Reader Response Criticism

The American Women's College; Jessica Egan

Introduction

Reader-response criticism has the reader at its foundation. According to reader-response theory, readers are crucial to the effectiveness and meaning of a piece of writing. Those who practice reader-response criticism argue that texts are created as the reader reads and engages with them. This activity will introduce you to reader response style and provide you with examples of criticism for your review.

Note that as you read through some of these materials, you will most likely encounter words you don’t know or use often. It will be worth your time to look these words up as you find them. Keep your phone or dictionary handy to look up words, jot down definitions, and understand their use in context. This will not be the last time you see many of these words, so take a couple extra minutes to learn them now.

Reader-Response Criticism

Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or “audience”) and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.

Although literary theory has long paid some attention to the reader’s role in creating the meaning and experience of a literary work, modern reader-response criticism began in the 1960s and ’70s, particularly in the US and Germany, in work by Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, Roland Barthes, and others.

Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts “real existence” to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. 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. It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and the New Criticism,

The Purpose of Reader-Response

Reader-response suggests that the role of the reader is essential to the meaning of a text, for only in the reading experience does the literary work come alive. For example, in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the monster doesn’t exist, so to speak, until the reader reads Frankenstein and reanimates it to life, becoming a co-creator of the text.

Thus, the purpose of a reading response is examining, explaining, and defending your personal reaction to a text.
Your critical reading of a text asks you to explore:

why you like or dislike the text;
explain whether you agree or disagree with the author;
identify the text’s purpose; and
critique the text.

There is no right or wrong answer to a reading response. Nonetheless, it is important that you demonstrate an understanding of the reading and clearly explain and support your reactions. Do not use the standard approach of just writing: “I liked this text because it is so cool and the ending made me feel happy,” or “I hated it because it was stupid, and had nothing at all to do with my life, and was too negative and boring.” In writing a response you may assume the reader has already read the text. Thus, do not summarize the contents of the text at length. Instead, take a systematic, analytical approach to the text.

Write as a Scholar

When writing a reader-response write as an educated adult addressing other adults or fellow scholars. As a beginning scholar, if you write that something has nothing to do with you or does not pass your “Who cares?” test, but many other people think that it is important and great, readers will probably not agree with you that the text is dull or boring. Instead, they may conclude that you are dull and boring, that you are too immature or uneducated to understand what important things the author wrote.

Criticize with Examples

If you did not like a text, that is fine, but criticize it either from:
principle, for example:

Is the text racist?
Does the text unreasonably puts down things, such as religion, or groups of people, such as women or adolescents, conservatives or democrats, etc?
Does the text include factual errors or outright lies? It is too dark and despairing? Is it falsely positive?

form, for example:

Is the text poorly written?
Does it contain too much verbal “fat”?
Is it too emotional or too childish?
Does it have too many facts and figures?
Are there typos or other errors in the text?
Do the ideas wander around without making a point?

In each of these cases, do not simply criticize, but give examples. As a beginning scholar, be cautious of criticizing any text as “confusing” or “crazy,” since readers might simply conclude that you are too ignorant or slow to understand and appreciate it.

The Structure of a Reader-Response Essay

Choosing a text to study is the first step in writing a reader-response essay. Once you have chosen the text, your challenge is to connect with it and have a “conversation” with the text.

In the beginning paragraph of your reader-response essay, be sure to mention the following:

title of the work to which you are responding;
the author; and
the main thesis of the text.

Then, do your best to answer the questions below. Remember, however, that you are writing an essay, not filling out a short-answer worksheet. You do not need to work through these questions in order, one by one, in your essay. Rather, your paper as a whole should be sure to address these questions in some way.

What does the text have to do with you, personally, and with your life (past, present or future)? It is not acceptable to write that the text has NOTHING to do with you, since just about everything humans can write has to do in some way with every other human.
How much does the text agree or clash with your view of the world, and what you consider right and wrong? Use several quotes as examples of how it agrees with and supports what you think about the world, about right and wrong, and about what you think it is to be human. Use quotes and examples to discuss how the text disagrees with what you think about the world and about right and wrong.
What did you learn, and how much were your views and opinions challenged or changed by this text, if at all? Did the text communicate with you? Why or why not? Give examples of how your views might have changed or been strengthened (or perhaps, of why the text failed to convince you, the way it is). Please do not write “I agree with everything the author wrote,” since everybody disagrees about something, even if it is a tiny point. Use quotes to illustrate your points of challenge, or where you were persuaded, or where it left you cold.
How well does the text address things that you, personally, care about and consider important to the world? How does it address things that are important to your family, your community, your ethnic group, to people of your economic or social class or background, or your faith tradition? If not, who does or did the text serve? Did it pass the “Who cares?” test? Use quotes from the text to illustrate.
What can you praise about the text? What problems did you have with it? Reading and writing “critically” does not mean the same thing as “criticizing,” in everyday language (complaining or griping, fault-finding, nit-picking). Your “critique” can and should be positive and praise the text if possible, as well as pointing out problems, disagreements and shortcomings.
How well did you enjoy the text (or not) as entertainment or as a work of art? Use quotes or examples to illustrate the quality of the text as art or entertainment. Of course, be aware that some texts are not meant to be entertainment or art: a news report or textbook, for instance, may be neither entertaining or artistic, but may still be important and successful.

For the conclusion, you might want to discuss:

your overall reaction to the text;
whether you would read something else like this in the future;
whether you would read something else by this author; and
if would you recommend read this text to someone else and why.

Putting It Together: Defining Characteristics of Romantic Literature. Authored by: Anne Eidenmuller & Lumen Learning. License: CC BY: Attribution

Reader-response criticism. Provided by: Wikipedia. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response_criticism. License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

Applying Reader-Response Theory

The systematic examination of the aspects of the text that arouse, shape, and guide a reader’s response. According to reader-response criticism, the reader is a producer rather than a consumer of meanings. In this sense, a reader is a hypothetical construct of norms and expectations that can be derived or projected or extrapolated from the work and may even be said to inhere in the work. Because expectations may be violated or fulfilled, satisfied or frustrated, and because reading is a temporal process involving memory, perception, and anticipation, the charting of reader-response is extremely difficult and perpetually subject to construction and reconstruction, vision and revision.

Reader-response criticism, however, does not denote any specific theory. It can range from the phenomenological theories of Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden — both of whom argue that although the reader fills in the gaps, the author’s intentional acts impose restrictions and conditions — to the relativistic analysis of Stanley Fish, who argues that the interpretive strategy of the reader creates the text, there being no text except that which a reader or an interpretive community of readers creates.
Reader Response Examples

Let’s begin with the famous opening from Jane Austen’s Emma (1816):“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”Jane Austen, Emma (New York: Penguin Classics, 2011).

Oh, that Emma Woodhouse. “Handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition,” certainly, but also vain, proud, and a mischievous-matchmaker in those things related to love. Not much of a character to base a novel on, the reader might muse. Austen was nervous about her creation of Emma, for as she wrote in a letter: “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Yet Austen does exactly this: in Emma, she creates a character that taxes the reader’s patience, one the author recognizes that readers may not like.

Austen’s comments on Emma point to the fact that readers identify with characters in a novel. And we can extrapolate further: readers like or dislike what they read; readers are moved to joy, anger, sadness, and so on by a literary work; and readers read literature from a personal level. For an author, this “reader response” is of utmost importance, as Austen most certainly realizes. If readers do not like Emma, do not empathize with her on some emotional level, then they will dislike the novel.

You will see that “likes” and “dislikes” are important markers in reader-response theory. Here’s an example: in Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (1984), the author, Fay Weldon, writes to her niece Alice, trying to convince her of the importance of Austen. “You tell me in passing,” writes Weldon, “that you are doing a college course in English Literature, and are obliged to read Jane Austen; that you find her boring, petty and irrelevant and, that as the world is in crisis, and the future catastrophic, you cannot imagine what purpose there can be in your reading her.”Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2011), 11. Weldon responds, “Emma opens with a paragraph which sends shivers of pleasure down my spine: it glitters with sheer competence: with the animation of the writer who has discovered power: who is at ease in the pathways of the City of Invention. Here is Emma, exciting envy in the heart of the reader and also, one suspects, the writer—and now, she declares, Emma will be undone; and I, the writer, and you, the reader, will share in this experience.”Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2011), 96. Weldon, of course, is responding to Austen on a very personal level—on the gut level we should say—which can make one have “shivers of pleasure” or “exciting envy” or “share in this [reading] experience.” What Weldon does to Austen and Emma is perform a reader-response interpretation.

Reader-response literary criticism recognizes the simple fact that readers respond to literature on an emotional level and that such responses are important to the understanding of the work. Long ago, even Aristotle recognized how important an audience’s reaction is to tragedy, for a key to tragedy is catharsis, the purging of the audience’s emotions. If you recall from Chapter 1 “Introduction: What Is Literary Theory and Why Should I Care?”, the concept of the affective fallacy was central to the New Critical methodology—a reader was never to confuse the interpretation of the literary work with the “feeling” she or he had while reading. These New Critics warned the reader that affective responses lead only to subjectivity; thus New Critics suggested that the reader pay close attention to the intricacies of the text under observation for meaning, for the text as a well-wrought urn contains meaning.

Reader-response critics, on the other hand, embrace the affective fallacy (what reader-response critic Stanley Fish has called the “affective fallacy fallacy”), for they believe that a reader’s affective response is importance to criticism.Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Instead of focusing on literature as a well-wrought urn, reader-response critics focus on the reader, who “completes” or “activates” the text as he or she reads. In a sense, the reader becomes the most important element in the reading process, supplanting even the author.

When you think about it, reader-response criticism makes perfect sense. How many times have you become so immersed in a work that you are oblivious to the world around you? If you like fantasy literature, you might still recall the first time you read the Harry Potter series—you were transported out of your Muggle world into the magical Hogwarts, where Harry and his friends battle the dark forces of the one we should not name. How many of you stood in line to get your copy of the latest Harry Potter novel at midnight? Or camped out at the theater to be one of the first to see the final installment of The Deathly Hallows? There may even be a few of you who are not Potter fans, but be warned—don’t share those thoughts too readily! A case point: one of the editors of this textbook, John Pennington, found this out quite clearly. He teaches a general-education course called Science Fiction and Fantasy, which attracts die-hard fans of these popular forms of fiction. When the first volume of the Harry Potter series came out, he was approached by a student, who told him that this was the best fantasy literature since J. R. R. Tolkien, maybe even better. Quite a claim, and one that came from a very intelligent student who clearly was excited about Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone! However, Pennington found that he did not enjoy the novel as much as his student had. So he read the next volume, and the next, and…you get the picture. To put it bluntly, he wasn’t that impressed with the Harry Potter series. He eventually published an article in The Lion and the Unicorn, a critical journal that focuses on children’s literature. In that article, he critiques the Harry Potter series as ineffective—shall we say, “failed”—fantasy literature.John Pennington, “From Elfland to Hogwarts, or the Aesthetic Trouble with Harry Potter,” The Lion and the Unicorn 26, no. 1 (2002): 78–97.

Henderson, G.E and Brown, C. Reader Response Criticism. In Glossary of Literary Theory. Retrieved from https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Reader-Response-Criticism.pdf

Writing about Readers: Applying Reader-Response Theory. (December 20, 2012) In Creating Literary Analysis. Retrieved from https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/creating-literary-analysis/s10-writing-about-readers-applying.html

Summary