Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Wikipedia's Reader Response highlights

Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates their own, possibly unique, text-related performance.

 categorizing reader-response theorists explicitly invites difficultly due to their overlapping beliefs and practices.[2] Transactional reader-response theory, led by Louise Rosenblatt and supported by Wolfgang Iser, involves a transaction between the text's inferred meaning and the individual interpretation by the reader influenced by their personal emotions and knowledge.[2] Affective stylistics, established by Stanley Fish, believe that a text can only come into existence as it is read; therefore, a text cannot have meaning independent of the reader.[2] Subjective reader-response theory, associated with David Bleich, looks entirely to the reader's response for literary meaning as individual written responses to a text are then compared to other individual interpretations to find continuity of meaning.[2] Psychological reader-response theory, employed by Norman Holland, believes that a reader’s motives heavily affect how they read, and subsequently use this reading to analyze the psychological response of the reader.[2] Social reader-response theory is Stanley Fish's extension of his earlier work, stating that any individual interpretation of a text is created in an interpretive community of minds consisting of participants who share a specific reading and interpretation strategy.[2] In all interpretive communities, readers are predisposed to a particular form of interpretation as a consequence of strategies used at the time of reading.[2]

The most fundamental difference among reader-response critics is probably, then, between those who regard individual differences among readers' responses as important and those who try to get around them.