Reader+-+Response+approach+to+Texts

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 * ==** Reader-Response Criticism **== ||

== **In the [|reader-response] critical approach, the primary focus falls on the reader and the process of reading rather than on the author or the text.** ==

** Theoretical Assumptions: **
==**Literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance, analogous to playing/singing a musical work, enacting a drama, etc. Literature exists only when it is read; meaning is an event (versus the New Critical concept of the "[|affective fallacy]").**==

==**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. According to Louise Rosenblatt, a poem is "what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text."**==

** Varying Emphases: **
== ** How readers interpret texts: Sometimes called "subjective." May deal with published "readings" of texts and/or study nonprofessional readings (e.g., students). These critics explain similarities in readings in varying ways:** == ==**"styles" or "identity themes" of readers are similar (Norman Holland--psychoanalytic approach): cf. George Dillon's classification of students' responses to Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily":readers belong to same "interpretive communities" (Stanley Fish) with shared reading strategies, values and interpretive assumptions (i.e., shared "discourse"); concept of the "informed reader."**==
 * "Character-Action-Moral Style" ("connected knowers")--treat literature as coextensive with experience
 * "Diggers for Secrets"--find hidden meanings in literature, psychoanalyze motives of characters, etc.
 * "Anthropologists"--look for cultural patterns, norms, values [e.g. feminists, New Historicists].

==**readers are situated in a common cultural/historical setting and shaped by dominant discourses and ideologies (New Historicist emphasis). "Reception theory/aesthetics" studies the changing responses of the general reading public over time.**==

== ** How texts govern reader: Focus on how texts guide, constrain, control reading; often use linguistic, stylistic, narratological methods of analysis. 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** == ==**"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**==