Hand-out 2: Working with the Reader

Reader-response and Reception Aesthetics

I read, therefore I
count. Shove it, New
AUTHOR --> WORK --> LANGUAGE --> READER --> CONTEXT Critics!
Reader-response in a Nutshell
- Appeared in late 1960’s and 1970’s;
- Reaction against New Criticism (esp. the “affective fallacy”)
- Meaning is not something pre-existent in the work or language, meaning is the result of the interaction
between reader and text (Fish: “meaning as event”, something that happens in the activity of reading);
- Reading is active, not passive (the reader is not like some type of passive container into which the meaning
text is poured, but he/she is actively involved in the process of making meaning);
- Objective interpretations are impossible;
- Not a single, unified, homogenous theory;
- “Umbrella term” used for any kind of criticism and theory interested in the reader;
- Reunites all sorts of very different approaches;
- Varies from theorists who posit that meaning resides completely the reader (the text is whatever we make
of it) to theorists who see meaning as the result of a negotiation between reader and text (the text is partly
what it is, partly what I make of/project on it) to others who see the text as a guide to the reader;
- Frequently interdisciplinary (combined with psychology/psychoanalysis, social studies, stylistics,
esthetics, etc.)
- Center of interest: the complex interactions between reader and text;
- Instead of analyzing the text itself, it analyzes the activity of reading the text, its reception;

The Reader-Response Gang

Stanley Fish (“Is there a text in class?”), David Bleich (“Subjective Criticism”), Norman Holland (“The
Dynamics of Literary Response”), Louise Rosenblatt (“Literature as Exploration”), Wolfgang Iser (“The
Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response”), Hans Robert Jauss (“Towards an Aesthetic of
Reception”)

Big Concepts
 affective stylistics, Fish (analyzing how readers respond to the succession of words in a text and
how the text creates expectations which it may subsequently either frustrate or fulfil)
 interpretive communities, Fish (the way we make meaning depends on our background or our
belonging to a certain group which shares social, cultural values)
 determinate vs. indeterminate meanings
 transactive criticism, Holland (interpretation is a transaction, a negotiation, between the reader’s
identity and the text)
 ideal, implied (Fish, Iser) and actual readers (Holland, Bleich)
 horizon of expectation (Jauss): every generation of readers has a different horizon of
expectations; good literature is one that does not completely satisfy that horizon;
 reception history: how a work was received by different generations of readers;
 gaps or “blanks” in the text (Iser): indeterminacies that the reader must “fill in”

Examples of Questions:
How does this text guide us towards a certain direction of interpretation? How do we make sense of the gaps
(the indeterminacies) of the text?
What psychological responses does the text elicit? What expectations does the text (or sentence or paragraph)
create and how does it fulfil them or frustrate them?
How was Jane Austen received by readers along the course of time (reception history)? How did the horizons
of expectations change from generation to generation?
Why did certain critics interpret certain literary works the way they did?