They confuse you or they clarify things for you. Characters in a novel may remind you of real people in your life; a description in a poem may make you remember some childhood incident; heck, a book can even change your life. Reading is a totally personal experience, after all. Well, that's the whole point of Reader-Response theory. This theory allows you to take your own personal feelings and your own perspective into account when you analyze a literary text.
According to Reader-Response theorists, it is significant that a certain character reminds you of Dad, or that a certain passage recalls something from your childhood. Reader-Response theory isn't just about understanding a text better; it's also about understanding yourself better. Up until the s, New Criticism reigned supreme in American universities. New Criticism was all about focusing on the text itself: you weren't supposed to think about the context, or about the author—and certainly not about the reader.
Reader-Response theorists helped dethrone New Criticism from its privileged position by, well, drawing attention to the reader. They also helped pave the way for a lot of other literary schools that followed in the s and s, like Poststructuralism and New Historicism. The ideas of both these schools were closely affiliated with the focus on reading and subjectivity that the Reader-Response theorists first called attention to.
Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. Reader-Response Theory Introduction When you think about literature, you probably think of authors and texts. Yeah, not so fast.
It holds that meaning does not reside in the text, but in the mind of the reader. The text functions only as a canvas onto which the reader projects whatever his or her reactions may be. The text is a cause of different thoughts, but does not provide a reason for one interpretation rather than another.
See also indeterminacy of translation. From: reader response theory in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy ». View all reference entries ». View all related items in Oxford Reference ». Search for: 'reader-response theory' in Oxford Reference ». All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice.
Oxford Reference. It diverts the emphasis away from the text as the sole determiner of meaning to the significance of the reader as an essential participant in the reading process and the creation of meaning.
Thus, both explanations place a reader as an active participant along with the text in the production of interpretation of that literary work from the point of view of the reader-response theory. As a result, if teaching literature is to accommodate the students' role in making interpretation, it is supposed to place them as the active readers to interpret and shape the meaning of that particular literary works; it is not preaching or directing them into a specific meaning decided previously.
Students as the active readers must be given opportunity and space to develop their opinion and argumentation to shape and define what a particular text means to them. Therefore, by understanding and applying reader-response theory in teaching and learning literature in the classroom, at the same time, teachers could have a different teaching and learning method e.
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