Dramatic Monologue

     Dramatic Monologue. A monologue is a lengthy speech by a single person. In a play, when a character utters a monologue that expresses his or her private thoughts, it is called a soliloquy. Dramatic monologue, however, does not designate a component in a play, but a type of lyrìc poem that was perfected by Robert Browning. In its fullest form, as represented in Browning's "My Last Duchess," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," "Andrea del Sarto," and many other poems, the dramatic monologue has the following features: (1) A single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment: the Duke is negotiating with an emissary for a second wife; the Bishop lies dying; Andrea once more attempts wistfully to believe his wife's lies. (2) This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditors' presence, and what they say and do, only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker. (3) The main principle controlling the poet's formulation of what the lyric speaker says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances its interest, the speaker's temperament and character.

     In monologues such as "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" and "Caliban upon Setebos," Browning omits the second feature, the presence of a silent auditor; but features (1) and (3) are the necessary conditions of a dramatic monologue. The third feature—the focus on self-revelation—serves to distinguish a dramatic monologue from its near relation, the dramatic lyric, which is also a monologue uttered in an identifiable situation at a dramatic moment. John Donne's "The Canonization" and "The Flea" (1613), for example, are dramatic lyrics that lack only one feature of the dramatic monologue: the focus of interest is primarily on the speaker's elaborately ingenious argument, rather than on the character he inadvertently reveals in the course of arguing. And although Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798) is spoken by one person to a silent auditor (his sister) in a specific situation at a significant moment in his life, it is not a dramatic monologue proper, both because we are invited to identify the speaker with the poet himself, and because the organizing principle and focus of interest is not the revelation of the speaker's distinctive temperament, but the evolution of his observations, memories, and thoughts toward the resolution of an emotional problem.

     Tennyson wrote "Ulysses" (1842) and other dramatic monologues, and the form has been used by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and other poets of this century. The best-known modern instance is T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915).

     See Benjamin Fuson, Browning and His English Predecessors in the Dramatic Monologue (1948); Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (1957); Ralph W. Rader, "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms," Critical Inquiry 3 (1976); and Adena Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (1985, chapter 2, "The Dramatic Monologue").

-Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Marxist Criticism

     Marxist Criticism, in its diverse forms, grounds its theory and practice on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx (1818-83) and his fellowthinker Friedrich Engels, and especially on the following claims: 

     (1) In the last analysis, the evolving history of humanity, of its social groupings and relations, of its institutions, and of its ways of thinking are largely determined by the changing mode of its "material production", that is, of its overall economic organization for producing and distributing material goods. 

     (2) Historical changes in the fundamental mode of material production effect changes in the class structure of a society, establishing in each era dominant and subordinate classes that engage in a struggle for economic, political, and social advantage. 

     (3) Human consciousness is constituted by an ideology, that is, the beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings perceive, and by recourse to which they explain, what they take to be reality. An ideology is, in complex ways, the product of the position and interests of a particular class. In any historical era, the dominant ideology embodies, and serves to legitimize and perpetuate, the interests of the dominant economic and social class. 

     Ideology was not much discussed by Marx and Engels after The German Ideology, which they wrote jointly in 1845-46, but it has become a key concept in Marxist criticism of literature and the other arts. Marx inherited the term from French philosophers of the late eighteenth century, who used it to designate the study of the way that all general concepts develop from senseperceptions. In the present era, "ideology" is used in a variety of non-Marxist ways, ranging from a derogatory name for any set of political ideas that are held dogmatically and applied rigorously, to a neutral name for ways of perceiving and thinking that are specific to an individual's race, or sex, or education, or ethnic group. In its distinctively Marxist use, the reigning ideology in any era is conceived to be, ultimately, the product of its economic structure and the resulting class-relations and class-interests. In a famed architectural metaphor, Marx represented ideology as a "superstructure" of which the concurrent socioeconomic system is the "base." Friedrich Engels described ideology as "a false consciousness," and many later Marxists consider it to be constituted largely by unconscious prepossessions that are illusory, in contrast to the "scientific" (that is, Marxist) knowledge of the economic determinants, historical evolution, and present constitution of the social world. A further claim is that, in the present era of capitalist economic organization that emerged during the eighteenth century, the reigning ideology incorporates the interests of the dominant and exploitative class, the "bourgeoisie," who are the owners of the means of production and distribution, as opposed to the "proletariat," or wage-earning working class. This ideology, to those who live in and with it, it is claimed, seems a natural and inevitable way of seeing, explaining, and dealing with the environing world, but in fact has the hidden function of legitimizing and maintaining the position, power, and economic interests of the ruling class. Bourgeois ideology is regarded as both producing and permeating the social and cultural institutions and practices of the present era—including religion, morality, philosophy, politics, and the legal system, as well as (though in a less direct way) literature and the other arts. 

     In accordance with some version of the views just outlined, a Marxist critic typically undertakes to explain the literature in any historical era, not as works created in accordance with timeless artistic criteria, but as "products" of the economic and ideological determinants specific to that era. What some Marxist critics themselves decry as "vulgar Marxism" analyzes a "bourgeois" literary work as in direct correlation with the present stage of the class struggle and demands that such works be replaced by a "social realism" that will represent the true reality and progressive forces of our time; in practice, this has usually turned out to be the demand that literature conform to an official party line. More flexible Marxists, on the other hand, building upon scattered comments on literature in Marx and Engels themselves, grant that traditional literary works possess a degree of autonomy that enables some of them to transcend the prevailing bourgeois ideology sufficiently to represent (or in the frequent Marxist equivalent, to reflect) aspects of the "objective" reality of their time (see imitation). 

     The Hungarian thinker Georg Lukács, the most widely influential of Marxist critics, represents a flexible view of the role of ideology. He proposed that each great work of literature creates "its own world," which is unique and seemingly distinct from "everyday reality." But masters of realism in the novel such as Balzac or Tolstoy, by "bringing to life the greatest possible richness of the objective conditions of life," and by creating "typical" characters who manifest to an extreme the essential tendencies and determinants of their epoch, succeed—often "in opposition to [the author's] own conscious ideology"—in producing a fictional world which is a "reflection of life in the greatest concreteness and clarity and with all its motivating contradictions." That is, the fictional world of such writers accords with the Marxist conception of the real world as constituted by class conflict, economic and social "contradictions," and the alienation of the individual under capitalism. (See bourgeois epic, under epic, and refer to Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. 1970; the volume also includes Lukács' useful review of the foundational tenets of Marxist criticism, in "Marx and Engels on Aesthetics.") 

     While lauding nineteenth-century literary realism, Lukács attacked modernist experimental writers as "decadent" instances of concern with the subjectivity of the alienated individual in the fragmented world of our late stage of capitalism. (See modernism.) He thereby inaugurated a vigorous debate among Marxist critics about the political standing of formal innovators in twentieth-century literature. In opposition to Lukács, the Frankfurt School of German Marxists, especially Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, lauded modernist writers such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Beckett, proposing that their formal experiments, by the very fact that they fragment and disrupt the life they "reflect," effect a distance and detachment that serve as an implicit critique—or yield a "negative knowledge"—of the dehumanizing institutions and processes of society under capitalism. 

     Two rather maverick German Marxists, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, who also supported modernist and nonrealistic art, have had considerable influence on non-Marxist as well as Marxist criticism. In his critical theory, and in his own dramatic writings (see epic theater), Bertolt Brecht rejected what he called the "Aristotelian" concept that a tragic play is an imitation of reality with a unified plot and a universal theme which establishes an identification of the audience with the hero and produces a catharsis of the spectator's emotions. (See Aristotle, under tragedy and plot) Brecht proposes instead that the illusion of reality should be deliberately shattered by an episodic plot, by protagonists who do not attract the audience's sympathy, by a striking theatricality in staging and acting, and by other ways of baring the artifice of drama so as to produce an "alienation effect" (see under distance and involvement). The result of such alienation will be to jar audiences out of their passive acceptance of modern capitalist society as a natural way of life, into an attitude not only (as in Adorno) of critical understanding of capitalist shortcomings, but of active engagement with the forces of change. Another notable critic, Walter Benjamin, was both an admirer of Brecht and briefly an associate of the Frankfurt School. Particularly influential was Benjamin's attention to the effects of changing material conditions in the production of the arts, especially the recent technological developments of the mass media that have promoted, he said, "a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art." In his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin proposes that modern technical innovations such as photography, the phonograph, the radio, and especially the cinema, have transformed the very concept and status of a work of art. Formerly an artist or author produced a work which was a single object, regarded as the special preserve of the bourgeois elite, around which developed a quasi-religious "aura" of uniqueness, autonomy, and aesthetic value independent of any social function— an aura which invited in the spectator a passive attitude of absorbed contemplation in the object itself. The new media not only make possible the infinite and precise reproducibility of the objects of art, but effect the production of works which, like motion pictures, are specifically designed to be reproduced in multiple copies. Such modes of art, Benjamin argues, by destroying the mystique of the unique work of art as a subject for pure contemplation, make possible a radical role for works of art by opening the way to "the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art." (A useful collection of central essays by the Marxist critics Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno is R. Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and Politics, 1977.) 

     Since the middle of the present century there has been a resurgence of Marxist criticism, marked by an openness, on some level of literary analysis, to other current critical perspectives; a flexibility which acknowledges that Marxist critical theory is itself not a set of timeless truths but at least to some degree an evolving historical process; a subtilizing of the concept of ideology as applied to literary content; and a tendency to grant an increased role to non-ideological and distinctively artistic determinants of literary structures. 

     In the 1960s the influential French Marxist Louis Althusser assimilated the structuralism then current into his view that the structure of society is not a monolithic whole, but is constituted by a diversity of "nonsynchronous" social formations, or "ideological state apparatuses," including religious, legal, political, and literary institutions. Each of these is interrelated with the others in complex ways, but possesses a "relative autonomy"; only "in the last instance" is the ideology of a particular institution determined by its material base in contemporary economic production. In an influential reconsideration of the nature of ideology, Althusser opposes its definition as simply "false consciousness"; he declares instead that ideologies vary according to the form and practices of each mode of state apparatus, and that the ideology of each mode operates by means of a type of discourse which interpellates (calls upon) the individual to take up a pre-established "subject position"—that is, a position as a person with certain views and values which, in every instance, serve the ultimate interests of the ruling class. (See discourse under poststructuralism.) Within the particular social formation of literature, furthermore, a great work is not a mere product of ideology, because its fiction establishes for the reader a distance from which to recognize, hence expose, "the ideology from which it is born . . . from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes." Pierre Macherey, in A Theory of Literary Production (1966, trans. 1978), stressed the supplementary claim that a literary text not only distances itself from its ideology by its fiction and form, but also exposes the "contradictions" that are inherent in that ideology by its "silences" or "gaps"—that is, by what the text fails to say because its ideology makes it impossible to say it. Such textual "absences" are symptoms of ideological repressions of the contents in the text's own "unconscious." The aim of Marxist criticism, Macherey asserts, is to make these silences "speak" and so to reveal, behind what an author consciously intended to say, the text's unconscious content—that is, its repressed awareness of the flaws, stresses, and incoherence in the very ideology that it incorporates. 

      Between 1929 and 1935 the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, while imprisoned by the fascist government, wrote approximately thirty documents on political, social, and cultural subjects, known as the "prison notebooks." Gramsci maintains the original Marxist distinction between the economic base and the cultural superstructure, but replaces the older notion that culture is a disguised "reflection" of the material base with the concept that the relation between the two is one of "reciprocity," or interactive influence. Gramsci places special emphasis on the popular, as opposed to the elite elements of culture, ranging from folklore and popular music to the cinema. Gramsci's most widely echoed concept is that of hegemony: that a social class achieves a predominant influence and power, not by direct and overt means, but by succeeding in making its ideological view of society so pervasive that the subordinate classes unwittingly accept and participate in their own oppression. Gramsci's prison writings have become widely influential since they were published late in the 1940s, especially among literary and social critics, such as Terry Eagleton in England and Fredric Jameson and Edward Said in America, who concern themselves with the power of literary culture to intervene in and to transform existing economic and political arrangements and activities. See Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, trans. William Boelhower, 1985; Chantal Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory, 1979. 

     In England the many social and critical writings of Raymond Williams manifest an adaptation of Marxist concepts to his humanistic concern with the overall texture of an individual's "lived experience." A leading theorist of Marxist criticism in England is Terry Eagleton, who has expanded and elaborated the concepts of Althusser and Macherey into his view that a literary text is a special kind of production in which ideological discourse—described as any system of mental representations of lived experience—is reworked into a specifically literary discourse. In recent years Eagleton has been increasingly hospitable to the tactical use, for dealing with ideology in literature, of concepts derived from deconstruction and from Lacan's version of Freudian psychoanalysis. Eagleton views such poststructuralist analyses as useful to Marxist critics of literary texts insofar as they serve to undermine reigning beliefs and certainties, but only as preliminary to the properly Marxist enterprise of exposing their ideological motivation and to the application of the criticism of literature toward politically desirable ends. 

     The most prominent American theorist, Fredric Jameson, is also the most eclectic of current Marxist critics. In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Symbolic Act (1981), Jameson expressly adapts to his synthetic critical enterprise such seemingly incompatible viewpoints as the medieval theory of fourfold levels of meaning in the allegorical interpretation of the Bible, the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye, structuralist criticism, Lacan's reinterpretations of Freud, semiotics, and deconstruction. These modes of criticism, Jameson asserts, are applicable at various stages of the critical interpretation of a literary work; but Marxist criticism, he contends, "subsumes" all the other "interpretive modes," by retaining their positive findings within a "political interpretation of literary texts" which stands as the "final" or "absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation." This last-analysis "political interpretation" of a literary text involves an exposure of the hidden role of the "political unconscious"—a concept which Jameson describes as his "collective," or "political," adaptation of the Freudian concept that each individual's unconscious is a repository of repressed desires. (See psychological and psychoanalytic criticism.) In any literary product of our late capitalist era, the "rifts and discontinuities" in the text, and especially those elements which, in the French phrase, are its "non-dit" (its not-said), are symptoms of the repression by a predominant ideology of the contradictions of "History" into the depths of the political unconscious; and the content of this repressed History, Jameson asserts, is the revolutionary process of "the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity." In the final stage of an interpretation, Jameson holds, the Marxist critic "rewrites," in the mode of "allegory," the literary text "in such a way that the [text] may be seen as the . . . reconstruction of a prior historical or ideological subtext"—that is, of the text's unspoken, because repressed and unconscious, awareness of the ways it is determined not only by current ideology, but also by the long-term process of true "History." 

     See sociology of literature, and for the Marxist wing of the new historicism, see cultural materialism under the entry new historicism. In addition to writings listed above, refer to: Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism (1950); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1960) and Marxism and Literature (1977); Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism (1967); Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (trans., 1968); Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (1969, trans. 1971); Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (1971); Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art (1973); Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (1976) and Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)—the latter is a useful introduction to Marxist criticism in general; Chris Bullock and David Peck, eds., Guide to Marxist Literary Criticism (1980); Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (1982); J. J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (1983); J. G Merquior, Western Marxism (1986); and the comprehensive survey, "Marxist Criticism," by Walter Cohen in Redrawing the Boundaries, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (1992). Various essays by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak assimilate Marxist concepts both to deconstruction and to the viewpoint of feminist criticism; see, for example, her "Displacement and the Discourse of Women," in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick (1983). For a sharp critique of recent theorists of Marxist criticism, see Frederick Crews, "Dialectical Immaterialism," in Skeptical Engagements (1986); also Richard Levin, "The New Interdisciplinarity in Literary Criticism," in Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling, eds., After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory, 1993. Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), write a poststructuralist challenge to the "master narrative" of Marxist theory.

-Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Reader Response Theory

     Reader-Response Criticism does not designate any one critical theory, but a focus on the process of reading a literary text that is shared by many of the critical modes, American and European, which have come into prominence since the 1960s. Reader-response critics turn from the traditional conception of a work as an achieved structure of meanings to the ongoing mental operations and responses of readers as their eyes follow a text on the page before them. In the more drastic forms of such reader-response criticism, matters that had been considered by critics to be features of the work itself (including narrator, plot, characters, style, and structure, as well as meanings) are dissolved into an evolving process, consisting primarily of diverse kinds of expectations and the violations, deferments, satisfactions, and restructurings of expectations, in the flow of a reader's experience. Reader-response critics of all theoretical persuasions agree that, at least to some considerable degree, the meanings of a text are the "production" or "creation" of the individual reader, hence that there is no one "correct" meaning for all readers either of the linguistic parts or of the artistic whole of a text. Where these critics importantly differ is (1) in their view of the primary factors that shape a reader's responses; (2) in the place at which they draw the line between what is "objectively" given in a text and the "subjective" responses of an individual reader; and as a result of this difference, (3) in their conclusion about the extent, if any, to which a text controls, or at least "constrains," a reader's responses, so as to authorize us to reject at least some readings as misreadings, even if, as almost all reader-response critics assert, we are unable to demonstrate that any one reading is the correct reading. 

     The following is a brief survey of some of the more prominent forms of reader-response criticism: 

The contemporary German critic Wolfgang Iser develops the phenomenological analysis of the reading process proposed by Roman Ingarden, but whereas Ingarden had limited himself to a description of reading in general, Iser applies his theory to the analysis of many individual works of literature, especially prose fiction. (For Ingarden, see phenomenology and criticism.) In Iser's view the literary text, as a product of the writer's intentional acts, in part controls the reader's responses, but always contains (to a degree that has greatly increased in many modern literary texts) a number of "gaps" or "indeterminate elements." These the reader must fill in by a creative participation with what is given in the text before him. The experience of reading is an evolving process of anticipation, frustration, retrospection, reconstruction, and satisfaction. Iser distinguishes between the implied reader, who is established by the text itself as one who is expected to respond in specific ways to the "response-inviting structures" of the text, and the "actual reader," whose responses are inevitably colored by his or her accumulated private experiences. In both cases, however, the process of the reader's consciousness constitutes both the partial patterns (which we ordinarily attribute to objective features of the work itself) and the coherence, or unity, of the work as a whole. As a consequence, literary texts always permit a range of possible meanings. The fact, however, that the author's intentional acts establish limits, as well as incentives, to the reader's creative additions to a text allows us to reject some readings as misreadings. (For an application of phenomenological analysis to the history of ever-altering reader-responses to a given text, see reception-theory.) 

     French structuralist criticism, as Jonathan Culler has said in Structuralist Poetics (1975), "is essentially a theory of reading" which aims to "specify how we go about making sense of texts" (pp. viii, 128). As practiced by critics such as Culler in the course of his book, such criticism stresses literary conventions, codes, and rules which, having been assimilated by competent readers, serve to structure their reading experience and so make possible, at the same time as they impose constraints on, the partially creative activity of interpretation. The structuralist Roland Barthes, however, in his later theory encouraged a mode of reading that opens the text to an endless play of alternative meanings. And the poststructuralist movement of deconstruction is a theory of reading that subverts the structuralist view that interpretation is in some part controlled by linguistic and literary codes, and instead proposes a "creative" reading of any text as a play of "differences" that generate innumerable and mutually contradictory, but "undecidable" meanings. 

     American proponents of reader-response types of interpretive theory often begin by rejecting the claim of the American New Criticism that a literary work is a self-sufficient object invested with publicly available meanings, whose internal features and structure should be analyzed without "external" reference to the responses of its readers (see affective fallacy). In radical opposition to this view, these newer critics turn their attention exclusively to the reader's responses; they differ greatly, however, in the factors to which they attribute the formation of these responses. 

     David Bleich, in Subjective Criticism (1978), undertakes to show, on the basis of classroom experiments, that any purportedly "objective" reading of a text, if it is more than an empty derivation from theoretical formulas, turns out to be based on a response that is not determined by the text, but is instead a "subjective process" determined by the distinctive personality of the individual reader. In an alternative psychoanalytic analysis of reading, Norman Holland accounts for the responses of a reader to a text by recourse to Freudian concepts (see psychoanalytic criticism). The subject matter of a work of literature is a projection of the fantasies—engendered by the interplay of unconscious needs and defenses—that constitute the particular "identity" of its author. The individual reader's "subjective" response to a text is a "transactive" encounter between the fantasies projected by its author and the particular defenses, expectations, and wish-fulfilling fantasies that make up the reader's own identity. In this transactive process the reader transforms the fantasy content, "which he has created from the materials of the story his defenses admitted," into a unity, or "meaningful totality," which constitutes the reader's particular interpretation of the text. There is no universally determinate meaning of a work; two readers will agree in their interpretation only insofar as their "identity themes" are sufficiently alike to enable each to fit the other's re-creation of a text to his or her own distinctive responses. 

     In his theory of reading, Harold Bloom also employs psychoanalytic concepts; in particular, he adapts Freud's concept of the mechanisms of defense against the revelation to consciousness of repressed desires to his own view of the process of reading as the application of "defense mechanisms" against the "influence," or threat to the reader's imaginative autonomy, of the poet whose text is being read. Bloom applies Freudian concepts in a much more complex way than Holland; he arrives, however, at a parallel conclusion that there can be no determinate or correct meaning of a text. All "reading is. . . misreading"; the only difference is that between a "strong" misreading and a "weak" misreading. See anxiety of influence. 

     Stanley Fish is the proponent of what he calls affective stylistics. In his earlier writings Fish represented the activity of reading as one that converts the spatial sequence of printed words on a page into a temporal flow of experience in a reader who has acquired a "literary competence." In following the printed text with his eye, the reader makes sense of what he has so far read by anticipating what is still to come. These anticipations may be fulfilled by what follows in the text; often, however, they will turn out to have been mistaken. But since, according to Fish, "the meaning of an utterance" is the reader's "experience—all of it," and the reader's mistakes are "part of the experience provided by the author's language," these mistakes are an integral part of the meaning of a text. (See "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," published in 1970 and reprinted with slight changes in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature, 1974, and in Is There a Text in This Class? 1980.) Fish's analyses of large-scale literary works were designed to show a coherence in the kinds of mistakes, constitutive of specific types of meaning-experience, which are effected in the reader by the text of John Milton's Paradise Lost, and by various essayists and poets of the seventeenth century. 

     Fish's early claim was that he was describing a universal process of the competent reading of literary texts. In later publications, however, he introduced the concept of interpretive communities, each of which is composed of members who share a particular reading "strategy," or "set of community assumptions." Fish, in consequence, now presented his own affective stylistics as only one of many alternative modes of interpretation, which his earlier writings were covertly attempting to persuade his readers to adopt. He also proposed that each communal strategy in effect "creates" all the seemingly objective features of the text itself, as well as the "intentions, speakers, and authors" that we may infer from the text. The result is that there can be no universal "right reading" of any text; the validity of any reading, however obvious it may seem to a reader, will always depend on the assumptions and strategy of reading that he or she happens to share with other members of a particular interpretive community. Fish's claim is that all values, as well as meanings, of a text are relative to the concept or scheme of a particular interpretive community; furthermore, that such conceptual schemes are "incommensurable," in that there is no standpoint, outside of any interpretive community, for translating the discourse of one community into that of another, or for mediating between them. (See Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, 1980; and for a concise exposition of philosophical critiques of Fish's claims for interpretive relativism and incommensurability, James Battersby, Reason and the Nature of Texts, 1996.) In a later book, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989), Fish analyzes, and defends, the role of the professional "interpretive community" of academic critics in literary studies; he also extends his views of literary interpretation into the domain of legal interpretation. 

     Since the early 1980s, as part of a widespread tendency to stress cultural and political factors in the study of literature, reader-response critics have increasingly undertaken to "situate" a particular reading of a text in its historical setting, in the attempt to show the extent to which the responses that constitute both the interpretation and evaluation of literature have been determined by a reader's ideology and by built-in biases about race, class, or gender. See Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Nanative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, 1987; and for feminist emphasis on the male biases that affect the responses of readers, Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader (1978); and Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio Schweikart, eds., Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (1986). 

     A survey of a number of reader-response theories of criticism is included in Steven Mailloux's own contribution to this mode in Interpretive Conventions (1982); another survey from the point of view of deconstructive theory is Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism (1987). Anthologies of diverse reader-response essays: Susan Suleiman and Inge Crossman, eds., The Reader in the Text (1980); Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism (1980). Important early instances of a criticism that is focused on the reader: Walter J. Slatoff, With Respect to Readers (1970); Louise Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978); Umberto Eco, The Role of Reader (trans., 1979). 

     In addition to the titles mentioned in this essay, the following are prominent exemplars of reader-response criticism: Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost" (1967) and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972); Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968) and Five Readers Reading (1975); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (1974) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1978). For critiques of Fish's "affective stylistics": Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (1981); Eugene Goodheart, The Skeptic Disposition in Contemporary Criticism (1984); M. H. Abrams, "How to Do Things with Texts," in Doing Things with Texts (1989).

-Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Wuthering Heights: Jacobs

Presentation on Jacobs

Key terms:

-Gender roles (gender theory)

-Dometic violence

-Patriarchal society: asserting power

-Distortion (ridicule) of male characters

-Power/discipline: justification of violence

Wuthering Heights: Eagleton

Presentation on Eagleton

Key terms:

-Binary oppositions

-Class: relationships of power

-Marxist criticism

Wuthering Heights: Matthews

Presentation on Matthews

Key terms:

-Frames

-Unreliable narrator

-Sinking frame (forgetting about the frame)

-Boundaries

-Frame merges with the story

Wuthering Heights: Makovski

Presentation on Makovski

Key terms:

-Dialogism

-Interpretation

-Misinterpretation

-The Mirror Stage

Wuthering Heights: Kermode

Presentation on Kermode

Key terms:

-Classic

-Ambiguity

-Openness

-Plurality of Interpretation

-Time

-Reader Response Theory

Wuthering Heights: Van Ghent

Presentation on Van Ghent

Key terms:

-Window Symbol

-"Two Children" Figure

-Binary opposition

-Outside of Ethics

-Human vs. Inhuman

-Incest

"My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning

My Last Duchess
BY ROBERT BROWNING

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps

Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace—all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech—which I have not—to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—

E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

Source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173024

"Prospice" by Robert Browning

Prospice

BY ROBERT BROWNING

Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,

         The mist in my face,

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote

         I am nearing the place,

The power of the night, the press of the storm,

         The post of the foe;

Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,

         Yet the strong man must go:

For the journey is done and the summit attained,

         And the barriers fall,

Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,

         The reward of it all.

I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,

         The best and the last!

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forbore,

         And bade me creep past.

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers

         The heroes of old,

Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears

         Of pain, darkness and cold.

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,

         The black minute's at end,

And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,

         Shall dwindle, shall blend,

Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,

         Then a light, then thy breast,

O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,

         And with God be the rest!

Source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173029

Robert Browning (1812–1889)

Biographies:

• poets.org
• Poetry Foundation
• The Victorian Web

To read the works of Robert Browning, click here.