Reader-response criticism
This movement shifted the focus from the text to the reader[1] and argues that affective response is a legitimate point for departure in criticism.
[2] Classic reader-response critics include Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss,[3] and Roland Barthes.
A. Richards, who in 1929 analyzed a group of Cambridge undergraduates' misreadings; and Louise Rosenblatt, who, in Literature as Exploration (1938), argued that it is important for the teacher to avoid imposing any "preconceived notions about the proper way to react to any work".
Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation.
There are multiple approaches within the theoretical branch of reader-response criticism, yet all are unified in their belief that the meaning of a text is derived from the reader through the reading process.
Reader-response critics in the United States such as Holland and Bleich are characterized as individualists due to their use of psychology as starting point, focusing on the individual identity when processing a text.
In the 1960s, David Bleich's pedagogically inspired literary theory entailed that the text is the reader's interpretation of it as it exists in their mind, and that an objective reading is not possible due to the symbolization and resymbolization process.
[7] The symbolization and resymbolization process consists of how an individual's personal emotions, needs and life experiences affect how a reader engages with a text; marginally altering the meaning.
Michael Steig and Walter Slatoff have, like Bleich, shown that students' highly personal responses can provide the basis for critical analyses in the classroom.
[10] Modern reader-response critics have drawn from his idea that one cannot see the thing itself but only the image conjured in his mind as induced by stimulated sense perceptions.
[10] In 1967, Stanley Fish published Surprised by Sin, the first study of a large literary work (Paradise Lost) that focused on its readers' experience.
Holland worked with others at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Murray Schwartz, David Willbern, and Robert Rogers, to develop a particular teaching format, the "Delphi seminar," designed to get students to "know themselves".
[15] Reuven Tsur in Israel has developed in great detail models for the expressivity of poetic rhythms, of metaphor, and of word-sound in poetry (including different actors' readings of a single line of Shakespeare).
Within various polarities created by the text, this "implied" reader makes expectations, meanings, and the unstated details of characters and settings through a "wandering viewpoint".
Iser describes the reader's maneuvers in the negotiation of a text in the following way: "We look forward, we look back, we decide, we change our decisions, we form expectations, we are shocked by their nonfulfillment, we question, we muse, we accept, we reject; this is the dynamic process of recreation.
"[19] Iser's approach to reading has been adopted by several New Testament critics, including Culpepper 1983,[20] Scott 1989,[21] Roth 1997,[22] Darr 1992, 1998,[23] Fowler 1991, 2008,[24] Howell 1990,[25] Kurz 1993,[26] and Powell 2001.
[27] Another important German reader-response critic was Hans-Robert Jauss, who defined literature as a dialectic process of production and reception (Rezeption—the term common in Germany for "response").
Traditional text-oriented schools, such as formalism, often think of reader-response criticism as an anarchic subjectivism, allowing readers to interpret a text any way they want.
Increasingly, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and neuropsychoanalysis have given reader-response critics powerful and detailed models for the aesthetic process.
In 2011 researchers found that during listening to emotionally intense parts of a story, readers respond with changes in heart rate variability, indicative of increased activation of the sympathetic nervous system.
Intense parts of a story were also accompanied by increased brain activity in a network of regions known to be involved in the processing of fear, including the amygdala.
In stressing the activity of the reader, reader-response theory may be employed to justify upsettings of traditional interpretations like deconstruction or cultural criticism.
