Reader Response

Theory

o Literature is a performative art and each reading is a

performance, analogous to playing/singing a musical work,
enacting a drama, etc.
o Literature exists only when it is read; meaning is an event
o The 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 Development
RRC 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 Development
2. 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 Development
Louise Rosenblatt (Literature as Exploration, 1937). One of
the first theoretical works outlining a reader-oriented
approach to the study and analysis of literature.
o Both the reader and the text work together to produce
meaning. They are partners in the interpretive process.
o 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 Development
Through 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.
o 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 Approaches
There 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-o Includes such critical fields as structuralism, formalism, narratology, and rhetorical
criticism.
o 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.
o Distinguish between a text's meaning and its significance.
o 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 Approaches
Narratology-- 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 reader

Methods or Approaches
II. Emphasis on the interaction between reader and text
Phenomenology-- 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 Reader

Methods or Approaches
III. 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 Text

By Roland Barthes

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

Barthes propositions:
I.

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

o. 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 avantgarde 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.
o. 1D: the work is a fragment of substance, the Text is a methodological field
o. 2D: the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language
o. 3D: the text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the
imaginary tail of the text

From Work to Text

Barthes 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.
o 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 Text

Barthes propositions:
III. The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign.
o 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.
o 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 Text

Barthes propositions:
IV. The Text is plural.
o It accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible plurality, which
answers not to an interpretation but to an explosion, a dissemination.
o 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'.
o So the Text can be itself only in its differences, not monistic determination.

From Work to Text

V. The work is caught up in a process of filiation.
o 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.
o 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.
o 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 Text

VI. The work is normally the object of a consumption
o 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.
o 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.
o The radical fundamentality of text is that text is the practice; it actively plays
the volume.

From Work to Text

VII. The final approach to the Text is pleasure.
o According to Barthes, there exists a pleasure of certain works but this pleasure
is in the level of consumption (passive).
o 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 Text

At 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!