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.