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 ›
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 ›
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 ›