared to the characters' experiences in the text? Is the
reading experience parallel to the experiences of the text's characters or narrator?
Or is it quite different? Does the reader know more than the characters?
● Is the reading experience deliberately difficult? How does the quality of the
reading experience contribute to the text's overall meaning?
● How does the text want readers to react to a key event or plot twist?

Applying a reader response approach to literary analysis will help you come up with new
and exciting meanings.

The Importance of Reader Response Criticism

Many important works of recent literary criticism have taken a reader response
approach. For example, Roland Barthes' famous essay, The Death of the Author (1967),
which disregards the author as the authority of a text's meaning; the author's
interpretation of their own work is just as important as any readers'.

The influence of a reader-based critical approach can be felt in Literature classrooms

around the world, as discussions are spurred by questions like 'How did this scene make
you feel?'.

Reader Response Criticism - Key Takeaways

● Reader Response Criticism is an approach to literary criticism and analysis that

focuses on how readers are actively engaged in the creation of meaning in a text.
● The implied reader is the reader that the text expects to react to, pick up on,
interpret and experience aspects of the text in a certain way.
● Readers belong to interpretive communities based on shared contexts and traits,
and this influences how they create meanings in texts.
● According to Reader Response Criticism, the text is an event, an interaction, a
performance.
● It is important to consider the way a text cultivates a specific reading experience
for its reader. Oftentimes, the reader experience is built into how we should
interpret the text.
● The key theorists of Reader Response Criticism are: Hans Robert Jauss,
Wolfgang Iser, Louise Rosenblatt, David Bleich, Norman Holland, and Stanley E.
Fish.