DEFINITION OF READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM

Reader-response criticism encompasses various approaches to literature that explore and seek
to explain the diversity (and often divergence) of readers' responses to literary works.
Louise Rosenblatt is often credited with pioneering the approaches in Literature as Exploration
(1938). In her 1969 essay "Towards a Transactional Theory of Reading," she summed up her
position as follows: "A poem is what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and
experiences as relevant to the text." Recognizing that many critics would reject this definition,
Rosenblatt wrote, "The idea that a poem presupposes a reader actively involved with a text is
particularly shocking to those seeking to emphasize the objectivity of their interpretations."
Rosenblatt implicitly and generally refers to formalists (the most influential of whom are the New
Critics) when she speaks of supposedly objective interpreters shocked by the notion that a
"poem" is cooperatively produced by a "reader" and a "text." Formalists spoke of "the poem
itself," the "concrete work of art," the "real poem." They had no interest in what a work of
literature makes a reader "live through." In fact, in The Verbal Icon (1954), William K. Wimsatt
and Monroe C. Beardsley used the term affective fallacy to define as erroneous the very idea that
a readers response is relevant to the meaning of a literary work.
Stanley Fish, whose early work is seen by some as marking the true beginning of contemporary
reader-response criticism, also took issue with the tenets of formalism. In "Literature in the
Reader: Affective Stylistics" (1970), he argued that any school of criticism that sees a literary work
as an object, claiming to describe what it is and never what it does, misconstrues the very essence
of literature and reading. Literature exists and signifies when it is read, Fish suggests, and its force
is an affective one. Furthermore, reading is a temporal process, not a spatial one as formalists
assume when they step back and survey the literary work as if it were an object spread out before
them. The German critic Wolfgang Iser has described that process in The Implied Reader: Patterns
of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (1974) and The Act of Reading: A
Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976). Iser argues that texts contain gaps (or blanks) that
powerfully affect the reader, who must explain them, connect what they separate, and create in
his or her mind aspects of a work that arent in the text but are incited by the text.
With the redefinition of literature as something that only exists meaningfully in the mind of the
reader, and with the redefinition of the literary work as a catalyst of mental events, comes a
redefinition of the reader. No longer is the reader the passive recipient of those ideas that an
author has planted in a text. "The reader is active," Rosenblatt had insisted. Fish makes the same
point in "Literature in the Reader": "Reading is . . . something you do." Iser, in focusing critical
interest on the gaps in texts, on the blanks that readers have to fill in, similarly redefines the
reader as an active maker of meaning. Other reader-response critics define the reader differently.
Wayne Booth uses the phrase the implied reader to mean the reader "created by the work." Iser
also uses the term the implied reader but substitutes the educated reader for what Fish calls the
intended reader.

Since the mid-1970s, reader-response criticism has evolved into a variety of new forms.
Subjectivists like David Bleich, Norman Holland, and Robert Crosman have viewed the readers
response not as one "guided" by the text but rather as one motivated by deep-seated, personal,
psychological needs. Holland has suggested that, when we read, we find our own "identity
theme" in the text by using "the literary work to symbolize and finally replicate ourselves. We
work out through the text our own characteristic patterns of desire." Even Fish has moved away
from reader-response criticism as he had initially helped define it, focusing on "interpretive
strategies" held in common by "interpretive communities"such as the one comprised by
American college students reading a novel as a class assignment.
Fishs shift in focus is in many ways typical of changes that have taken place within the field of
reader-response criticisma field that, because of those changes, is increasingly being referred
to as reader-oriented criticism. Recent reader-oriented critics, responding to Fishs emphasis on
interpretive communities and also to the historically oriented perception theory of Hans Robert
Jauss, have studied the way a given reading publics "horizons of expectations" change over time.
Many of these contemporary critics view themselves as reader-oriented critics and as
practitioners of some other critical approach as well. Certain feminist and gender critics with an
interest in reader response have asked whether there is such a thing as "reading like a woman."
Reading-oriented new historicists have looked at the way in which racism affects and is affected
by reading and, more generally, at the way in which politics can affect reading practices and
outcomes. Gay and lesbian critics, such as Wayne Koestenbaum, have argued that sexualities
have been similarly constructed within and by social discourses and that there may even be a
homosexual way of reading.
Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M.
Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books.

"Dance With My Father" (Luther Vandross & Richard Marx)

Back when I was a child, before life removed all the innocence
My father would lift me high and dance with my mother and me and then
Spin me around til I fell asleep
Then up the stairs he would carry me
And I knew for sure I was loved
If I could get another chance, another walk, another dance with him
Id play a song that would never, ever end
How Id love, love, love
To dance with my father again
When I and my mother would disagree
To get my way, I would run from her to him
Hed make me laugh just to comfort me
Then finally make me do just what my mama said
Later that night when I was asleep
He left a dollar under my sheet
Never dreamed that he would be gone from me
If I could steal one final glance, one final step, one final dance with him
Id play a song that would never, ever end
Cause Id love, love, love
To dance with my father again
Sometimes Id listen outside her door
And Id hear how my mother cried for him
I pray for her even more than me
I pray for her even more than me
I know Im praying for much too much
But could you send back the only man she loved
I know you dont do it usually
But dear Lord shes dying
To dance with my father again
Every night I fall asleep and this is all I ever dream

(From Wikipedia) Luther Vandross wrote "Dance with my Father", with Richard Marx, based on
his personal experience. Considered by Vandross as his "career song", "Dance with my Father" is
a tribute to his father, Luther Vandross, Sr., who died due to complications of diabetes. Vandross
was seven when his father died. According to Marx, writing the song was emotional for Vandross
because it is "a subject matter [Vandross] hadn't written before".

On the backdrop of strings and interplay of piano and drums, Vandross recalls fond memories
with his late father who used to dance with his mother. Mary Ida, his mother, says, "I was amazed
at how well Luther remembered his father, how we used to dance and sing in the house. I was so
surprised that at 7 1/2 years of age, he could remember what a happy household we had." Barry
Walters of Rolling Stone magazine qualifies the memories invoked in the lyrics as painful and
private, adding that when Vandross asks God to return his father, it "turn a potentially maudlin
song into a meditative, deeply personal prayer".

At the time of "Dance with my Father"'s release as a single on May 30, 2003, Vandross had been
hospitalized due to his suffering from stroke. This timely release of the song gained attention
from critics. On his review for the album, David Jeffries of Allmusic wrote that its release "makes
the song's references to absent loved ones even more poignant". For Larry Flick of The Advocate,
it transformed the song into "a haunting composition rife with subtext".

Those Winter Sundays

Robert Hayden, 1913 - 1980

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

Id wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, hed call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of loves austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden: Those Winter Sundays - A lost father warms a house by David Biespiel
Ten years ago, based on a Columbia University Press survey, the poem was ranked the 266th
most anthologized poem in English. This put it nearly a hundred spots ahead of "Paul Reveres
Ride" (#313), but still lagging far behind Robert Frosts "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
(ranked 6th).
Born in 1913, Hayden grew up in a destitute African-American section of Detroit known as
Paradise Valley. A neighbors family adopted him at the age of two when his parents separated
and his mother could no longer afford to keep him. His adoptive father was a strict Baptist and
manual laborer. Still, the new family nurtured Haydens early literary interests, and as a teenager,
he was immersed in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance and in traditional poets such as Edna
St. Vincent Millay and Carl Sandburg.
While in college Hayden studied with the English poet W.H. Auden, who stressed a poetics of
technical precision, for which Hayden was naturally suited. Poetic form would always remain
important to him. Technique, he once said, enables discovery and definition in a poem, and it
provides a way of "solving the unknowns."
In 1940, Hayden published his first volume of tidy lyrics called Heart-Shape in the Dust. The book
drew little attention. But that would change. For the next forty years Haydens precise style
would become widely acclaimed. In 1976 he was the first African-American to serve as Consultant
in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the post we now call U.S. Poet Laureate. He died in 1980.
"Those Winter Sundays" is his heart-wrenching domestic masterpiece, and very much a poem of
discovery and definition.
What it discovers is a synchronicity of sound that embodies the poems spirit of reconciliation.
Listen to the K sounds: blueblack, cracked, ached, weekday, banked, thanked, wake, breaking,
call, chronic. That percussive, consonant-cooked vocabulary is like a melodic map into how to
read the poem, linking the fire, the season, the father, and his son.
Then theres what the poem defines, unspoken love. It begins with the father toward the son,
when he makes the fire. Then, the unspoken love is returned, when the adult son asks, "What
did I know, what did I know...?" The tone of that repetitionmore statement than question
cuts from indifference to guilt to admiration. Its a fast moment in the poem that blossoms into
the last word, "offices," a metaphor that expresses the endurance required of long-term love, of
manual labor, and of the official fatherly role.
Yet it all begins with that quiet, understated opening line ("Sundays, too, my father got up early"),
which defines Haydens initial memory, as well as bringing to mind the other unmentioned six
days of the weekand for how many years?when the father began each day in the cold
darkness, to warm up the home for his still-dreaming child.

My Papas Waltz
By Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mothers countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.