Reader-response criticism
Encyclopedia
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory
that focuses on the reader
(or "audience
") and his or her 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 America and Germany, in work by Norman Holland, Stanley Fish
, Wolfgang Iser
, Hans-Robert Jauss
, Roland Barthes
, and others. Important predecessors were I. A. Richards
, who in 1929 analyzed a group of Cambridge undergraduates' misreadings; 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"; and C. S. Lewis
in An Experiment in Criticism
(1961).
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 his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism
and the New Criticism
, in which the reader's role in re-creating literary works is ignored. New Criticism had emphasized that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text. No appeal to the authority or intention of the author
, nor to the psychology
of the reader, was allowed in the discussions of orthodox New Critics.
teaching of literature. He claimed that his classes "generated" knowledge, that is, knowledge of how particular persons recreate texts.
Michael Steig and Walter Slatoff have, like Bleich, shown that students' highly personal responses can provide the basis for critical analyses in the classroom. Jeffrey Berman has encouraged students responding to texts to write anonymously and share with their classmates writings in response to literary works about sensitive subjects like drugs, suicidal thoughts, death in the family, parental abuse and the like. A kind of catharsis
bordering on therapy results. In general, American reader-response critics have focused on individual readers' responses. American magazine
s like Reader, Reading Research Quarterly, and others publish articles applying reader-response theory to the teaching of literature.
In 1961, C. S. Lewis published An Experiment in Criticism
, in which he analyzed readers' role in selecting literature. He analyzed their selections in light of their goals in reading.
In 1967, Stanley Fish
published Surprised by Sin, the first study of a large literary work (Paradise Lost
) that focused on its readers' experience. In an appendix, "Literature in the Reader", Fish used "the" reader to examine responses to complex sentences sequentially, word-by-word. Since 1976, however, he has turned to real differences among real readers. He explores the reading tactics endorsed by different critical schools, by the literary professoriate, and by the legal profession, introducing the idea of "interpretive communities
" that share particular modes of reading.
In 1968, Norman Holland drew on psychoanalytic psychology in The Dynamics of Literary Response to model the literary work. Each reader introjects a fantasy "in" the text, then modifies it by defense mechanisms into an interpretation. In 1973, however, having recorded responses from real readers, Holland found variations too great to fit this model in which responses are mostly alike but show minor individual variations.
Holland then developed a second model based on his case studies 5 Readers Reading. An individual has (in the brain) a core identity theme (behaviors then becoming understandable as a theme and variations as in music). This core gives that individual a certain style of being--and reading. Each reader uses the physical literary work plus invariable codes (such as the shapes of letters) plus variable canon
s (different "interpretive communities", for example) plus an individual style of reading to build a response both like and unlike other readers' responses. 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".
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). Richard Gerrig in the U.S. has experimented with the reader's state of mind during and after a literary experience. He has shown how readers put aside ordinary knowledge and values while they read, treating, for example, criminals as heroes. He has also investigated how readers accept, while reading, improbable or fantastic things (lays. Jenefer Robinson, a researcher in emotion, has recently blended her studies on emotion with its role in literature, music, and art.
exemplifies the German tendency to theorize the reader and so posit a uniform response. For him, a literary work is not an object in itself but an effect to be explained. But he asserts this response is controlled by the text. For the "real" reader, he substitutes an implied reader, who is the reader a given literary work requires. 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". In his model, the text controls. The reader's activities are confined within limits set by the literary work.
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"). For Jauss, readers have a certain mental set, a "horizon" of expectations (Erwartungshorizont), from which perspective each reader, at any given time in history, reads. Reader-response criticism establishes these horizons of expectation by reading literary works of the period in question.
Both Iser and Jauss, and the Constance School they exemplify, return reader-response criticism to a study of the text by defining readers in terms of the text. In the same way, Gerald Prince posits a "narratee", Michael Riffaterre
posits a "superreader", and Stanley Fish
an "informed reader." And many text-oriented critics simply speak of "the" reader who typifies all readers.
, allowing readers to interpret a text any way they want. They accuse reader-response critics of saying the text doesn't exist. (Reader-response critics respond that they are only saying that to explore someone's literary experience, one must ask the someone, not pore over the text.) By contrast, text-oriented critics assume that one can understand a text while remaining immune to one's own culture, status, personality
, and so on, and hence "objectively."
To reader-response based theorists, however, reading is always both subjective
and objective
, and their question is not "which" but "how". Some reader-response critics (uniformists) assume a bi-active model of reading: the literary work controls part of the response and the reader controls part. Others, who see that position as internally contradictory, claim that the reader controls the whole transaction (individualists). In such a reader-active model, readers and audiences use amateur or professional procedures for reading (shared by many others) as well as their personal issues and values.
Another objection to reader-response criticism is that it fails to account for the text being able to expand the reader's understanding. While readers can and do put their own ideas and experiences into a work, they are at the same time gaining new understanding through the text. This is something that is generally overlooked in reader-response criticism.
Some argue that 'artworks' are now purposely being fabricated which lack meaning but rather the 'artworks' are fabricated only to generate a reader response. The reader response then is corralled via interpretative communities. Reader response rather than handing a freedom to the reader empowers the leaders of an interpretative community against the reader. The reader has no ground to evaluate the 'artwork' as the artwork is senseless. Only a reader response, basically an emotive response, is legitimate. The Web provides an ideal way to form such interpretative communities. The power of reader response strategy is that people are fundamentally 'hungry' for culture and will attempt to impart meaning even to artworks that are senseless. Of course, people can always opt out of these interpretative communities centered around senseless artworks with little to no loss vis-a-vis culture and almost certainly a cultural gain.
Paradoxically reader response criticism as done by critics today attempts to tell the reader what the reader is allegedly thinking about an artwork. Basically when employing reader response theory to criticism it has to be this way as otherwise the critic fails to connect to the audience in any way as otherwise the idiosyncratic views of the reviewer, perhaps based on neuropsychoanalysis, for example, are put forward with a loss of a popular audience. Moreover, being a leader of an interpretative community has attractions over detailed analysis of summer blockbusters. Reader response criticism is clearly a cultural dominant amongst those who do popular criticism.
for those attempting to find principles of response, and psychoanalytic psychology for those studying individual responses. Post-behaviorist psychologists of reading and of perception
support the idea that it is the reader who makes meaning. 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 amygdala
.
Because it rests on psychological principles, a reader-response approach readily generalizes to other arts: cinema
(David Bordwell
), music, or visual art (E. H. Gombrich), and even to history (Hayden White
). In stressing the activity of the scholar, reader-response theory justifies such upsettings of traditional interpretations as, for example, deconstruction
or cultural criticism.
Since reader-response critics focus on the strategies readers are taught to use, they address the teaching of reading and literature. Also, because reader-response criticism stresses the activity of the reader, reader-response critics readily share the concerns of feminist
critics and critics writing on behalf of gays, ethnic minorities, or post-colonial peoples.
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
that focuses on the reader
Reading (process)
Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of constructing or deriving meaning . It is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas...
(or "audience
Audience
An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature , theatre, music or academics in any medium...
") and his or her experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form
Mode (literature)
In literature, a mode is an employed method or approach, identifiable within a written work. As descriptive terms, form and genre are often used inaccurately instead of mode; for example, the pastoral mode is often mistakenly identified as a genre...
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 America and Germany, in work by Norman Holland, Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish
Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island...
, Wolfgang Iser
Wolfgang Iser
-Biography:He was born in Marienberg, Germany. His parents were Paul and Else Iser. He studied literature in the universities of Leipzig and Tübingen before receiving his PhD in English at Heidelberg with a dissertation on the world view of Henry Fielding...
, Hans-Robert Jauss
Hans-Robert Jauss
Hans Robert Jauss was a German academic, notable for his work in reception theory and medieval and modern French literature.-Early years and education:...
, Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
, and others. Important predecessors were I. A. Richards
I. A. Richards
Ivor Armstrong Richards was an influential English literary critic and rhetorician....
, who in 1929 analyzed a group of Cambridge undergraduates' misreadings; Louise Rosenblatt
Louise Rosenblatt
Louise Michelle Rosenblatt was an American university professor. She is best-known as a researcher into the teaching of literature.-Biography:...
, 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"; and C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
in An Experiment in Criticism
An Experiment in Criticism
An Experiment in Criticism is a 1961 book by C. S. Lewis in which he proposes that the quality of books should be measured not by how they are written, but by how they are read. To do this, the author describes two kinds of readers. One is what he calls the "unliterary", and the other the...
(1961).
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 his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism
Formalism (literature)
Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar...
and the New Criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...
, in which the reader's role in re-creating literary works is ignored. New Criticism had emphasized that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text. No appeal to the authority or intention of the author
Authorial intentionality
In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in his or her work.-Literary theory:In literary studies, the question of the validity of the methods of determining authorial intent has been debated since the early twentieth century. New Criticism,...
, nor to the psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
of the reader, was allowed in the discussions of orthodox New Critics.
Kinds of reader-response criticism
One can sort reader-response theorists into three groups: those who focus upon the individual reader's experience ("individualists"); those who conduct psychological experiments on a defined set of readers ("experimenters"); and those who assume a fairly uniform response by all readers ("uniformists"). One can therefore draw a distinction between reader-response theorists who see the individual reader driving the whole experience and others who think of literary experience as largely text-driven and uniform (with individual variations that can be ignored). The former theorists, who think the reader controls, derive what is common in a literary experience from shared techniques for reading and interpreting which are, however, individually applied by different readers. The latter, who put the text in control, derive commonalities of response, obviously, from the literary work itself. 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.Individualists
In the 1960s, David Bleich began collecting statements by influencing students of their feelings and associations. He used these to theorize about the reading process and to refocus the classroomClassroom
A classroom is a room in which teaching or learning activities can take place. Classrooms are found in educational institutions of all kinds, including public and private schools, corporations, and religious and humanitarian organizations...
teaching of literature. He claimed that his classes "generated" knowledge, that is, knowledge of how particular persons recreate texts.
Michael Steig and Walter Slatoff have, like Bleich, shown that students' highly personal responses can provide the basis for critical analyses in the classroom. Jeffrey Berman has encouraged students responding to texts to write anonymously and share with their classmates writings in response to literary works about sensitive subjects like drugs, suicidal thoughts, death in the family, parental abuse and the like. A kind of catharsis
Catharsis
Catharsis or katharsis is a Greek word meaning "cleansing" or "purging". It is derived from the verb καθαίρειν, kathairein, "to purify, purge," and it is related to the adjective καθαρός, katharos, "pure or clean."-Dramatic uses:...
bordering on therapy results. In general, American reader-response critics have focused on individual readers' responses. American magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
s like Reader, Reading Research Quarterly, and others publish articles applying reader-response theory to the teaching of literature.
In 1961, C. S. Lewis published An Experiment in Criticism
An Experiment in Criticism
An Experiment in Criticism is a 1961 book by C. S. Lewis in which he proposes that the quality of books should be measured not by how they are written, but by how they are read. To do this, the author describes two kinds of readers. One is what he calls the "unliterary", and the other the...
, in which he analyzed readers' role in selecting literature. He analyzed their selections in light of their goals in reading.
In 1967, Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish
Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island...
published Surprised by Sin, the first study of a large literary work (Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse...
) that focused on its readers' experience. In an appendix, "Literature in the Reader", Fish used "the" reader to examine responses to complex sentences sequentially, word-by-word. Since 1976, however, he has turned to real differences among real readers. He explores the reading tactics endorsed by different critical schools, by the literary professoriate, and by the legal profession, introducing the idea of "interpretive communities
Interpretive communities
Interpretive communities are a theoretical concept stemming from reader-response criticism and invented by Stanley Fish. They appeared in an article by Fish in 1976 entitled "Interpreting the Variorum". Fish's theory states that a text does not have meaning outside of a set of cultural assumptions...
" that share particular modes of reading.
In 1968, Norman Holland drew on psychoanalytic psychology in The Dynamics of Literary Response to model the literary work. Each reader introjects a fantasy "in" the text, then modifies it by defense mechanisms into an interpretation. In 1973, however, having recorded responses from real readers, Holland found variations too great to fit this model in which responses are mostly alike but show minor individual variations.
Holland then developed a second model based on his case studies 5 Readers Reading. An individual has (in the brain) a core identity theme (behaviors then becoming understandable as a theme and variations as in music). This core gives that individual a certain style of being--and reading. Each reader uses the physical literary work plus invariable codes (such as the shapes of letters) plus variable canon
Canon (fiction)
In the context of a work of fiction, the term canon denotes the material accepted as "official" in a fictional universe's fan base. It is often contrasted with, or used as the basis for, works of fan fiction, which are not considered canonical...
s (different "interpretive communities", for example) plus an individual style of reading to build a response both like and unlike other readers' responses. Holland worked with others at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Murray Schwartz, David Willbern, and Robert Rogers
Robert Rogers
Robert Rogers may refer to:*Robert Rogers , 18th century American colonial officer, explorer and playwright*Robert Rogers , Canadian politician...
, to develop a particular teaching format, the "Delphi seminar," designed to get students to "know themselves".
Experimenters
Reuven TsurReuven Tsur
Reuven Tsur is professor emeritus of Hebrew literature and literary theory at Tel Aviv University. He was born in Nagyvárad, Transylvania and his mother tongue is Hungarian.- Scientific Contribution :...
in Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
has developed in great detail models for the expressivity of poetic rhythms, of metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
, and of word-sound in poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
(including different actors' readings of a single line of Shakespeare). Richard Gerrig in the U.S. has experimented with the reader's state of mind during and after a literary experience. He has shown how readers put aside ordinary knowledge and values while they read, treating, for example, criminals as heroes. He has also investigated how readers accept, while reading, improbable or fantastic things (lays. Jenefer Robinson, a researcher in emotion, has recently blended her studies on emotion with its role in literature, music, and art.
Uniformists
Wolfgang IserWolfgang Iser
-Biography:He was born in Marienberg, Germany. His parents were Paul and Else Iser. He studied literature in the universities of Leipzig and Tübingen before receiving his PhD in English at Heidelberg with a dissertation on the world view of Henry Fielding...
exemplifies the German tendency to theorize the reader and so posit a uniform response. For him, a literary work is not an object in itself but an effect to be explained. But he asserts this response is controlled by the text. For the "real" reader, he substitutes an implied reader, who is the reader a given literary work requires. 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". In his model, the text controls. The reader's activities are confined within limits set by the literary work.
Another important German reader-response critic was Hans-Robert Jauss
Hans-Robert Jauss
Hans Robert Jauss was a German academic, notable for his work in reception theory and medieval and modern French literature.-Early years and education:...
, who defined literature as a dialectic
Dialectic
Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...
process of production and reception (Rezeption--the term common in Germany for "response"). For Jauss, readers have a certain mental set, a "horizon" of expectations (Erwartungshorizont), from which perspective each reader, at any given time in history, reads. Reader-response criticism establishes these horizons of expectation by reading literary works of the period in question.
Both Iser and Jauss, and the Constance School they exemplify, return reader-response criticism to a study of the text by defining readers in terms of the text. In the same way, Gerald Prince posits a "narratee", Michael Riffaterre
Michael Riffaterre
Michael or Michel Riffaterre was an influential French literary critic and theorist. He pursued a generally structuralist approach. He is well known in particular for his book Semiotics of Poetry, and the concepts of hypogram and syllepsis.He was born in Bourganeuf, in the Limousin region of France...
posits a "superreader", and Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish
Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island...
an "informed reader." And many text-oriented critics simply speak of "the" reader who typifies all readers.
Objections
Reader-response critics hold that, to understand the literary experience or the meaning of a text, one must look to the processes readers use to create that meaning and experience. Traditional, text-oriented critics often think of reader-response criticism as an anarchic subjectivismSubjectivism
Subjectivism is a philosophical tenet that accords primacy to subjective experience as fundamental of all measure and law. In extreme forms like Solipsism, it may hold that the nature and existence of every object depends solely on someone's subjective awareness of it...
, allowing readers to interpret a text any way they want. They accuse reader-response critics of saying the text doesn't exist. (Reader-response critics respond that they are only saying that to explore someone's literary experience, one must ask the someone, not pore over the text.) By contrast, text-oriented critics assume that one can understand a text while remaining immune to one's own culture, status, personality
Personality psychology
Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that studies personality and individual differences. Its areas of focus include:* Constructing a coherent picture of the individual and his or her major psychological processes...
, and so on, and hence "objectively."
To reader-response based theorists, however, reading is always both subjective
Subject (philosophy)
In philosophy, a subject is a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness or a relationship with another entity . A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed...
and objective
Objectivity (philosophy)
Objectivity is a central philosophical concept which has been variously defined by sources. A proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are met and are "mind-independent"—that is, not met by the judgment of a conscious entity or subject.- Objectivism...
, and their question is not "which" but "how". Some reader-response critics (uniformists) assume a bi-active model of reading: the literary work controls part of the response and the reader controls part. Others, who see that position as internally contradictory, claim that the reader controls the whole transaction (individualists). In such a reader-active model, readers and audiences use amateur or professional procedures for reading (shared by many others) as well as their personal issues and values.
Another objection to reader-response criticism is that it fails to account for the text being able to expand the reader's understanding. While readers can and do put their own ideas and experiences into a work, they are at the same time gaining new understanding through the text. This is something that is generally overlooked in reader-response criticism.
Some argue that 'artworks' are now purposely being fabricated which lack meaning but rather the 'artworks' are fabricated only to generate a reader response. The reader response then is corralled via interpretative communities. Reader response rather than handing a freedom to the reader empowers the leaders of an interpretative community against the reader. The reader has no ground to evaluate the 'artwork' as the artwork is senseless. Only a reader response, basically an emotive response, is legitimate. The Web provides an ideal way to form such interpretative communities. The power of reader response strategy is that people are fundamentally 'hungry' for culture and will attempt to impart meaning even to artworks that are senseless. Of course, people can always opt out of these interpretative communities centered around senseless artworks with little to no loss vis-a-vis culture and almost certainly a cultural gain.
Paradoxically reader response criticism as done by critics today attempts to tell the reader what the reader is allegedly thinking about an artwork. Basically when employing reader response theory to criticism it has to be this way as otherwise the critic fails to connect to the audience in any way as otherwise the idiosyncratic views of the reviewer, perhaps based on neuropsychoanalysis, for example, are put forward with a loss of a popular audience. Moreover, being a leader of an interpretative community has attractions over detailed analysis of summer blockbusters. Reader response criticism is clearly a cultural dominant amongst those who do popular criticism.
Extensions
Reader-response criticism relates to psychology, both experimental psychologyExperimental psychology
Experimental psychology is a methodological approach, rather than a subject, and encompasses varied fields within psychology. Experimental psychologists have traditionally conducted research, published articles, and taught classes on neuroscience, developmental psychology, sensation, perception,...
for those attempting to find principles of response, and psychoanalytic psychology for those studying individual responses. Post-behaviorist psychologists of reading and of perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
support the idea that it is the reader who makes meaning. Increasingly, cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
, psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
, 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
Heart rate variability
Heart rate variability is a physiological phenomenon where the time interval between heart beats varies. It is measured by the variation in the beat-to-beat interval....
, indicative of increased activation of the sympathetic nervous system
Sympathetic nervous system
The sympathetic nervous system is one of the three parts of the autonomic nervous system, along with the enteric and parasympathetic systems. Its general action is to mobilize the body's nervous system fight-or-flight response...
. 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 amygdala
Amygdala
The ' are almond-shaped groups of nuclei located deep within the medial temporal lobes of the brain in complex vertebrates, including humans. Shown in research to perform a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the amygdalae are considered part of the limbic system.-...
.
Because it rests on psychological principles, a reader-response approach readily generalizes to other arts: cinema
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
(David Bordwell
David Bordwell
David Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film , Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema , Making Meaning , and On the...
), music, or visual art (E. H. Gombrich), and even to history (Hayden White
Hayden White
Hayden White is a historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe...
). In stressing the activity of the scholar, reader-response theory justifies such upsettings of traditional interpretations as, for example, deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
or cultural criticism.
Since reader-response critics focus on the strategies readers are taught to use, they address the teaching of reading and literature. Also, because reader-response criticism stresses the activity of the reader, reader-response critics readily share the concerns of feminist
Feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...
critics and critics writing on behalf of gays, ethnic minorities, or post-colonial peoples.
Further reading
- Tompkins, Jane P. (ed.) (1980). Reader-response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 080182401X.