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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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