Reader Response Theory :Explanation

Reader response stresses the importance of the reader's role in interpreting texts.
Rejecting the idea that there is a single, fixed meaning inherent in every literary work,
this theory holds that the individual creates his or her own meaning through a
"transaction" with the text based on personal associations. Because all readers bring
their own emotions, concerns, life experiences, and knowledge to their reading, each
interpretation is subjective and unique.
Many trace the beginning of reader-response theory to scholar Louise Rosenblatt's
influential 1938 work Literature As Exploration. Rosenblatt's ideas were a reaction to
the formalist theories of the New Critics, who promoted "close readings" of literature,
a practice which advocated rigid scholarly detachment in the study of texts and
rejected all forms of personal interpretation by the reader. According to Rosenblatt,
the New Critics treated the text as "an autonomous entity that could be objectively
analyzed" using clear-cut technical criteria. Rosenblatt believed instead that "the
reading of any work of literature is, of necessity, an individual and unique occurrence
involving the mind and emotions of some particular reader and a particular text at a
particular time under particular circumstances.

Reader Response Literary Criticism

In the reader response critical approach the primary focus falls on the reading rather
than on the author or the text.

Theoretical assumptions:
 Literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance. Literature exists only
when it is read; meaning is an event
 The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning. Literary meaning is created by the
interaction of the reader and the text. According Louise Rosenblatt a poem is “what the
reader lives through under the guidance of the text.”

How text govern readers:

Focus on how texts guide, constrain, control reading.
Wolfgang Iser argues that the text in part controls the reader´s responses but
contains gaps that the reader creatively fills.
There is a tension between

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  the implied reader , who is established by the response-inviting structures of the text
(this type of reader is assumed and created by the work itself)
 and the actual reader, who brings his/her own experiences and preoccupations to the
text.
The Implied Reader
The author creates a relationship with a reader and enables him/her to discover the
meaning of the text.
The tone of voice or features of the narrative voice imply what kind of reader - in
terms of knowledge and attitude is addressed, what kind of attention the book is
requesting and what kind of relationship of the narrator and the reader is assumed to
be.
For the child- implied reader authors try to reinforce the relationship by a very sharply
focused point of view. (in the centre of the story is a child)
Techniques”
 the author puts him/herself into the narrator (3rd person godlike all-seer) or the 1st person
child character
 the way s/he comments on the events in the story
 by the attitude s/he adopts towards his/her characters

“Actual Reader” is the one whose responses are coloured by his/ her accumulated
personal experiences; one, who receives mental images during the process of
reading through the knowledge and experience of one’s own. However the implied
and actual readers co-exist, and are truly one and the same person, responding to a
text in two different ways and levels of consciousness.

Famous Critics

Louise Rosenblatt
“Through the medium of words, the text brings into the reader's consciousness
certain concepts, certain sensuous experiences, certain images of things,
people, actions, scenes. The special meanings and, more particularly, the
submerged associations that these words have for the individual reader will
largely determine what the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the
work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and
preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical
condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated
combination determine his response to the peculiar contribution of the text”

The reader is an active participant in the process of creating meaning in a piece of

literature. A single reader may interpret a single piece of text in different ways in
different time periods. It depends on the mood, age, gender, & circumstances of the
reader at the time of his reading a text which give it a specific meaning.

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 STANLEY FISH
“It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention
but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of
poetic qualities. […] Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of
constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.”
Reading Casually vs Reading Carefully can have two entirely different
perspectives on a single piece of literature.

Norman N Holland:
“The unity we find in literary texts is impregnated with the identity that finds that
unity. This is simply to say that my reading of a certain literary work will differ
from yours or his or hers. As readers, each of us will bring different kinds of
external information to bear. Each will seek out the particular themes that
concern him. Each will have different ways of making the text into an experience
with a coherence and significance that satisfies.”
“[I]dentity re-creates itself, or, to put it another way, style—in the sense of
personal style—creates itself. That is, all of us, as we read, use the literary work
to symbolize and finally to replicate ourselves. We work out through the text our
own characteristic patterns of desire and adaptation. We interact with the work,
making it part of our own psychic economy and making ourselves part of the
literary work—as we interpret it.”

Each one of us interprets a text differently. We make sense out of a text in our
unique way. We project our image in our interpretations of the text. The reader is
thus an active participant in interpreting the ‘meanings’

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