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| Murfin |
On my wandering through the net to uncover a
suitable reading list for this proposed PhD in Performance Writing I have come
across the following piece adapted from The
Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray. Copyright
1998 by Bedford Books. I can find no image of Supryia M Ray.
My main reason for bringing this up is the
lingering cogitations prompted by my upset expressed in yesterday’s item. Was I
seeking to explain a diversity or divergence of responses to a literary work?
Was my evaluation of another’s evaluation made entirely without prejudice?
DEFINITION OF READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
Reader-response criticism encompasses
various approaches to literature that explore and seek to explain the diversity
(and often divergence) of readers' responses to literary works.
Louise Rosenblatt is often credited with pioneering the approaches in Literature
as Exploration (1938). In her 1969 essay "Towards a Transactional
Theory of Reading," she summed up her position as follows: "A poem is
what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and experiences as
relevant to the text." Recognizing that many critics would reject this
definition, Rosenblatt wrote, "The idea that a poem presupposes a reader
actively involved with a text is particularly shocking to those seeking
to emphasize the objectivity of their interpretations." Rosenblatt
implicitly and generally refers to formalists (the most influential of whom are
the New Critics) when she speaks of supposedly objective interpreters shocked
by the notion that a "poem" is cooperatively produced by a
"reader" and a "text." Formalists spoke of "the poem
itself," the "concrete work of art," the "real poem."
They had no interest in what a work of literature makes a reader "live
through." In fact, in The Verbal Icon (1954), William K. Wimsatt
and Monroe C. Beardsley used the term affective fallacy to define as
erroneous the very idea that a reader’s response is relevant to the meaning of
a literary work.
Stanley Fish, whose early work is seen by some as marking the true
beginning of contemporary reader-response criticism, also took issue with the
tenets of formalism. In "Literature in the Reader: Affective
Stylistics" (1970), he argued that any school of criticism that sees a
literary work as an object, claiming to describe what it is and never what it
does, misconstrues the very essence of literature and reading. Literature
exists and signifies when it is read, Fish suggests, and its force is an
affective one. Furthermore, reading is a temporal process, not a spatial one as
formalists assume when they step back and survey the literary work as if it
were an object spread out before them. The German critic Wolfgang Iser has
described that process in The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in
Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (1974) and The Act of Reading: A
Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976). Iser argues that texts contain gaps
(or blanks) that powerfully affect the reader, who must explain them, connect
what they separate, and create in his or her mind aspects of a work that aren’t
in the text but are incited by the text.
With the redefinition of literature as something that only exists
meaningfully in the mind of the reader, and with the redefinition of the
literary work as a catalyst of mental events, comes a redefinition of the
reader. No longer is the reader the passive recipient of those ideas that an
author has planted in a text. "The reader is active," Rosenblatt
had insisted. Fish makes the same point in "Literature in the
Reader": "Reading is . . . something you do." Iser, in
focusing critical interest on the gaps in texts, on the blanks that readers
have to fill in, similarly redefines the reader as an active maker of meaning.
Other reader-response critics define the reader differently. Wayne Booth uses
the phrase the implied reader to mean the reader "created by the
work." Iser also uses the term the implied reader but substitutes the
educated reader for what Fish calls the intended reader.
Since the mid-1970s, reader-response criticism has evolved into a
variety of new forms. Subjectivists like David Bleich, Norman Holland, and
Robert Crosman have viewed the reader’s response not as one "guided"
by the text but rather as one motivated by deep-seated, personal, psychological
needs. Holland has suggested that, when we read, we find our own "identity
theme" in the text by using "the literary work to symbolize and
finally replicate ourselves. We work out through the text our own
characteristic patterns of desire." Even Fish has moved away from
reader-response criticism as he had initially helped define it, focusing on
"interpretive strategies" held in common by "interpretive communities"—such
as the one comprised by American college students reading a novel as a class
assignment.
Fish’s shift in focus is in many ways typical of changes that have
taken place within the field of reader-response criticism—a field that, because
of those changes, is increasingly being referred to as reader-oriented
criticism. Recent reader-oriented critics, responding to Fish’s emphasis on
interpretive communities and also to the historically oriented perception theory
of Hans Robert Jauss, have studied the way a given reading public’s
"horizons of expectations" change over time. Many of these
contemporary critics view themselves as reader-oriented critics and as
practitioners of some other critical approach as well. Certain feminist and
gender critics with an interest in reader response have asked whether there is
such a thing as "reading like a woman." Reading-oriented new
historicists have looked at the way in which racism affects and is affected by
reading and, more generally, at the way in which politics can affect reading
practices and outcomes. Gay and lesbian critics, such as Wayne Koestenbaum,
have argued that sexualities have been similarly constructed within and by
social discourses and that there may even be a homosexual way of reading.
Louise Rosenblatt is often credited with pioneering the approaches in Literature
as Exploration (1938). In her 1969 essay "Towards a Transactional
Theory of Reading," she summed up her position as follows: "A poem is
what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and experiences as
relevant to the text." Recognizing that many critics would reject this
definition, Rosenblatt wrote, "The idea that a poem presupposes a reader
actively involved with a text is particularly shocking to those seeking
to emphasize the objectivity of their interpretations." Rosenblatt
implicitly and generally refers to formalists (the most influential of whom are
the New Critics) when she speaks of supposedly objective interpreters shocked
by the notion that a "poem" is cooperatively produced by a
"reader" and a "text." Formalists spoke of "the poem
itself," the "concrete work of art," the "real poem."
They had no interest in what a work of literature makes a reader "live
through." In fact, in The Verbal Icon (1954), William K. Wimsatt
and Monroe C. Beardsley used the term affective fallacy to define as
erroneous the very idea that a reader’s response is relevant to the meaning of
a literary work.
Stanley Fish, whose early work is seen by some as marking the true
beginning of contemporary reader-response criticism, also took issue with the
tenets of formalism. In "Literature in the Reader: Affective
Stylistics" (1970), he argued that any school of criticism that sees a
literary work as an object, claiming to describe what it is and never what it
does, misconstrues the very essence of literature and reading. Literature
exists and signifies when it is read, Fish suggests, and its force is an
affective one. Furthermore, reading is a temporal process, not a spatial one as
formalists assume when they step back and survey the literary work as if it
were an object spread out before them. The German critic Wolfgang Iser has
described that process in The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in
Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (1974) and The Act of Reading: A
Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976). Iser argues that texts contain gaps
(or blanks) that powerfully affect the reader, who must explain them, connect
what they separate, and create in his or her mind aspects of a work that aren’t
in the text but are incited by the text.
With the redefinition of literature as something that only exists
meaningfully in the mind of the reader, and with the redefinition of the
literary work as a catalyst of mental events, comes a redefinition of the
reader. No longer is the reader the passive recipient of those ideas that an
author has planted in a text. "The reader is active," Rosenblatt
had insisted. Fish makes the same point in "Literature in the
Reader": "Reading is . . . something you do." Iser, in
focusing critical interest on the gaps in texts, on the blanks that readers
have to fill in, similarly redefines the reader as an active maker of meaning.
Other reader-response critics define the reader differently. Wayne Booth uses
the phrase the implied reader to mean the reader "created by the
work." Iser also uses the term the implied reader but substitutes the
educated reader for what Fish calls the intended reader.
Since the mid-1970s, reader-response criticism has evolved into a
variety of new forms. Subjectivists like David Bleich, Norman Holland, and
Robert Crosman have viewed the reader’s response not as one "guided"
by the text but rather as one motivated by deep-seated, personal, psychological
needs. Holland has suggested that, when we read, we find our own "identity
theme" in the text by using "the literary work to symbolize and
finally replicate ourselves. We work out through the text our own
characteristic patterns of desire." Even Fish has moved away from
reader-response criticism as he had initially helped define it, focusing on
"interpretive strategies" held in common by "interpretive communities"—such
as the one comprised by American college students reading a novel as a class
assignment.
Fish’s shift in focus is in many ways typical of changes that have
taken place within the field of reader-response criticism—a field that, because
of those changes, is increasingly being referred to as reader-oriented
criticism. Recent reader-oriented critics, responding to Fish’s emphasis on
interpretive communities and also to the historically oriented perception theory
of Hans Robert Jauss, have studied the way a given reading public’s
"horizons of expectations" change over time. Many of these
contemporary critics view themselves as reader-oriented critics and as
practitioners of some other critical approach as well. Certain feminist and
gender critics with an interest in reader response have asked whether there is
such a thing as "reading like a woman." Reading-oriented new
historicists have looked at the way in which racism affects and is affected by
reading and, more generally, at the way in which politics can affect reading
practices and outcomes. Gay and lesbian critics, such as Wayne Koestenbaum,
have argued that sexualities have been similarly constructed within and by
social discourses and that there may even be a homosexual way of reading.
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