reader response criticism quotes

2. Reading Literature as a Critic

Reader-response criticism.

We have examined many schools of literary criticism. Here you will find an in-depth look at one of them: Reader-Response.

The Purpose of Reader-Response

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.

Write as a Scholar

Criticize with examples.

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?
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

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

Key Takeaways

In reader-response, the reader is essential to the meaning of a text for they bring the text to life.
The purpose of a reading response is examining, explaining, and defending your personal reaction to a text.
When writing a reader-response, write as an educated adult addressing other adults or fellow scholars.
As a beginning scholar, be cautious of criticizing any text as “boring,” “crazy,” or “dull.” If you do criticize, base your criticism on the principles and form of the text itself.
The challenge of a reader-response is to show how you connected with the text.

Reader-Response Essay Example

To Misread or to Rebel: A Woman’s Reading of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”

At its simplest, reading is “an activity that is guided by the text; this must be processed by the reader who is then, in turn, affected by what he has processed” (Iser 63). The text is the compass and map, the reader is the explorer. However, the explorer cannot disregard those unexpected boulders in the path which he or she encounters along the journey that are not written on the map. Likewise, the woman reader does not come to the text without outside influences. She comes with her experiences as a woman—a professional woman, a divorcée, a single mother. Her reading, then, is influenced by her experiences. So when she reads a piece of literature like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber, which paints a highly negative picture of Mitty’s wife, the woman reader is forced to either misread the story and accept Mrs. Mitty as a domineering, mothering wife, or rebel against that picture and become angry at the society which sees her that way.

Due to pre-existing sociosexual standards, women see characters, family structures, even societal structures from the bottom as an oppressed group rather than from a powerful position on the top, as men do. As Louise Rosenblatt states: a reader’s “tendency toward identification [with characters or events] will certainly be guided by our preoccupations at the time we read. Our problems and needs may lead us to focus on those characters and situations through which we may achieve the satisfactions, the balanced vision, or perhaps merely the unequivocal motives unattained in our own lives” (38). A woman reader who feels chained by her role as a housewife is more likely to identify with an individual who is oppressed or feels trapped than the reader’s executive husband is. Likewise, a woman who is unable to have children might respond to a story of a child’s death more emotionally than a woman who does not want children. However, if the perspective of a woman does not match that of the male author whose work she is reading, a woman reader who has been shaped by a male-dominated society is forced to misread the text, reacting to the “words on the page in one way rather than another because she operates according to the same set of rules that the author used to generate them” (Tompkins xvii). By accepting the author’s perspective and reading the text as he intended, the woman reader is forced to disregard her own, female perspective. This, in turn, leads to a concept called “asymmetrical contingency,” described by Iser as that which occurs “when Partner A gives up trying to implement his own behavioral plan and without resistance follows that of Partner B. He adapts himself to and is absorbed by the behavioral strategy of B” (164). Using this argument, it becomes clear that a woman reader (Partner A) when faced with a text written by a man (Partner B) will most likely succumb to the perspective of the writer and she is thus forced to misread the text. Or, she could rebel against the text and raise an angry, feminist voice in protest.

James Thurber, in the eyes of most literary critics, is one of the foremost American humorists of the 20th century, and his short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is believed to have “ushered in a major [literary] period … where the individual can maintain his self … an appropriate way of assaulting rigid forms” (Elias 432). The rigid form in Thurber’s story is Mrs. Mitty, the main character’s wife. She is portrayed by Walter Mitty as a horrible, mothering nag. As a way of escaping her constant griping, he imagines fantastic daydreams which carry him away from Mrs. Mitty’s voice. Yet she repeatedly interrupts his reveries and Mitty responds to her as though she is “grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in the crowd” (286). Not only is his wife annoying to him, but she is also distant and removed from what he cares about, like a stranger. When she does speak to him, it seems reflective of the way a mother would speak to a child. For example, Mrs. Mitty asks, “‘Why don’t you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?’ Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again” (286). Mrs. Mitty’s care for her husband’s health is seen as nagging to Walter Mitty, and the audience is amused that he responds like a child and does the opposite of what Mrs. Mitty asked of him. Finally, the clearest way in which Mrs. Mitty is portrayed as a burdensome wife is at the end of the piece when Walter, waiting for his wife to exit the store, imagines that he is facing “the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last” (289). Not only is Mrs. Mitty portrayed as a mothering, bothersome hen, but she is ultimately described as that which will be the death of Walter Mitty.

Mrs. Mitty is a direct literary descendant of the first woman to be stereotyped as a nagging wife, Dame Van Winkle, the creation of the American writer, Washington Irving. Likewise, Walter Mitty is a reflection of his dreaming predecessor, Rip Van Winkle, who falls into a deep sleep for a hundred years and awakes to the relief of finding out that his nagging wife has died. Judith Fetterley explains in her book, The Resisting Reader, how such a portrayal of women forces a woman who reads “Rip Van Winkle” and other such stories “to find herself excluded from the experience of the story” so that she “cannot read the story without being assaulted by the negative images of women it presents” (10). The result, it seems, is for a woman reader of a story like “Rip Van Winkle” or “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” to either be excluded from the text, or accept the negative images of women the story puts forth. As Fetterley points out, “The consequence for the female reader is a divided self. She is asked to identify with Rip and against herself, to scorn the amiable sex and act just like it, to laugh at Dame Van Winkle and accept that she represents ‘woman,’ to be at once both repressor and repressed, and ultimately to realize that she is neither” (11). Thus, a woman is forced to misread the text and accept “woman as villain.” as Fetterley names it, or rebel against both the story and its message.

So how does a woman reader respond to this portrayal of Mrs. Mitty? If she were to follow Iser’s claim, she would defer to the male point of view presented by the author. She would sympathize with Mitty, as Thurber wants us to do, and see domineering women in her own life that resemble Mrs. Mitty. She may see her mother and remember all the times that she nagged her about zipping up her coat against the bitter winter wind. Or the female reader might identify Mrs. Mitty with her controlling mother-in-law and chuckle at Mitty’s attempts to escape her control, just as her husband tries to escape the criticism and control of his own mother. Iser’s ideal female reader would undoubtedly look at her own position as mother and wife and would vow to never become such a domineering person. This reader would probably also agree with a critic who says that “Mitty has a wife who embodies the authority of a society in which the husband cannot function” (Lindner 440). She could see the faults in a relationship that is too controlled by a woman and recognize that a man needs to feel important and dominant in his relationship with his wife. It could be said that the female reader would agree completely with Thurber’s portrayal of the domineering wife. The female reader could simply misread the text.

Or, the female reader could rebel against the text. She could see Mrs. Mitty as a woman who is trying to do her best to keep her husband well and cared for. She could see Walter as a man with a fleeting grip on reality who daydreams that he is a fighter pilot, a brilliant surgeon, a gun expert, or a military hero, when he actually is a poor driver with a slow reaction time to a green traffic light. The female reader could read critics of Thurber who say that by allowing his wife to dominate him, Mitty becomes a “non-hero in a civilization in which women are winning the battle of the sexes” (Hasley 533) and become angry that a woman’s fight for equality is seen merely as a battle between the sexes. She could read Walter’s daydreams as his attempt to dominate his wife, since all of his fantasies center on him in traditional roles of power. This, for most women, would cause anger at Mitty (and indirectly Thurber) for creating and promoting a society which believes that women need to stay subservient to men. From a male point of view, it becomes a battle of the sexes. In a woman’s eyes, her reading is simply a struggle for equality within the text and in the world outside that the text reflects.

It is certain that women misread “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” I did. I found myself initially wishing that Mrs. Mitty would just let Walter daydream in peace. But after reading the story again and paying attention to the portrayal of Mrs. Mitty, I realized that it is imperative that women rebel against the texts that would oppress them. By misreading a text, the woman reader understands it in a way that is conventional and acceptable to the literary world. But in so doing, she is also distancing herself from the text, not fully embracing it or its meaning in her life. By rebelling against the text, the female reader not only has to understand the point of view of the author and the male audience, but she also has to formulate her own opinions and create a sort of dialogue between the text and herself. Rebelling against the text and the stereotypes encourages an active dialogue between the woman and the text which, in turn, guarantees an active and (most likely) angry reader response. I became a resisting reader.

Works Cited

Elias, Robert H. “James Thurber: The Primitive, the Innocent, and the Individual.” Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 5. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 431–32. Print.

Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Print.

Hasley, Louis. “James Thurber: Artist in Humor.” Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 11. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 532–34. Print.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. Print.

Lindner, Carl M. “Thurber’s Walter Mitty—The Underground American Hero.” Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 5. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 440–41. Print.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration . New York: MLA, 1976. Print.

Thurber, James. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Literature: An Introduction to Critical Reading . Ed. William Vesterman. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1993. 286–89. Print.

Tompkins, Jane P. “An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism.” Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism . Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. ix-xxvi. Print.

Putting It Together: Defining Characteristics of Romantic Literature. Provided by : Anne Eidenmuller & Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
Reader-Response . Authored by : Daryl Smith O’Hare and Susan C. Hines. Provided by : Chadron State College. Located at : http://www.csc.edu/ . Project : Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. License : CC BY: Attribution
Reader-Response. Authored by : Anonymous. Provided by : Anonymous. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
How to Write a Reaction Paper or Reader Response. Authored by : Owen M. Williamson. Provided by : The University of Texas at El Paso. Located at : http://www.utep.edu/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
To Misread or to Rebel: A Woman’s Reading of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Authored by : Amy Ferdinandt. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

Collaboration, information literacy, writing process, reader-response criticism.

Reader-Response Criticism is

a research method , a type of textual research , that literary critics use to interpret texts
a genre of discourse employed by literary critics used to share the results of their interpretive efforts.

Key Terms: Dialectic ; Hermeneutics ; Semiotics ; Text & Intertextuality ; Tone

The origins of reader-oriented criticism can be located in the United States with Louise Rosenblatt’s development of theories in the 1930s, though she further developed her theories in the late seventies ( The Reader, the Text, the Poem 1978). American critic Stanley Fish has also significantly influenced Reader-Response theory. He conceived of “interpretive communities” that employ interpretive strategies to produce properties and meanings of literary texts (14-15). The thoughts, ideas, and experiences a reader brings to the text, combined with the text and experience of reading it, work together to create meaning. Reader + Text = Meaning.

Reader-response criticism, or reader-oriented criticism, focuses on the reading process. As Charles Bressler notes in Literary Criticism , the basic assumption of reader-oriented criticism is “Reader + Text = Meaning” (80). The thoughts, ideas, and experiences a reader brings to the text, combined with the text and experience of reading it, work together to create meaning. From this perspective, the text becomes a reflection of the reader. The association of the reader with a text differs from the premise of Formalist criticism, which argues for the autonomy of a text. Reader-response criticism does not suggest that anything goes, however, or that any interpretation is a sound one.

The origins of reader-oriented criticism can be located in the United States with Louise Rosenblatt’s development of theories in the 1930s ( Literature as Exploration ). Rosenblatt further developed her theories in the late seventies ( The Reader, the Text, the Poem ). American critic Stanley Fish has also significantly influenced reader-response theory. Fish conceived of “interpretive communities” that employ interpretive strategies to produce properties and meanings of literary texts (14-15).Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , a novel that critiques the dangers of a fictional utopian society, incorporates an intriguing exploration of reader-response criticism into its plot. John and Mustapha Mond both read texts written by Shakespeare, but they report very different responses to Shakespeare’s plays. For John, a noble savage born on a reservation in New Mexico, plays by Shakespeare represent a useful way to learn about the finest aspects of humanity and human values. In contrast, Mustapha Mond views literary works written by Shakespeare as useless high art. Mustapha Mond’s position as the Resident Controller for Western Europe influences his perspective as a reader as much as John’s encounter with Shakespeare on a Reservation in New Mexico does. Recognizing how John’s and Mustapha Mond’s experiences differ in the novel helps readers understand why these characters respond to Shakespeare in dissimilar ways.

Foundational Questions of Reader-Response Criticism

Who is the reader? Who is the implied reader?
What experiences, thoughts, or knowledge does the text evoke?
What aspects or characters of the text do you identify or disidentify with, and how does this process of identification affect your response to the text?
What is the difference between your general reaction to (e.g., like or dislike) and reader-oriented interpretation of the text?

Online Example: Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”: A Reader’s Response

Discussion Questions and Activities: Reader-Response Criticism

List and define two to three of the key terms you would consider to approach a text from a reader-response approach.
Explain why a text that has not been interpreted by a reader is an “incomplete text.”
Using the Folger Digital Texts from the Folger Shakespeare Library , interpret the soliloquy in act three, scene one, lines 64-98 of Hamlet from a reader-response approach. Consider the following questions as you construct your response: what previous experiences do you have with the drama or poetry of William Shakespeare, and how have those experiences shaped the way you currently approach his work? If you read this soliloquy in the past, has your view of it changed? Why?
Differentiate between your general opinion of Hamlet’s soliloquy (your like or dislike of it) and your interpretation of it.
In your view, what does Hamlet mean when he says, “To be or not to be—that is the question” (3.1.64)? Defend your interpretation.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Reader Response Theory

Introduction, general overview.

Foundational/Seminal Texts
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Experiential Theories of Response
Feminist Perspectives
Gender Theory
New Literacies and Multimodal Literacies
Phenomenology Theory
Postmodern Perspectives
Psychological Processes, Participant and Spectator Stances
Subjective Reader Response Theory
Transactional Theory
Application of the Transactional Theory
Critical Theories

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Reader Response Theory by Susan Browne , Xiufang Chen , Faten Baroudi , Esra Sevinc LAST MODIFIED: 21 April 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0107

This annotated bibliography presents influential work in the area of reader response theory. While providing an overview of major research in the area of reader response, the annotated bibliography also provides current research representing various categories of reader response. The citations are organized by their dominant characteristics although there may be some overlap across categories.

Reader response theory identifies the significant role of the reader in constructing textual meaning. In acknowledging the reader’s essential role, reader response diverges from early text-based views found in New Criticism, or brain-based psychological perspectives related to reading. Literacy scholars such as David Bleich, Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, and Wolfgang Iser are instrumental in crafting what has come to be known as reader response. The theory maintains that textual meaning occurs within the reader in response to text and recognizes that each reader is situated in a particular manner that includes factors such as ability, culture, gender, and overall experiences. However, according to Tomkins’s 1980 edited volume Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism , reader response is not a representation of a uniform position, but is rather a term associated with theorists whose work addresses the reader, the reading process, and textual response. Although Tompkins omits the work of Louise Rosenblatt, it is Rosenblatt’s work that has come to have a vast influence in the field of reader response. Prior to the work of the New Critics, Louise Rosenblatt wrote the now-seminal text Literature as Exploration , first published in 1938, which was distinct in emphasizing both the reader and the text. In later editions of the text, Rosenblatt draws on the work of John Dewey and shifts from the use of the word “interaction” to describe reading as a “transaction,” thus giving life to the transactional theory of reading. The references in this section, including Applebee 1992 , Beach 1993 , Barton 2002 , and Harkin 2005 , provide an overview of reader response theory.

Applebee, A. “The Background for Reform.” In Literature Instruction: A Focus on Student Response . Edited by J. Langer, 1–18. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1992.

This book chapter reviews a series of studies of the elementary and secondary school curriculum, providing a rich portrait of literature instruction and suggesting a series of issues that needed to be addressed in the teaching of literature. It set the background for reform.

Barton, J. “Thinking about Reader-Response Criticism.” The Expository Times 113.5 (2002): 147–151.

DOI: 10.1177/001452460211300502

An article that outlines reader response criticism through the lens of biblical scholarly inquiry.

Beach, R. A Teacher’s Introduction to Reader-Response Theories . Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993.

This book offers an in-depth review of reader response theory for teachers to build foundational knowledge to aptly use in their classrooms. Topics discussed include textual theories of response, experiential theories of response, psychological theories of response, social theories of response, cultural theories of response, and applying theory into practice, eliciting response. Key reviews of reader response criticism and glossary terms are also explored throughout the text.

Harkin, P. “The Reception of Reader-Response Theory.” College Composition and Communication 56.3 (2005): 410–425.

This essay provides a historical explanation for the place of reader response theory in English studies. The author takes a genealogical look at how reader response theory has been celebrated or rejected in English departments and what this suggests about conflicted relations between composition studies and literary studies and between research and pedagogy during the past two or three decades in the United States.

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10.1: Reader-Response Criticism

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We have examined many schools of literary criticism. Here you will find an in-depth look at one of them: Reader-Response.

The Purpose of Reader-Response

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.

Write as a Scholar

Criticize with examples.

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?
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?

The Structure of a Reader-Response Essay

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

Key Takeaways

In reader-response, the reader is essential to the meaning of a text for they bring the text to life.
The purpose of a reading response is examining, explaining, and defending your personal reaction to a text.
When writing a reader-response, write as an educated adult addressing other adults or fellow scholars.
As a beginning scholar, be cautious of criticizing any text as “boring,” “crazy,” or “dull.” If you do criticize, base your criticism on the principles and form of the text itself.
The challenge of a reader-response is to show how you connected with the text.

Reader-Response Essay Example

To Misread or to Rebel: A Woman’s Reading of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”

Works Cited

Elias, Robert H. “James Thurber: The Primitive, the Innocent, and the Individual.” Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 5. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 431–32. Print.

Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Print.

Hasley, Louis. “James Thurber: Artist in Humor.” Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 11. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 532–34. Print.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. Print.

Lindner, Carl M. “Thurber’s Walter Mitty—The Underground American Hero.” Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 5. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 440–41. Print.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration . New York: MLA, 1976. Print.

Thurber, James. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Literature: An Introduction to Critical Reading . Ed. William Vesterman. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1993. 286–89. Print.

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

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16 Reader Response Lecture Notes and Presentation

Slide One: Reader Response Criticism

Welcome. I’m Dr. Liza Long, and in this presentation, we’re going to learn about reader response theory. I’m expecting that you are already at least a little familiar with reader response, whether you’ve heard it called that or not. This is a type of literary analysis that you have likely engaged in throughout high school and perhaps even in your other English courses.

But now we’ll formalize our study of reader response as a critical theory, learning more about methods and history of this critical approach to texts. You’ll notice that unsurprisingly, the reader is at the center of the analysis when we do reader response. We’re actually going to look at two types of reader response and two type of readers: a subjective reader response (that’s all about you and your interactions with the text), and a receptive reader response, where we consider the implied reader, a hypothetical reader who doesn’t actually exist but for whom the text seems to have been written.

Why focus on the reader? I love this quote from reader response theorist Louise Rosenblatt. She said, “I find it helpful to visualize a little scene: on a darkened stage I see the figures of the author and the reader, with the book—the text of the poem or play or novel—between them. The spotlight focusses on one of them so brightly that the others fade into practical invisibility. Throughout the centuries, it has become apparent, usually either the book or the author has received major illumination. The reader has tended to remain in shadow, taken for granted, to all intents and purposes invisible. Like Ralph Ellison’s hero, the reader might say, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” Here or there a theoretician may start to take him seriously, and the spotlight may seem from time to time to hover over him, but actually he has never for long held the center of attention.”

When doing subjective reader response, some questions you could ask might be, how am I responding to this idea or language? What does this make me think? What am I expecting next? As we read our assigned novel for this class, you’re probably already doing this in your reading responses. In those assignments, I’m explicitly asking you to respond to the text in this subjective, personal way.

Receptive reader response is more common in literary scholarship. With this approach, we’re asking ourselves to consider how a typical or implied reader might respond to the text. Again, this reader is a hypothetical construct, just as, if you think about it, the implied author is also a hypothetical construct. Remember that we learned how the New Critics abandoned author intent because, among other reasons, it’s not actually possible to know what the author intended, even if the author is around to tell us. This is an especially interesting point in light of a concept called paratext, or text that is written about a text. We will learn more about this, with J.K. Rowling and YA author John Green as examples, when we watch Lindsey Ellis’s video “Death of the Author.”

It’s probably already abundantly clear how this type of criticism is different from New Criticism. In fact, it’s in many respects a strong reaction to the sterile and clinical approach that New Critics took to literature, placing the text at the center of the target. Now, with reader response criticism, instead, we’re going to look at how the text affects the reader: either you in subjective criticism, or the implied reader in receptive criticism. As part of our receptive approach, we will also consider how readers from different demographic groups might respond to texts in different ways.

Slide Two: Subjective Reader Response

Just as we took the tool of close reading from New Criticism, we will take subjective reader responses to texts from reader response theory. Going forward, for every text we read, you should engage in a brief reader response exercise. Here are some guidelines for how to do this:

Read the text: Begin by reading the text closely, paying attention to the language, structure, and themes. This should feel familiar from your experiences with New Criticism.
Reflect on your own experiences: Think about how your own experiences and emotions relate to the themes and characters in the text. Consider how the text makes you feel and what thoughts or memories it evokes.
Respond to the text: Write down your thoughts and reactions to the text, either in a journal or as annotations in the margins of the text itself. Consider how your interpretation differs from or aligns with traditional interpretations of the text.
Consider how your response might differ from others’ responses. Share your responses with others and engage in discussion and debate about the different interpretations and perspectives that the text can generate.
Reflect on the process : Reflect on how your personal experiences and emotions influenced your interpretation of the text and consider how this approach differs from other approaches to literary analysis.

Let’s take a look at the poem “What an Indian Thought He Saw When He Saw a Comet” by Tso-le-oh-who, a Cherokee author whose poem was published in the Cherokee Advocate in 1853. We don’t know much else about the poem’s author, but we can conclude that he had literary talent if we look at the complexities throughout the poem. Don’t get too hung up on the poem’s creative spelling. English spelling was not standardized at this point in time. When we’re doing subjective reader response, it’s inevitable that we will all have different reactions to the poem. As I read the poem, think about your responses.

(Reads “What an Indian Thought He Saw When He Saw a Comet”)

For me, the first thing I think of is a book I read last summer called B ury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. This book sought to tell American history from the Native Indigenous perspective, and it really opened my eyes to some of the injustices that Americans perpetrated on Native Americans, including the Trail of Tears, where Cherokee nation members from 1830 to 1850 were forced from their homelands, with many dying along the way. That this poem was written shortly after the worst of that forced relocation was a detail I personally noticed because I had recently read about this historical period. The reference to the explorer John C. Fremont, who came West and found gold, felt especially harsh in light of this historical event. I read the description of the comet as a “sky rocket of eternity” as potentially exacting judgment and retribution on behalf of the Native Americans.

But another thought that comes to me is the clear sense of awe and wonder at a heavenly sight this poem captures so brilliantly. In this, I can connect empathetically with the author and the text. I thought of my own experiences in 2017 when I witnessed the total eclipse of the sun from Ontario, Oregon. It was one of the most magical and mysterious moments of my life. These lines really brought this to mind for me: “Thou that art cloth’d in mistery/ More startling and more glorious than thine own/Encircling fires—profound as the oceans/Of shoreless space.”

And the idea of riding the comet, though impossible, felt exhilarating to me. In crafting a subjective reader response thesis statement, I decide to focus on that second response: “Reading “What an Indian Thought When He Saw a Comet” by Tso-le-oh-woh, I feel connected to our nation’s past through a common experience of celestial wonder as I recall how the 2017 total solar eclipse influenced me. This common experience of wonder can serve to unite us in our humanity.”.

This is what I’m going to be looking for when you write your theoretical response. You’re going to do a subjective reading of the text you choose, then use the questions below the text to create a thesis statement. Then you will support that thesis statement with evidence from the text.

You can engage in a sort of counterargument with this type of criticism as well by considering how other people might interpret the evidence that you use and then explain as you would with a counter argument, why your way is a more correct or a more appropriate reading. As my annotations to the AI draft essays show you, I want to see very specific, concrete examples from the text itself. Focus on the language and how it works to make the reader feel something. What does the reader expect? What does the reader anticipate? Use the checklist and the questions to guide your response.

Slide Three: Terms to Use in Reader Response

Here are some terms to use in reader response. I’ve also bolded some terms that work well in this type of criticism in my annotation to the AI models.

Affect/effect in both senses of these words can be useful to consider. How does the text affect you or the implied reader? Expectation and anticipation are also important concepts for this type of criticism. How does the text meet or not meet your expectations? What do you anticipate will happen and why?

Here’s a simple checklist to follow, starting with your subjective reading of the text you choose to use for your theoretical response. I recommend that you read all three texts, then choose the one that resonates most with you personally.

Practice active reading. Make notes, ask questions, respond to the text, and record your responses.
Focus on the details (much as you do with a close reading) and ask how your response to the text might change if those details changed.
Decide whether you will write a subjective or a receptive response to the text.

You might write in the third person if you’re doing receptive reader response, but subjective should always use the first-person pronoun “I.” I think this will probably be relatively easy, especially compared with New Criticism, but remember that you should still consider formal elements. Also, with this type of criticism, if you have actual information about the actual intended reader, this is worth noting in your response. You may choose either subjective or receptive when you are completing this assignment this week, so have fun with it. As always, if you have questions, feel free to reach out to me. I’m really looking forward to seeing how you interact with the text and how you apply reader response criticism.

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Home › Key Theories of Wolfgang Iser

Key Theories of Wolfgang Iser

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 12, 2018 • ( 4 )

Wolfgang Iser’s (1926-2007) theories of reader response were initially presented in a lecture of 1970 entitled The Affective Structure of the Text , and then in two major works, The Implied Reader (1972) and The Act of Reading (1976). After examining a number of English novels in The Implied Reader , Iser outlines his approach in a section of this book entitled The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach .1 Iser begins by pointing out that, in considering a literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text but also “the actions involved in responding to that text.” He suggests that we might think of the literary work as having two poles: the “artistic” pole is the text created by the author, and the “aesthetic” pole refers to “the realization accomplished by the reader” (IR, 274). We cannot identify the literary work with either the text or the realization of the text; it must lie “half-way between the two,” and in fact it comes into being only through the convergence of text and reader (IR, 275). His point here is that reading is an active and creative process. It is reading which brings the text to life, which unfolds “its inherently dynamic character” (IR, 275). If the author were somehow to present a story completely, the reader’s imagination would have nothing to do; it is because the text has unwritten implications or “gaps” that the reader can be active and creative, working things out for himself. This does not mean that any reading will be appropriate. The text uses various strategies and devices to limit its own unwritten implications, but the latter are nonetheless worked out by the reader’s own imagination (IR, 276).

Iser draws attention to two important features of the reading process. The first is that reading is a temporal activity, and one that is not linear. As readers, we cannot absorb even a short text in a single moment, nor does the fictional world of the text pass in linear fashion before our eyes (IR, 277, 280). Whatever we read sinks into our memory and is “foreshortened”; it may be evoked again later against a different background, enabling us to develop connections we had not anticipated: “the reader, in establishing these interrelations between past, present and future, actually causes the text to reveal its potential multiplicity of connections. These connections are the product of the reader’s mind working on the raw material of the text, though they are not the text itself – for this consists just of sentences, statements, information, etc.” (IR, 278). As readers, we occupy a perspective that is continually moving and changing according to the way we make sense of the accumulating fictional material. Moreover, our second reading of the same text will proceed along a different time sequence: we already know the ending, for example, and we will make connections that we had earlier missed. The text thus created by our reading is a product of our processes of anticipation and retrospection (IR, 281).

The second important feature of the reading process is that, when we are confronted with “gaps” or unwritten implications or frustrated expectations in the text, we attempt to search for consistency. Though our expectations are continually shifting, and images are continually being modified in their significance, we will “strive, even if unconsciously, to fit everything together in a consistent pattern” (IR, 283). According to Iser, this consistency of images or sentences and coherence of meaning is not given by the text itself; rather, we, as readers, project onto the text the consistency that we require. Hence, such textual consistency is the product of the “meeting between the written text and the individual mind of the reader with its own particular history of experience, its own consciousness, its own outlook” (IR, 284). We attempt to understand the material of the text within a consistent and coherent framework because it is this which allows us to make sense of whatever is unfamiliar to us in the text (IR, 285).

This search for consistency has a number of implications. Firstly, it makes us aware of our own capacity for providing links, our own interpretative power: we thereby learn not only about the text but also about ourselves. The non-linear nature of the reading process, says Iser, is akin to the way we have experiences in real life. Hence the “reading experience can illuminate basic patterns of real experience” (IR, 281). As Iser states, the manner “in which the reader experiences the text will reflect his own disposition, and in this respect the literary text acts as a kind of mirror” (IR, 280–281). On the other hand, by making certain semantic decisions and ruling out others, for the sake of a consistent reading, we acknowledge the inexhaustibility of the text, its potential to have other meanings that may not quite fit into our own scheme. Indeed, our desire for consistency involves us to some extent in a world of illusion: as we leave behind our own reality somewhat to enter the reality of the text, we build up a textual world whose illusory consistency helps us make sense of unfamiliar elements. The consistency is illusory because we “reduce the polysemantic possibilities to a single interpretation in keeping with the expectations aroused, thus extracting an individual, configurative meaning” (IR, 285).

Iser sees the polysemantic nature of the text and the illusion-making of the reader as “opposed factors,” but both are necessary in the process of reading: if the illusion were destroyed completely, the text would be alien to us; and if the illusion were allembracing, then the polysemantic nature of the text would be reduced to one level of meaning. Hence we try to find a balance between these two conflicting tendencies. According to Iser, however, the “dynamism” of the text, its sense of life-likeness, presupposes that we do not actually achieve this balance. Even as we seek a consistent pattern in the text, we are also uncovering other textual elements and connections that resist integration into our pattern (IR, 285). In other words, even “in forming our illusions, we also produce at the same time a latent disturbance of these illusions.” It is the reader’s attempt to conduct this balancing operation, oscillating between consistency and alien associations, between “involvement in and observation of the illusion . . . that forms the esthetic experience offered by the literary text” (IR, 286). In seeking a balance, we start out with certain expectations, and it is the shattering of these expectations that lies at the core of our aesthetic experience. The very indeterminacy of the text, the very fact that parts of it are unformulated or unwritten, is the driving force behind our attempt to work out a “configurative” meaning, a meaning that is consistent and coherent (IR, 287). It is the very shifting of our perspective that makes us feel that a novel is true to life, and we ourselves impart to the text this dynamic life-likeness which allows us to absorb unfamiliar experiences into our personal world (IR, 288).

Following an insight in John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1958), Iser believes that in reading a text, we undergo a process of organization similar to that undertaken by the creator of the text. In other words, we must recreate the text in order to view it as a work of art. And this act of aesthetic recreation, says Iser, is not a smooth or linear process and it actually relies on continual interruption of the flow of reading: “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” (IR, 288). Two factors govern this process of recreation: firstly, a familiar repertoire of literary patterns, themes, and social contexts; secondly, strategies that are used to “set the familiar against the unfamiliar.” It is the “defamiliarization” of what the reader thought she knew which creates the tension between her intensified expectations and her distrust of those very expectations (IR, 288). Hence it is the interplay between “illusion-forming and illusion-breaking that makes reading essentially a recreative process” (IR, 289).

The bases of the connection between reader and text, then, are: anticipation and retrospection, hence the unfolding of the text as a living event and consequently an impression of life-likeness (IR, 290). During the reading process, the work’s efficacy is caused by its evocation and subsequent negation of the familiar; in other words, the reader thinks her assumptions are affirmed by the text; she is then led to see that these assumptions are overturned and she enters the assumptions of the textual world itself, her reorientation marking an expansion of her experience, which learns to incorporate unfamiliar perspectives (IR, 290–291). Reading, for Iser, reflects the way in which we gain experience: once our preconceptions are held in abeyance, the text becomes our “present” while our own ideas fade into the past. We suspend the ideas and attitudes governing our own personality so that we can experience the “unfamiliar world of the literary text” (IR, 291).

But how does this happen? Many critics have suggested that the reader “identifies” with certain attitudes or characters in the fictional world. Iser’s explanation of such identification derives in part from Georges Poulet’s essay “Phenomenology of Reading” (1969). Following Poulet, Iser insists that in reading, it is the reader, not the author, who becomes the subject that does the thinking. Even though the text consists of ideas thought out by the author, in reading we must think the thoughts of the author, and we place our consciousness at the disposal of the text. According to Poulet, consciousness is the point at which author and reader converge, and the work itself can be thought of as a consciousness which takes over the mentality of the reader, who is obliged to shut out his individual disposition and character (IR, 292–293).

Iser modifies Poulet’s insights to urge that reading abrogates the dualism of subject and object that constitutes ordinary perception, and this division now takes place within the reader’s consciousness. Though we may be thinking the thoughts of the author, our own personality and disposition will not disappear completely but remain as “a more or less powerful virtual force,” and in reading there will be “an artificial division of our personality.” We, as readers, “assume” the individuality of the author as a division within our personality, thereby establishing the alien “me” and the real, virtual “me.” Indeed, it is this relationship between the alien themes of the text and the virtual background of familiar assumptions that allows “the unfamiliar to be understood” (IR, 293–294). Someone else’s thoughts can only take shape in our consciousness if our own unformulated faculty for deciphering those thoughts is brought into play and achieves formulation. In this way, reading is a genuinely dialectical process with myself being infused by the author’s subjectivity and perpetually negotiating between the illusionary world of the fiction and the real world of which my own subjectivity is a part (IR, 293–294).

The production of meaning in literary texts not only entails our discovering unformulated or unwritten elements of the text; it also gives us the chance to formulate our own deciphering capacity, to formulate ourselves and to expand our experience by incorporating the unfamiliar (IR, 294). Hence, for Iser, the reading process mimes the process of experience in general: the aesthetic dimension of a literary work is located in the act of its recreation by the reader, a process that is temporal and also dialectical insofar as it allows the assumptions of the reader to interact with those of the text, yielding knowledge not only of the text but also of the reader herself.

But if the text at one level “mirrors” the reader, and if it is the reader who makes the connections between a text’s various elements, what is to stop the reading process from being entirely subjective and even impressionistic? While Iser acknowledges and even insists that “the potential text is infinitely richer than any of its individual realizations,” and that the reading process will vary from individual to individual, he also urges that such variation can occur only “within the limits imposed by the written as opposed to the unwritten text.” He compares the variety of possible readings with the way two people might gaze on the same constellation of stars: one might “see” a plough and the other a dipper. The “stars” in a literary text, says Iser, “are fixed; the lines that join them are variable” (IR, 280, 282). One might also argue in Iser’s defense that his concept of the reader as split between two personalities, the author’s and her own, also disables complete arbitrariness of interpretation since it is a prerequisite of the reading process that the reader’s preconceptions are held in suspension or, at the very least, compelled into dialogue with the assumptions and attitudes in the text.

In fact, this possible charge of uncontrolled subjectivism is confronted in Iser’s The Act of Reading .2 In this book, Iser enlists two basic arguments against such a charge. The first argument is based on the nature of meaning, and the second hinges on the question of whether a truly objective interpretation is possible. The meaning of a literary text, says Iser, is not a fixed and “definable entity” but a “dynamic happening” (AR, 22). It is, in other words, an event in time. Every fictional structure, according to Iser, is two-sided: it is both “verbal” and “affective.” The verbal structure of effects embodied in the text “guides the [reader’s] reaction and prevents it from being arbitrary”; the affective aspect is the realization in the reader’s response of a meaning that has been “prestructured by the language of the text” (AR, 21).

However, though the textual structures guide the reader’s response, they do not completely control it: some elements of the text are indeterminate and their meaning must be worked out by the reader. It is this mixture of determinacy and indeterminacy that “conditions the interaction between text and reader, and such a two-way process cannot be called arbitrary” (AR, 24). In this way, literary texts initiate “performances” of meaning “rather than actually formulating meanings themselves.” Indeed, the very aesthetic quality of a text, says Iser, lies in this “performing” structure, which could not occur without the reader (AR, 27). Hence, not only is “meaning” an event in time, but also it is located in the interaction between text and reader. Iser effectively extricates the notion of meaning from its status as a spatial concept, as an entity somehow hidden in the textual object, and sees it as a temporal concept, as a relation that is produced in the reader’s consciousness.

Again, we might object: even if we grant that the text somehow guides the reader’s reaction, could not the meaning thereby generated in the mind of a given reader be entirely subjective and private? Iser acknowledges that what is private is the reader’s eventual incorporation of the text “into his own treasure-house of experience” (AR,24). However, such arbitrariness is limited by the fact that the act of understanding a text is “intersubjective”: though readers may draw very different conclusions from what they read, they will often respond to the same things: “a literary text contains intersubjectively verifiable instructions for meaning-production, but the meaning produced may then lead to a whole variety of different experiences and hence subjective judgments” (AR, 25). The point is that the process of “meaning-production” itself will occur within a range limited by the textual structures; different readers may then draw widely diverging conclusions from this range of meanings. Iser sees this intersubjective model of reading as an advance over objectivist theories which presume that a text itself contains a single hidden meaning or set of meanings that can be discovered by the critic.

Iser points out that such objectivism is based on an “ideal standard” to which literary works should conform: and, far from being objective, this ideal standard is open to dispute. Who, moreover, defines this standard? The critic? But the critic, says Iser, is hardly infallible; he is another reader who will bring his own background and dispositions into play when judging the meaning or value of a literary work. Such “objective” judgments, then, may rest on intensely private foundations (AR, 24).

In The Act of Reading , Iser further elaborates his important concept of the “implied reader.” He points out that when critics talk about literature in terms of its effects, they invoke two broad categories of reader: the “real” reader and the “hypothetical” reader. The former refers to an actual reader whose response is documented, whereas the hypothetical reader is a projection of all possible realizations of the text (AR, 27). Iser sees both of these concepts as deficient. The documented response of real readers has often been thought to mirror the cultural norms or codes of a given era. The main problem Iser sees with this approach is that any reconstruction of real readers depends on the survival of documents from their era; and the further back we go in history, such documentation becomes increasingly sparse, and we must reconstruct the real readership of a text from the text itself (AR, 28). On the other hand, Iser points out that the “hypothetical” or what is sometimes called the “ideal” reader is often nothing more than a creation of the critic’s mind. Moreover, the code of an ideal reader would be identical to that of the author, thereby making reading superfluous (AR, 28 –29). Since the “ideal reader” must encompass all the potential meanings of a text, Iser acknowledges that such a concept might be useful in order to “close the gaps that constantly appear in any analysis of literary effects and responses” (AR, 29).

Iser evaluates newer models of the reader that have arisen in more recent years, models that have sought to break free of the traditional restrictive models cited above: the “superreader” of Michael Riffaterre , the “informed reader” of Stanley Fish , the “intended reader” of Erwin Wolff, and the “psychological reader” of Norman Holland and Simon Lesser. Iser has criticisms of all of these models. Riffaterre’s concept of the “superreader” refers to a “group of informants” who converge at “nodal points in the text,” and their common reactions establish the existence of a “stylistic fact” (AR, 30). Iser acknowledges the value of Riffaterre’s concept in showing that stylistic qualities cannot be constrained within the province of linguistics but must be discerned by readers. But he points out that Riffaterre hopes to guard against inordinate variation of response among readers by appealing to the “sheer weight of numbers.” Also, his concept depends on the historical position of a group of readers in relation to the literary work (AR, 30–31). Iser sees this weakness also in Fish’s concept of the “informed” reader, characterized by Fish as a competent speaker of the language, having “mature” semantic knowledge and possessing “literary competence.” What he views as positive in Fish’s model is its demand that the reader engage in a process of selfobservation while reading, and its stressing, like Riffaterre’s model, the insufficiency of a merely linguistic model (AR, 31). Iser insists that the reader’s role is larger than that of the fictitious reader, who is only one aspect of the former. His critique of the psychological models of reading is centered on his objection that they do not adequately describe our reading of literature as an aesthetic experience: the text tends to lose its aesthetic quality and is merely regarded as material to demonstrate the functioning of our psychological dispositions (AR, 40).

According to Iser, all of the models cited above are restricted in their general applicability. His concept of the “implied reader” is intended to overcome these restrictions. In analyzing responses to a literary work, he says, “we must allow for the reader’s presence without in any way predetermining his character or his historical situation.” It is this reader, who is somehow lifted above any particular context, whom Iser designates the implied reader (AR, 34). The implied reader is a function not of “an empirical outside reality” but of the text itself. Iser points out that the concept of the implied reader has “his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text; he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real reader.” He defines the implied reader as “a textual structure anticipating the presence of a recipient without necessarily defining him.” The implied reader, then, designates “a network of response-inviting structures,” which prestructure the role of the reader in the latter’s attempt to grasp the text (AR, 34).

Iser explains that there are two aspects of the concept of the implied reader: “the reader’s role as a textual structure, and the reader’s role as a structured act.” By the first of these, Iser refers to those elements in a text that help a reader to “actualize” unfamiliar or new textual material. The text must be able to bring about a standpoint or perspective from which the reader will be able to do this. For example, in a novel, there are four main perspectives: those of the narrator, characters, plot, and the fictitious reader. The meaning of the text is generated by the convergence of these perspectives, a convergence that is not itself set out in words but occurs during the reading process. During this process, the reader’s role is to occupy shifting perspectives that are to some extent prestructured, and then to fit these various viewpoints “into a gradually evolving pattern” (AR, 35). The components that prestructure the reader’s role are: the different perspectives represented in the text, the perspective from which the reader holds these together, and their point of convergence (AR, 36). Indeed, the second aspect of the concept of the “implied reader” is the “reader’s role as a structured act.” By this, Iser means the reader’s active role in bringing together the various perspectives offered in the text; the text itself does not bring about this convergence. Iser sees “textual structure” and “structured act” – the two aspects of the “implied reader” – as related in the manner of intention and fulfillment (AR, 36).

Iser also sees the notion of the “implied reader” as explaining the tension that occurs within the reader during the reading process, a tension between the reader’s own subjectivity and the author’s subjectivity which overtakes the reader’s mentality, a tension between two selves that directs the reader’s ability to make sense of the text. The reader’s own subjective disposition, says Iser, will not be totally left behind: “it will tend instead to form the background to and a frame of reference for the act of grasping and comprehending.” Every text, says Iser, constructs its work, in varying degrees unfamiliar to possible readers; these readers, therefore, must be placed in a position to actualize the new perspectives. It is part of the reader’s role to be a fictitious reader, and her existing stock of experience will provide a referential background against which the unfamiliar can be conceived and processed (AR, 36–37). Given that the text’s structure allows for different realizations and interpretations, any one actualization, says Iser, “represents a selective realization of the implied reader” and it can be judged against the background of the other realizations “potentially present in the textual structure of the reader’s role.” As such, the notion of the “implied reader” performs the vital function of providing “a link between all the historical and individual actualizations of the text.” In short, the “implied reader” is a “transcendental model” which allows us to describe and analyze the structured effects of literary texts (AR, 37–38).

Iser’s concept of “negativity” is important in his analysis of the reading process. All of the text’s formulations, he says, are punctuated by “blanks” and “negations.” The former refer to omissions of various elements between the formulated “positions” of a text; “negations” refer to cancelations or modifications or contradictions of positions in the repertoire of the text. These blanks and negations, says Iser, refer to an unformulated background: this fact he calls “negativity.” It is negativity that enables words to transcend their literal meaning and to assume multiple layers of reference (AR, 225–227). Negativity, urges Iser, is the basic force in literary communication, making possible: (1) an understanding based on the reader’s linkage of individual positions in a text, directed in part by blanks and negations; (2) deformations of organized structures of familiar knowledge and their remedy or the reader’s search for the underlying cause of those deformations; here, negativity is a mediator between representation and reception, enabling the reader to construct the text’s meaning on a question–answer basis. In this sense, negativity is the “infrastructure” of the literary text; (3) since literature presents something (knowledge or perspectives) that is not already in the world, it can reveal itself only through negativity, through the dislocation of external norms from their real context. In other words, everything that has been incorporated into a literary text has been deprived of its reality, and is subjected to new and unfamiliar connections. Negativity is the structure underlying this invalidation or questioning of the manifested reality (AR, 229). The reader must formulate the cause underlying this questioning of the world, and to do this, she must transcend that world, observing it, as it were, from the outside.

Hence negativity provides a “basic link between the reader and the text.” Iser sees it as characteristic of a work of art that it enables us to transcend our own lives, entangled as they are in the real world. Negativity, then, as a basic element of communication, is an “enabling structure” that gives rise to a fecundity or richness of meaning that is aesthetic in character. Each decision we make as readers must stabilize itself against the alternatives that we have rejected, alternatives which arise from an interaction between the text and the reader’s dispositions. The richness of meaning derives partly from the fact that there are no rigid criteria of right and wrong, but this, according to Iser, does not mean that meaning is purely subjective: the “very existence of alternatives makes it necessary for a meaning to be defensible and so intersubjectively accessible.” Moreover, as we gain insights from a literary work, we do not merely use these mechanically to complement our previous insights, or our previous understanding of earlier parts of the text; rather, an interaction occurs that leads to a new meaning. Hence the production of meaning of literary works does not take place according to “regulative or constitutive rules” but is “conditioned by a structure which allows for contingencies.” Iser acknowledges that it is the reader’s own competence that will enable the various possibilities of meaning and interpretation to be narrowed down: it is the reader who provides the “code” that will govern her communicative relation with the text, rather than there being a preexisting code between text and reader already in place. In the latter case, literature would have nothing, or at least nothing valuable, to communicate (AR, 230).

What Iser is reacting against in his account of the reading process is what he considers to be the “classical norm” of interpretation, and the implications of this norm. According to Iser, the aim of conventional, classical interpretation was to uncover “a single hidden meaning” within the text. Meaning was considered as “representative,” having a direct reference to the outside world; and hence the literary work was considered to be a vehicle for the expression of truth (AR, 10–12). Beyond this, interpretation aimed to instruct the reader as to the text’s meaning, value, and significance (AR, 22). Such a model of interpretation promoted the treatment of a literary work as a document, testifying to characteristics of its era and the disposition of its author. What this model ignored, according to Iser, was the status of the text as an event as well as the experience of the reader (AR, 22). Iser sees his own project as emerging from a more modern constellation of approaches which rejected the idea that art somehow expresses or represents truth and which focused more on the connections between the text and either its historical context or its audience (AR, 14).

And yet, Iser points out, various elements of the classical norm have persisted, even within approaches that aim to reject it. The New Criticism, for example, “called off the search for meaning,” rejecting the idea that the literary work contains “the hidden meaning of a prevailing truth,” and focusing on the interaction of elements within the text. Nonetheless, elements of the classical norm have crept into this new approach: the New Critical values of harmony, order, completeness, and removal of ambiguity differ from the classical norm only inasmuch as these values are freed from their subservience to the expression of truth. In the New Critical approach, qualities such as harmony are considered valuable in their own right. In many modern conceptions of art Iser sees the classical values of symmetry, balance, order, and totality as occupying a central role. Why this obstinate persistence of the age-old classical norm, even within the texture of theories that claim to subvert or transcend it?

The main reason, according to Iser, is that consistency is essential to the very act of comprehension. And the very fact, acknowledged in modern theories, that a reader cannot grasp a text all at once obliges her to engage in the process of “consistencybuilding” to make sense of the text (AR, 15–16). The meaning of the text is not formulated by the text itself but is a projection of the reader. Hence as readers we have recourse to the classical values of symmetry, harmony, and totality, values that enable us to construct a frame of reference against which we can make unfamiliar elements accessible. The fragmented or disjointed nature of the literary work – leaving many blanks, gaps, and connections for the reader to work out – conditions “consistency building throughout both the writing and the reading process” (AR, 17). So, in historical terms, the task of the critic has altered: instead of explaining how a text, with all its qualities of harmony, order, and totality, contains a hidden meaning, she must now acknowledge that consistency-building, as a “structure of comprehension,” depends on the reader rather than the work. The critic must explain, then, not the work itself (which is an abstraction from the entire situation of reader interacting with text) but“the conditions that bring about its various possible effects.” In other words, what is needed is not instruction passing from critic to reader in the meaning of the text but an analysis of the reading process (AR, 18–19). It is here that Iser’s own work is designed to intervene.

Notes 1. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Hereafter cited as IR. 2. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Hereafter cited as AR.

2.1.2.11.4.4.1: Reader-Response Criticism

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We have examined many schools of literary criticism. Here you will find an in-depth look at one of them: Reader-Response.

The Purpose of Reader-Response

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.

Write as a Scholar

Criticize with examples.

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?
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?

The Structure of a Reader-Response Essay

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

Key Takeaways

In reader-response, the reader is essential to the meaning of a text for they bring the text to life.
The purpose of a reading response is examining, explaining, and defending your personal reaction to a text.
When writing a reader-response, write as an educated adult addressing other adults or fellow scholars.
As a beginning scholar, be cautious of criticizing any text as “boring,” “crazy,” or “dull.” If you do criticize, base your criticism on the principles and form of the text itself.
The challenge of a reader-response is to show how you connected with the text.

Reader-Response Essay Example

To Misread or to Rebel: A Woman’s Reading of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”

Works Cited

Elias, Robert H. “James Thurber: The Primitive, the Innocent, and the Individual.” Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 5. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 431–32. Print.

Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Print.

Hasley, Louis. “James Thurber: Artist in Humor.” Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 11. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 532–34. Print.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. Print.

Lindner, Carl M. “Thurber’s Walter Mitty—The Underground American Hero.” Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 5. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 440–41. Print.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration . New York: MLA, 1976. Print.

Thurber, James. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Literature: An Introduction to Critical Reading . Ed. William Vesterman. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1993. 286–89. Print.

Contributors and Attributions

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

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Reader-Response Criticism
The purpose of a reading response is examining, explaining, and defending your personal reaction to a text. When writing a reader-response, write as an educated adult addressing other adults or fellow scholars. As a beginning scholar, be cautious of criticizing any text as "boring," "crazy," or "dull.". If you do criticize, base ...
What Is Reader Response?
Reader response criticism is a literary theory that focuses on the individual reader's experience and interpretation of a text. It asserts that the meaning of a text is not fixed and objective but rather subjective and dependent on the reader's interpretation and response to it. According to this theory, readers bring their own experiences ...
Wolfgang Iser as a Reader Response Critic: A Brief Note
Wolfgang Iser as a Reader Response Critic: A Brief Note By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 8, 2016 • ( 2). Negating the Formalist notion of objective reality and autotelic text that nullifies the participation of the readers, Wolfgang Iser in The Implied Reader, follows the phenomenological theories of Husserl and Ingarden, and formulates two aspects of a literary work: the artistic pole ...
Reader-Response Criticism
Reader-response criticism, or reader-oriented criticism, focuses on the reading process. As Charles Bressler notes in Literary Criticism, the basic assumption of reader-oriented criticism is "Reader + Text = Meaning" (80). The thoughts, ideas, and experiences a reader brings to the text, combined with the text and experience of reading it ...
Key Theories of Stanley Fish
The Reader-Response Theorist, Stanley Fish (b. 1938), attempts to situate the reading process in a broader, institutional context. Fish's earlier work, focusing on the reader's experience of literary texts, included an important study of Milton, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost" (1967), and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972).
Reader Response Theory
Key reviews of reader response criticism and glossary terms are also explored throughout the text. Harkin, P. "The Reception of Reader-Response Theory." College Composition and Communication 56.3 (2005): 410-425. This essay provides a historical explanation for the place of reader response theory in English studies. The author takes a ...
4.9: Reader-Response Criticism In Brief
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 ...
Reader-Response Criticism
Reader-Response Criticism By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 17, 2020 • ( 0). Reader-response criticism can be traced as far back as Aristotle and Plato, both of whom based their critical arguments at least partly on literature's effect on the reader.It has more immediate sources in the writings of the French structuralists (who stress the role of the perceiver as a maker of reality), the ...
4.10: Reader-Response Criticism
The purpose of a reading response is examining, explaining, and defending your personal reaction to a text. When writing a reader-response, write as an educated adult addressing other adults or fellow scholars. As a beginning scholar, be cautious of criticizing any text as "boring," "crazy," or "dull.".
Practicing Reader Response Criticism
15 Practicing Reader Response Criticism . Now that you've learned about reader response theory, practiced this method of analysis with "What an Indian Thought When He Saw a Comet," and reviewed some examples, you will complete a theoretical response to a text using reader response as your approach. You will read three different texts below.
Quotes about Reader response (50 quotes)
According to this view, reading is a fusion of text and reader. Votes: 3. Carl M. Tomlinson. I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers. Votes: 1. James Ellroy. Some readers allow their prejudices to blind them. A good reader knows how to disregard inappropriate responses. Votes: 1.
Reader-Response Criticism Critical Essays
Introduction. Reader-Response Criticism. Critical approaches to literature that stress the validity of reader response to a text, theorizing that each interpretation is valid in the context from ...
Psychological Reader‑response Theory
Psychological Reader‑response Theory By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 18, 2016 • ( 0). Psychoanalytic critic Norman Holland believes that readers' motives strongly influence how they read. Despite his claim, at least in his early work, that an objective text exists (indeed, he calls his method transactive analysis because he believes that reading involves a transaction between the reader ...
Reader-response criticism
Reader-response criticism. Two Girls Reading by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 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.
Reader-Response Criticism
Reader-response criticism raises theoretical questions about whether our responses to a work are the same as its meanings, whether a work can have as many meanings as we have responses to it, and ...
Reader-Response Criticism
Reader-response criticism describes this reading process, and its theory guarantees that the reading described is the correct one. Its theory claims to provide constraints on what counts as a ...
6.4: Reader Response: A Process Approach
No headers. Reader response is a powerful literary method that is refreshing since it allows you to concentrate on yourself as a reader specifically or on readers generally. Carefully read the work you will analyze. Formulate a general question after your initial reading that identifies a problem—a tension—that is fruitful for discussion ...
Subjective Reader Response Theory
Subjective Reader Response Theory By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 16, 2016 • ( 2). In stark contrast to affective stylistics and to all forms of transactional reader response theory, subjective reader-response theory does not call for the analysis of textual cues. For subjective reader-response critics, led by the work of David Bleich, readers' responses are the text, both in the sense ...
10.1: Reader-Response Criticism
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. ... Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. ix-xxvi. Print. CC licensed content, Shared previously.
Reader Response Lecture Notes and Presentation
Going forward, for every text we read, you should engage in a brief reader response exercise. Here are some guidelines for how to do this: Read the text: Begin by reading the text closely, paying attention to the language, structure, and themes. This should feel familiar from your experiences with New Criticism.
Key Theories of Wolfgang Iser
Key Theories of Wolfgang Iser By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 12, 2018 • ( 4). Wolfgang Iser's (1926-2007) theories of reader response were initially presented in a lecture of 1970 entitled The Affective Structure of the Text, and then in two major works, The Implied Reader (1972) and The Act of Reading (1976). After examining a number of English novels in The Implied Reader, Iser ...
Reader-Response Criticism Criticism: Critical Approaches To Reader
Jane Tompkins's anthology, Reader-Response Criticism, originally published in 1980 but reprinted many times since then and still used as a course textbook, includes essays that could equally well ...
2.1.2.11.4.4.1: Reader-Response Criticism
Key Takeaways. In reader-response, the reader is essential to the meaning of a text for they bring the text to life. The purpose of a reading response is examining, explaining, and defending your personal reaction to a text. When writing a reader-response, write as an educated adult addressing other adults or fellow scholars.

2. Reading Literature as a Critic

The Purpose of Reader-Response

Write as a Scholar

The Structure of a Reader-Response Essay

Key Takeaways

Reader-Response Essay Example

Table of Contents

Foundational Questions of Reader-Response Criticism

Brevity - Say More with Less

Clarity (in Speech and Writing)

Coherence - How to Achieve Coherence in Writing

Flow - How to Create Flow in Writing

Inclusivity - Inclusive Language

The Elements of Style - The DNA of Powerful Writing

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Citation - Definition - Introduction to Citation in Academic & Professional Writing

Collaboration - What is the Role of Collaboration in Academic & Professional Writing?

Information Literacy - Discerning Quality Information from Noise

Rhetoric: Exploring Its Definition and Impact on Modern Communication

The Writing Process - Research on Composing

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Reader Response Theory by Susan Browne , Xiufang Chen , Faten Baroudi , Esra Sevinc LAST MODIFIED: 21 April 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0107

10.1: Reader-Response Criticism

The Purpose of Reader-Response

Write as a Scholar

The Structure of a Reader-Response Essay

Key Takeaways

Reader-Response Essay Example

16 Reader Response Lecture Notes and Presentation

Slide One: Reader Response Criticism

Slide Two: Subjective Reader Response

Slide Three: Terms to Use in Reader Response

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2.1.2.11.4.4.1: Reader-Response Criticism

The Purpose of Reader-Response

Write as a Scholar

The Structure of a Reader-Response Essay

Key Takeaways

Reader-Response Essay Example

Contributors and Attributions

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