Reception theory, the approach to literature that concerns itself first and foremost with one or more readers’ actualization of the text, is based on a collective enterprise that has had far-reaching institutional consequences. Hans Robert Jauss, with his University of… Read More ›
Reader Response Criticism
Reader-Response Criticism
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… Read More ›
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… Read More ›
Key Theories of Wolfgang Iser
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… Read More ›
Key Theories of Martin Heidegger
Husserl’s student Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) proved to be one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and the major modern exponent of existentialism. His impact extends not only to existentialist philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Simone de… Read More ›
Key Theories of Edmund Husserl
Much reader-response theory had its philosophical origins in the doctrine known as phenomenology, whose foundations were laid by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). The Greek word phainomenon means “appearance.” Hence, as a philosophical attitude, phenomenology shifts our emphasis of… Read More ›
Literary Criticism and Theory in the Twentieth Century
Twentieth-century literary criticism and theory has comprised a broad range of tendencies and movements: a humanistic tradition, descended from nineteenth-century writers such as Matthew Arnold and continued into the twentieth century through figures such as Irving Babbitt and F. R…. Read More ›
Hermeneutics
The term “hermeneutics”, a Latinized version of the Greek “hermeneutice” has been part of common Ianguage from the beginning of the 17th Century. Nevertheless, its history stretches back to ancient philosophy. Addressing the understanding of religious intuitions, Plato used this… Read More ›
Psychological Reader‑response Theory
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… Read More ›
Subjective Reader Response Theory
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… Read More ›
Affective Stylistics
Affective stylistics is derived from analyzing further the notion that a literary text is an event that occurs in time—that comes into being as it is read—rather than an object that exists in space. The text is examined closely, often… Read More ›
Interpretive Communities: A Brief Note
Unlike Wolfgang Iser who analyses individual acts of reading, Stanley Fish situates the reading process within a broader institutional perspective. In Is There a Text in the Class? (1980), Fish proposes that competent readers form part of “interpretive communities”, consisting of… Read More ›
Wolfgang Iser as a Reader Response Critic: A Brief Note
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… Read More ›
Reception Theory: A Brief Note
Conceptualized by Hans Robert Jauss in his Toward an Aesthetic of Reception in the late 1960s, Reception Theory refers to a historical application of the Reader Response theory, emphasizing altering interpretive and evaluative responses of generations of readers to a… Read More ›
Transactional Reader Response Theory
Often associated with the work of Louise Rosenblatt, who formulated many of its premises, transactional reader-response theory analyzes the transaction between text and reader. Rosenblatt doesn’t reject the importance of the text in favor of the reader; rather she claims… Read More ›
Reader Response Criticism: An Essay
Reader Response, primarily a German and American offshoot of literary theory, emerged (prominent since 1960s) in the West mainly as a reaction to the textual emphasis of New Criticism of the 1940s. New Criticism, the culmination of liberal humanist ideals,… Read More ›