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

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Reader Response Theory by Susan Browne , Xiufang Chen , Faten Baroudi , Esra Sevinc LAST REVIEWED: 21 April 2021 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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Reader-response theory

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literary Terms and Techniques › 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 semioticians, and such American critics as Kenneth Burke (esp. his “Psychology and Form,” which defined “form” in terms of the audience’s appetite), Louise Rosenblatt, Walker Gibson (who developed the notion of a “mock reader”), and Wayne Booth . But reader criticism became recognized as a distinct critical movement only in the 1970s, when it found a particularly congenial political climate in the growing anti-authoritarianism within the academy.

Calling it a movement, however, is misleading, for reader-response criticism is less a unified critical school than a vague collection of disparate critics with a common point of departure. That is, reader-response critics share neither a body of critical principles (as Marxist critics, for instance, do), nor a subject matter (as Renaissance critics do). Indeed, they barely share a name. “Reader theory” and “audience theory” are perhaps the most neutral general terms, since the more popular term “reader-response theory” most accurately refers to more subjective kinds of reader criticism, and “ Reception Theory ” most accurately refers to the German school of Receptionkritik represented by Hans Robert Jauss . But these and other terms are often used indiscriminately, and the boundaries separating them are cloudy at best.

What affinity there is among reader-critics comes from their rejection of the New Critical principle (most clearly enunciated in W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley ‘s pivotal essay, “ The Affective Fallacy “) that severs the work itself from its effect and strongly privileges the former, treated in formal terms. Refusing to accept this banning of the reader, reader-critics take the existence of the reader as a decisive component of any meaningful literary analysis, assuming, as Michael Riffaterre puts it, that “readers make the literary event” (116). But once past that first step, there is little unanimity. Indeed, even the meaning of that first step has generated considerable debate, for different critics mean different things when they talk about “the reader.”

Stanley Fish (Christine Buckley/UConn Photo)

For some critics, readers are abstract or hypothetical entities, and even these are of various sorts. The category of hypothetical readers is often thought, for instance, to take in what Gerald Prince calls the “narratee,” the person to whom the narrator is addressing his or her narration (e.g., the “you” to whom Huckleberry Finn directs his opening sentence). For as Prince himself insists, the narratee, like the narrator, is really a character (even if sometimes only implicitly present in the text) and should therefore not be conflated with readers who are outside the text. Also included among hypothetical readers are readers who are implied by the text, that is, readers whose moves are charted out by (and hence more or less controlled by) the work in question. This is the kind of reader referred to, for instance, when one says, “The reader is surprised by the end of an Agatha Christie novel.” Wolfgang Iser describes the implied reader’s progress in phenomenological terms: although he pays particular attention to the indeterminacies in the texts—the gaps that the reader has to fill in on his or her own—his reader remains very much controlled by the author, since those gaps are part of the strategy of the text. On a more general level, some reader-critics examine the hypothetical reader who is implied, not by any specific text, but rather by the broader culture. In Structuralist Poetics , for instance, Jonathan Culler, influenced by French Structuralism and especially by Semiotics , develops the notion of “literary competence,” highlighting the ways in which the reader’s knowledge of conventions allows him or her to make sense of literary texts.

Narratees and implied readers need to be distinguished, however, from at least two other types of hypothetical reader. Since they are in principle the product of textual features, narratees and implied readers both differ from the intended reader (what Rabinowitz calls the “authorial audience”). The intended reader is presumed by rather than marked in the text and therefore can be discovered only by looking at the text in terms of the context in which it arose. In addition, there are postulated readers. Such readers’ characteristics do not emerge from a study of the text or its context; rather, the text’s meaning emerges from perceiving it through the eyes of a reader whose characteristics are assumed by the critic to begin with. Thus, in his early and influential “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” Stanley Fish follows the experiences of a “reader” word by word, insisting, in a self-conscious reversal of the Wimsatt-Beardsley position, that what “ happens to, and with the participation of, the reader” is in fact “the meaning” of a text ( Is There 25). But that is not the implied reader; it is, rather, an abstraction Fish calls the “informed reader.” He argues that real readers can become informed readers by developing linguistic, semantic, and literary competence, by making their minds “the repository of the (potential) responses a given text might call out” and by “suppressing, in so far as that is possible,… what is personal and idiosyncratic” (49). As is often the case with postulated readers, Fish’s informed reader is presented as an ideal, the best reader of the text. The distinctions among narratees, implied readers, intended readers, and postulated readers are significant, but they are subtle and not always recognized. As a consequence, they are sometimes blurred as critics (including Fish and Iser) fuse them or move from one to another without notice.

In contrast to those who write about hypothetical readers are those critics who focus on the activities of real readers. In Readings and Feelings , for instance, David Bleich, starting from the assumption that “the role of personality in response is the most fundamental fact of criticism” (4), talks about the specific students in his classes and uses the actual interpretations they have presented in papers they have written, in order to learn where they originate and how the classroom, as a community, can negotiate among them. Janice Radway moves further from the academic center by studying the ways nonacademic women interpret popular romances.

Reader-critics not only differ with respect to what entity they mean by “reader”; they also differ with regard to the perspective from which they treat it. To put it in different terms, most reader-critics admit, to some extent, the necessity of “contextualizing” the act of reading. Stanley Fish, in essays written after “Affective Stylistics,” has made some of the strongest arguments along these lines, claiming that meaning is entirely context-dependent and that there is consequently no such thing as literal meaning. Even audience critics who do not take this extreme position recognize the close relationship between meaning and interpretation on the one hand and context on the other. But readers are not simply in a single context; they are always in several. And there is no more agreement about what constitutes the most appropriate context to study than there is about what the term “reader” means.

For example, one can look at what might loosely be called the cultural context of the reader. Culler, in his discussions of literary conventions, examines the process of reading in the context of the shared cultural practices of the academic community. Fish takes a related but more radical position, rejecting the notion of a generalized literary competence and arguing instead for the study of literature in terms of disparate “interpretive communities” united by shared “article(s) of faith” (e.g., commitment to authorial intention) and “repertoirefs] of [interpretive] strategies.” According to Fish, these strategies do not decode some preexisting meaning, for the meaning of a literary work is not in the text at all. Rather, the very “properties” of the text are in fact “constituted” by whatever strategies the reader happens to bring to bear on the text: “These strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around” ( Is There 171). More recently, Steven Mailloux has expanded on this notion by developing a “rhetorical hermeneutics” that examines, with particular attention to institutional politics, the ways in which interpretations become accepted by given groups.

Reader Response Criticism: An Essay

Alternatively, one can look at the psychological context of the reader. In Dynamics of Literary Response Norman Holland deals primarily with hypothetical readers; in Five Readers Reading he turns his attention to actual students. In both cases, he tries to make sense of interpretive activity by passing it through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis. Still other critics look at the historical context of the reader. This is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Receptionkritik , most familiar through the writings of Hans Robert Jauss, who argues that the reader makes sense of literature in part through a “horizon of expectations.” Since that horizon varies with history, the literary work offers different “views” at different times (Jauss 21-22). Jane Tompkins, following Fish, pushes the idea further, claiming in her study of American literature ( Sensational Designs ) that the reader’s historical situation does not simply affect our view of the work but actually produces whatever it is that we call the text in the first place: “The circumstances in which a text is read … are what make the text available .. . [and] define the work ‘as it really is’—under those circumstances” (7).

Betty Tompkins is a feminist as well as a historian, and her work reminds us that yet another perspective is offered when the act of reading is studied in the context of gender. Like other forms of reader criticism, feminist reader criticism has moved in several different directions. In The Resisting Reader , for example, Judith Fetterley talks about the effects that reading particular texts can have on women. Radway, more willing to credit the reader’s power to “make” the meaning of the text, asks instead how women (especially women of a particular socioeconomic class) read differently from men (especially male academic critics).

Betty Tompkins, Apologia /Artsy.net

There is disagreement among reader-critics not only about the subject of inquiry but also about the whole purpose of critical activity. It is here that debates can become especially acrimonious. In particular, there is disagreement about the proper relation between the critic and interpretation, and consequently about the descriptive/prescriptive nature of the critical enterprise. Granted, most audience critics agree that to some extent, readers produce literary meaning; but since there are such widespread disagreements about who that “reader” is and what that production consists of, this apparent agreement yields no unity whatever on the issue of the reader’s ultimate freedom to interpret as he or she wishes.

At one extreme, there are critics who start with the text and use the concept of the reader as an analytic tool to perfect traditional interpretive practices. As Mary Louise Pratt has argued, the study of many types of hypothetical readers is consistent with formalism. In traditional formalist interpretive practice, certain textual details are foregrounded, and an interpretation explaining those details is posited as “the” interpretation of the text. To the extent that the implied reader is simply a mirror of those textual features, an implied-reader analysis is often a formalist analysis in different language. Thus, for instance, Wolfgang Iser ‘s interpretations, despite their heavy reliance on descriptions of “the reader’s” activities, could in many cases be translated into formalist terms.

Problems become more acute when we come to analyses based on postulated readers whose activities serve as models for correct behavior. In practice, such readers often turn out to be the critic himself or herself, and the readerly terminology serves primarily as a rhetorical device to persuade us of the general validity of individual interpretations. Riffaterre’s semiotic analyses in Semiotics of Poetry rely heavily on notions of what activities the text requires the reader to perform; readers are forced or compelled by the text, and individuals who, for one reason or another, wander in the wrong direction simply cannot find “the true reading” (142). For all the brilliance of his analyses, Riffaterre (as Culler has argued in Pursuit of Signs ) tells us less about what readers do or have done than about the way he himself reads; in fact, he often explicitly notes that no previous readers have followed what he sees as the dictates of the text. In the end, his use of reader terminology gives his prescriptions of how we ought to read the appearance of objective descriptions of what readers actually do.

Other critics, in contrast, use the concept of the reader not to engage in the act of interpretation but rather to explain how interpretations come about. Culler, for instance, like Riffaterre, describes much of his work as semiotic. But his actual practice is quite different. Arguing that “the interpretation of individual works is only tangentially related to the understanding of literature,” Culler strives to construct a criticism “which seeks to identify the conventions and operations by which any signifying practice (such as literature) produces its observable effects of meaning” ( Pursuits , 48). In contrast to Riffaterre, he builds his arguments not on the text but on interpretations already produced; and he aims not to persuade his own readers of the rightness or wrongness of those interpretations but rather to describe the practices that allowed them to come into being.

Culler’s work in this line is not, strictly speaking, concerned with evaluating interpretations. Indeed, he explicitly claims that the semiotic “project is disrupted whenever one slips back into the position of judge” ( Pursuit 67). Nonetheless, there is a sense in which his work tends to justify those interpretations he discusses. This is especially true because, as Pratt suggests, his arguments are frequently based on his notion of literary competence, and that notion is not really interrogated in terms of who determines competence or under what cultural and political circumstances. Since he tends to start with interpretations produced by professionally trained critics (rather than, as Bleich does, with students’ readings), academic practices are implicitly valorized.

Other reader-critics, therefore, use the notion of reader in yet a different way, neither to persuade nor to explain but to question interpretations. In The Resisting Reader, for instance, Fetterley, without giving up the notion that there are more or less correct intended interpretations of the classical American texts she reads, argues that those interpretations are harmful because they “immasculate” women (i.e., train them to identify with male needs and desires). She therefore calls upon readers to recognize them and resist them. Radway questions interpretations in an even more fundamental way. She criticizes those who use traditional academic interpretive practices to determine the cultural meaning of mass-market romances. Starting with a position fairly close to Fish’s, she insists that the cultural importance of those romances depends on the meaning they have for the actual women who consume them. She goes on to demonstrate, through ethnographic study, that since those women use different interpretive strategies than academic critics do, the texts for them have substantially different meanings.

Given the wide variety of interests and concerns exhibited by various reader-critics, it should not be surprising that audience criticism, as a whole, has not taken any definitive stands, except a negative attitude toward New Criticism , an attitude shared by virtually all other critical schools that have developed since the 1960s. Nonetheless, the very raising of certain questions (even unanswered questions) has had profound consequences for the commonplaces of the literary-critical profession and has, in conjunction with such movements as Deconstruction and Feminism , encouraged general shifts in the direction of literary studies. In the first place, talk of the reader opens up talk of psychology, sociology, and history, and reader criticism has helped break down the boundaries separating literary study from other disciplines. In addition, by highlighting the reader’s interpretive practice, even such prescriptive critics as Riffaterre have clarified the degree to which meaning is dependent upon the reader’s performance. Even if one does not agree with such critics as Robert Crosman (who claims that “‘validity’ is a matter of individual conscience” [381]) or Bleich (who argues that “reading is a wholly subjective process” [ Readings 3]), reader criticism has made it increasingly difficult to support the notion of definitive meaning in its most straightforward form. One can hardly claim that no critics, not even audience critics, continue to support the notion of “right” and “wrong” readings, but it is safe to say that the position is being increasingly discarded, and even critics who do argue for it have become ever more wary of how precarious interpretation is as a procedure and how little we can depend on the texts themselves to provide proper interpretive guidance.

What is most important, perhaps, as definitive meaning is undermined, so is the notion of definitive evaluation, since value is even more contextually determined than meaning. Statements of value are increasingly being put under pressure by the question, Value for whom? and value is increasingly being viewed not as a quality inherent in texts but rather as a function of particular social, historical, and cultural circumstances. By helping to throw into question the belief that texts have determinable, unvarying literary quality, reader-critics have helped fuel the attacks on the canon that have been launched from a number of other quarters, most notably, in the 1970s and 1980s, from feminist critics.

Further Reading David Bleich, Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism (1975), Subjective Criticism (1978); Robert Crosman, “Some Doubts about ‘The Reader of Paradise Lost/ ” College English 37 (1975); Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (1981), Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (1975); Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (1979); Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (1978); Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989), Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980); Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism (1987); Norman N. Holland, Five Readers Reading (1975); Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (1976, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, trans. Iser, 1978), Der implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett (1972, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, trans. Iser, 1974); Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (trans. Timothy Bahti, 1982); Steven Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (1982), Rhetorical Power (1989); James Phelan, Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative (1989); Mary Louise Pratt, “Interpretive Strategies I Strategic Interpretations: On Anglo-American Reader Response Criticism,” Boundary 2 11 (1981-82); Gerald Prince, “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee” (Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism); Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (1987); Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984); Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (1978); Louise Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978); Michael Steig, Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding (1989); Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, eds., The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (1980); Jane P. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (1985); Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (1980). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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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Education and Communications

How to Write a Reader Response

Last Updated: July 23, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Diane Stubbs . Diane Stubbs is a Secondary English Teacher with over 22 years of experience teaching all high school grade levels and AP courses. She specializes in secondary education, classroom management, and educational technology. Diane earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Delaware and a Master of Education from Wesley College. There are 9 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 447,776 times.

A reader response assignment asks you to explain and defend your personal reaction to an assigned text. Reader response papers can be difficult because they force you, the reader, to take responsibility for giving meaning to the text. Often these assignments feel open-ended and vague, but don't worry, a good reader response paper will follow a standard essay format that you can easily master. This guide will walk you through the creation of a well-crafted reader response paper that's sure to wow your instructor and earn you an awesome grade.

What to Include in a Reader Response

Introduce the name and author of the text.
Explain what the text is about.
Write about what you thought of the text, and why.
Answer any guided reading questions you're assigned.
Give examples to support your thoughts.
Conclude with a summary of your thoughts.

Writing the Reader Response

It is often helpful to use the first body paragraph to include more information about the text, the plotline, major themes, etc., and then use the rest of the paragraphs to provide an analysis of how you felt about the text.

Step 3 Remember to explain how, why, and what.

Remember that a reader response is meant to be personal, so it's OK to incorporate personal anecdotes and opinions into your analysis.
Example: "Forcing Hester Prynne to wear the scarlet "A" reminded me of a time when I was cyber-bullied in eighth grade, and my "friends" spread rumors about me online where the whole school could see."

Step 4 Incorporate specific examples into your analysis.

Example: "At the end of The Old Man and the Sea, Manolin promises to once again fish with Santiago, so the old man no longer has to be alone. This was Santiago's greatest wish, but it was a different kind of success than he initially set out to achieve."

Example: "'My big fish must be somewhere,' said Santiago. This is exactly how I felt after I received my third rejection letter, but like Santiago, I kept trying, and eventually I was accepted."
Make sure and cite your examples per class directions. You will usually be required to note the page numbers of any quotations or specific examples in parentheses at the end of the sentence.

A great way to think of your conclusion is that it's one last chance to explain to your reader how you see all of your points fitting together.

Step 7 Proofread, proofread, proofread!!

Sometimes it's hard to see our own mistakes, so it can really help to exchange papers with a friend, and proofread each other's work.

Drafting the Reader Response

Step 1 Identify an angle you can take when talking about the text.

"Even though I found The Scarlett Letter hard to follow at times, Hester Prynne's story is still relatable, and made me think a lot about the effects of publicly shaming people online."
"Some people believe the Old Man and the Sea is a book about failure, but it is really a story of perseverance that teaches us that success may not always come in the form we expect, and even disasters can lead to positive outcomes."

Introduction: 1 paragraph.
Analysis/Body Paragraphs: 3-4 paragraphs. How you organize these paragraphs will depend on the parameters of the assignment.
Conclusion: 1 paragraph.

Step 3 Choose example passages to use in your analysis.

Reading the Text

Step 1 Go over the assignment directions before you begin.

Do you like or dislike the text?
Can you identify the author's purpose?
Do you agree or disagree with the author?
Does the text relate to you and your life? If so, how? If not, why not?
Does the text agree with, or go against your personal world view?
What, if anything, did you learn from the text?

Taking a bit of extra time during this phase will save you a lot of time in the writing process. [9] X Research source

I think that...
I feel that...
I see that...
I have learned that...

Sample Reader Response

Community Q&A

↑ https://penandthepad.com/rules-writing-reading-response-essay-3968.html
↑ https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-jefferson-english102/chapter/reader-response-criticism-american-literature-i/
↑ https://writingstudio.gsu.edu/files/2021/02/Reading-Response.pdf
↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/proofreading/steps_for_revising.html
↑ https://faculty.washington.edu/momara/Reader%20Response.pdf
↑ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/essay-outline/
↑ http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/rwc/handouts/the-writing-process-1/invention/Writing-a-Response-or-Reaction-Paper
↑ http://education-portal.com/articles/Step-by-Step_Guide_to_Writing_a_Great_Reading_Response_Paper.html
↑ https://www.hunter.cuny.edu/rwc/handouts/the-writing-process-1/invention/Writing-a-Response-or-Reaction-Paper

About This Article

To write a reader response, develop a clear thesis statement and choose example passages from the text that support your thesis. Next, write an introduction paragraph that specifies the name of the text, the author, the subject matter, and your thesis. Then, include 3-4 paragraphs that discuss and analyze the text. Finish up with a conclusion paragraph that summarizes your arguments and brings the reader back to your thesis or main point! For tips on analyzing the text before writing your assignment, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Literary Analysis

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. Authored by : Anne Eidenmuller & Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution

Encyclopedia

Writing with artificial intelligence, 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


Incomplete Text	a text that remains incomplete because it has not been interpreted by a reader
Opinion	a view or judgment not necessarily based on facts
Interpretive Community	a term coined by Stanley Fish for describing a group of informed readers who share similar assumptions about language and literary conventions

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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English 333

Tianna Tatum-Fisher

Reader-Response Criticism

“ How do readers feel about what they read? ” (Tyson 161).

Description of Theory:

Reader-Response theory focuses on the individual reaction and interpretation of a text by the reader as it is proposed that only the reader can give a text sufficient meaning. Each and every reader will interpret a text differently between readings depending on their intellect or knowledge of the history of which the text describes, mood, personal experiences, ideologies, and culture.

Benefit of Theory:

The text forces the reader to look beyond its words and search for the deeper meaning. As each reader interprets differently groups of readers form connections and understandings based on each other’s perspectives. As well perspectives will change over time and therefore making meaning unstable.

Disadvantage of Theory:

This theory is too subjective because it focuses on the reader’s interpretation therefore reader’s bias and ignores the actual meaning of the text (if there is one), meaning the reader can misinterpret the text and if the reader knows the author’s interpretation then the reader may not believe it, find fault in it, or completely disregard it.

Questions of Reader-Response Theorists to Interpret a Text:

These questions are important because different perspectives will help enlighten different aspects of the story that would not be seen if not from a certain point of view.

Where does the text have gaps of missing information “indeterminacy” in the story that causes the reader to have to fill in themselves?
At what points is a reader most connected to a text? Why?

Notable Theorist/s:

Linguistics
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What Is Reader Response Criticism?

Whereas many discuss literary works objectively, absolutely and with respect to how the author developed the ideas on the page, reader response criticism focuses on the reader and how she or he receives the literary work. In a sense, this moves the text from existing on its own — on, for example, the physical pages of a book — and instead assumes that the text exists only when it is read. This theory makes literary works more like performance art where the reader's act of reading and interpreting the text is the performance. Critical theorists continue to develop this approach, considering the nature of the reader and what he or she brings to the text, along with the different "lenses" through which the text can be viewed.

Foundational Beliefs

In reader response criticism, the act of reading is like a dialogue between the reader and the text that has meaning only when the two are joined in conversation. It redefines the role of the text from an independent object into something that can only exist when it is read and interacts with the mind of the reader. In this way, the reader is not a passive recipient of what the text says, but rather takes an active role. The text then serves as a catalyst to spur memories and thoughts within the reader allowing him or her to link the text to personal experiences and thereby fill in the spaces left by the text. This allows theorists to explain why people can have different responses to and interpretations of the same text.

This form of criticism even goes so far as to examine the role that individual words and phrases in the text play when interacting with the reader. The sounds and shapes that words make or even how they are pronounced or spoken by the reader can essentially alter the meaning of the text, it is suggested. Some reader response critics go so far as to analyze a text phrase by phrase in order to determine how much of the experience of reading it is predetermined and then analyze how each reader's experience changes that initial meaning.

Approaches Within Reader Response Criticism

Reader response criticism starts with what formalist literary criticism called the "affective fallacy " — that the response of the reader is relevant to understanding a text — and uses it as the focus of approaching a work of literature. There are different approaches within this school of critical theory, however; some look at the work from the individual reader's point of view, while others focus on how groups or communities view the text. For these schools of criticism, it's what the text does to the reader that's important, and not necessarily the work itself, the author's intent, or the social, political, or cultural context in which it was written.

The label "reader-oriented criticism" has become popular since the reader's experiences and expectations often change as time passes. In addition, a reader may approach the text with different points of view, or lenses. That is, the reader may be able to see the value in his or her own personal response while also analyzing the text based on another critical approach.

Individual Readers

Louise Rosenblatt is generally credited with formally introducing the idea that the reader's experience and interaction with the text creates the true meaning. This idea developed into what came to be known as Transactional Reader Response Criticism. Rosenblatt argued that, while the reader is guided by the ideas and words that the author laid out, it is ultimately each individual reader's experience in reading the work that actually gives it meaning. Since each person brings unique knowledge and beliefs to the reading transaction, the text will mean different things to different people. It is that meaning — the reader's meaning — that should be assessed, as opposed to solely looking at the author's text in a vacuum.

Other critics focus on how the reader's mind relates to the text, in what is known as Psychological Reader Response Criticism. The reader is seen as a psychological subject who can be studied based on his or her unconscious drives brought to the surface by his or her reaction to a text. Reading the text can become almost a therapeutic experience for the reader, as the connections that he or she makes reveal truths about his or her personality.

Psychological Reader Response Criticism in many ways fueled another similar theory — Subjective Reader Response Criticism — which takes the personal, psychological component even further. In this theory, the reader’s interpretation of a text is thought to be deeply influenced by personal and psychological needs first, rather than being guided by the text. Each reading is thought to bring psychological symptoms to the surface, from which the reader can find his or her own unconscious motives.

The Uniform Reader

Other schools of reader response criticism look not at the reader as an individual, but as a theoretical reader. The "implied reader," for example, an idea introduced by Wolfgang Iser, is the reader who is required for the text — the reader who the author imagines when writing, and who he or she is writing for. This reader is guided by the text, which contains gaps meant for the reader to fill, explaining and making connections within the text. The reader ultimately creates meaning based not only on what is in the text, but what the text has provoked inside him or her. Theorist Stanley Fish introduced what he called the "informed reader," who brings prior, shared knowledge to the experience of reading.

Social Reader Response

Social Reader Response Criticism focuses on "interpretive communities" — groups that have shared beliefs and values — and how these groups use particular strategies that affect both the text and their reading behaviors. It is the group that then determines what an acceptable interpretation of the text is, with the meaning being whatever the group says that it is. A book club or a group of college students for example, based on their own cultural and group beliefs, will generally agree on the ultimate meaning on a text.

As an extension of the social theory, these like-minded groups can also approach and view the text from different lenses. If the group finds certain elements to be more significant than others, it might examine the text from this particular viewpoint, or lens. For example, feminist literary critics may find focus on the female elements of a writing, whereas new historicists might focus on the culture and era in which the text is read.

Arguments Against Reader Response Criticism Generally

It is often argued that reader response criticism allows for any interpretation of a text to be considered valid, and can devalue the content of the text as a result. Others argue that the text is being ignored completely or that it is impossible to properly interpret a text without taking into consideration the culture or era in which it is written. In addition, a larger complaint is that these theories do not allow for the reader’s knowledge and experience to be expanded by the text at all.

https://faculty.goucher.edu/eng215/reader_response_terms.htm
https://owl.purdue.edu/

What Is a Chiastic Structure?
What Is Historical Criticism?
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Update on USPTO response to CrowdStrike IT outage

USPTO technical staff assist employees affected by the IT outage. (Photo by Michael Connor/USPTO)

Portrait of Kathi Vidal, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office

On behalf of the USPTO, I want to express our gratitude for your patience while we work to mitigate the effects of the CrowdStrike IT outage. This event has significantly affected millions of users globally, and thousands within our USPTO workforce.

The USPTO has been diligently working since early Friday morning to restore workstation access for employees across our organization. Fortunately, all of our external, stakeholder-facing systems were minimally impacted and were restored to full operation as of Friday afternoon. The public should have no issues accessing systems such as MyUSPTO, TEAS, or other applications linked to your USPTO.gov account or our public webpages.

Though a majority of those who lost computer access are now fully online and we project that most of our workforce will be back online before the end of the week, we know employees may have missed previously scheduled meetings or were not able to return your communications. We regret any confusion or uncertainty this has caused you.

I want to express my sincere appreciation and gratitude to our teams who have been at this non-stop for the last few days, working over the weekend to set up an expanded onsite resolution center. I also want to thank the many employees across the organization who have stepped up to help outside of their regular job responsibilities. We will continue providing expanded services and hours until we have every USPTO employee back online. We are also committed to doing everything possible to alleviate the impact this outage has had on our stakeholders.

Thank you for your patience as we work to get this issue resolved. I appreciate your time and support.

Engage with the Director and join the conversation on our social media channels.

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Clintons Endorse Kamala Harris to Be Democrats’ Nominee for President

The former president and the former secretary of state swiftly backed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace President Biden atop the Democratic ticket.

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By Shawn McCreesh

July 21, 2024

Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton posted a statement on social media on Sunday afternoon endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to take President Biden’s place as the party’s nominee for November.

“We are honored to join the President in endorsing Vice President Harris and will do whatever we can to support her,” they wrote in the statement , which was posted within 90 minutes of Mr. Biden announcing that he would leave the race and back Ms. Harris as his replacement in the race against former President Donald J. Trump.

“We’ve lived through many ups and downs,” the Clintons said, “but nothing has made us more worried for our country than the threat posed by a second Trump term.”

The statement concluded, “Now is the time to support Kamala Harris and fight with everything we’ve got to elect her. America’s future depends on it.”

Mrs. Clinton faced off against Mr. Trump in 2016 and is keenly aware of what it would be like for Ms. Harris to take him on in a general election.

The Clintons were thrust into the news cycle in what appeared to be an effort by Biden allies to save his candidacy, with reports they were telling people they wanted him to stay in. What was happening was they told donors to keep giving money to him until things were settled, according to people who’ve spoken to them.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

What went wrong? How did Secret Service allow shooter to get so close to Trump?

Investigations into the sniper shooting that injured Donald Trump and killed a local firefighter must focus on whether several key Secret Service protocols were violated, current and former law enforcement officials said Sunday.

Chief among them: Why wasn't a building well within 1,000 yards of the former president locked down enough to prevent the shooter from nearly assassinating the presumptive GOP presidential nominee?

In an exclusive interview, former Secret Service Director Julia Pierson told USA TODAY that maintaining such a sniper security perimeter is part of the agency's responsibility for safeguarding "protectees" like Trump from harm. Yet the man identified as the sniper, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks , fired off numerous rounds from a building top about 150 yards from Trump's lectern at Saturday's rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“I think 1,000 yards is the sniper capability that we have a concern about for the President. So anything that's within that range, that is a professional, makable shot... and you want to know about it,” Pierson said.

“When you think about it, it's a football field and a half … and that is a makeable shot by an individual. And obviously an inch would have made a difference in this case and Trump wouldn't be with us,” said Pierson, who spent three decades with the Secret Service, much of that on presidential protective operations, before becoming director in 2013.

Crooks managed to fire off numerous rounds , injuring two other people in the crowd, before being killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper sharpshooter from another nearby roof. On Sunday evening, the FBI clarified that Crooks had used an "AR-style 556 rifle ."

Rep. Ruben Gallego, a former Marine and Arizona Democrat, said that those "responsible for the planning, approving and executing of this clearly insufficient security plan need to testify before Congress and be held accountable."

"There should never have been a clear line of sight on the former president. My Marine Corps training taught me that,” said Gallego, an Iraq veteran who is running for Senate in Arizona.

President Joe Biden also weighed in, directing Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to review all security measures for the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday in Milwaukee. He said he had ordered an independent review of the security measures taken at the Trump rally to "assess exactly what happened."

First assassination attempt against a former or current President in 43 years

The shooting marks the first assassination attempt against a former or current U.S. president since President Ronald Reagan was injured in a March 1981 shooting at a Washington, D.C. hotel. Before that, in 1975 a member of the Manson Family cult tried to shoot President Gerald Ford at close range in Sacramento, California but failed to chamber a round into the gun.

The Secret Service has confirmed that it is investigating how a gunman armed with an AR-style rifle was able to get close enough to shoot and injure Trump in what appears to be an epic failure of one the agency's primary duties of protecting VIPs. The FBI, state police and the U.S. Congress also will be seeking to answer the many swirling questions.

Some of those questions: How did Donald Trump’s would-be assassin gain a high-ground vantage point to fire off a potentially fatal head shot against the former president? Why didn’t Secret Service counter-sniper teams neutralize Crooks before he got off so many rounds from his high-powered rifle, killing one Trump rally-goer and injuring two others?

Also, if Crooks had been flagged by local authorities for acting suspiciously as some media have reported, why was he then able to climb atop a nearby building with a rifle, firing a shot that grazed Trump's ear? And why did Secret Service agents allow Trump to stand back up defiantly and do three fist-pumps when it wasn't clear that the threat had been fully neutralized?

Could this have been stopped before it started?

John Miller, a former senior FBI and New York Police Department official, said on CNN that Crooks had been observed acting suspiciously near the magnetometers, or metal detectors stationed outside the event by local law enforcement agencies.

Those officials then shared those concerns with the Secret Service and other authorities “and people had his description and were looking around for him,” said Miller, who’s currently a CNN analyst.

At some point, Miller said, Crooks “left the magnetometer area. And then at some point, people start to point out there's a guy who's climbing on that roof, and he has a rifle and police are putting that over the radio.”

According to some video and media reports, the Secret Service counter-sniper on a nearby rooftop was aiming at the shooter, perhaps before he took some or all of his shots.

“The counter sniper appears to be looking through his scope as if he's scanning for something. … And then, when the shots are fired, takes out the shooter from his position almost immediately,” said Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of Intelligence & Counterterrorism until 2022. “So we have to fill in those gaps. What happened during those seconds? What were the communications? What did he see through the scope, and did he act at his first opportunity? And we'll learn that later.”

Miller said the counter-sniper succeeded in eliminating the threat quickly. “That part worked,” he said. But, he added, “What about the front end? Could this have been stopped with faster or more clear communications or a more intense search?”

Investigations have already begun

It’s possible and even likely that the Secret Service security plan for the rally, in conjunction with local and state authorities, took into consideration the building from which Crooks allegedly sprayed bullets. It could have been locked down from the inside, prompting Crooks to have to climb to the roof from the outside as part of the security plan put in place by authorities before the rally.

But the entire sequence of events will be investigated to find out what went so wrong that Crooks was able to gain access to the roof of the building, including whether he might have surveilled the site ahead of time to find the best way up, according to current and former law enforcement officials.

William Pickle, a former special agent in charge of the Secret Service's Vice Presidential Protective Division who oversaw Vice President Al Gore’s detail, said there are provisions in any Secret Service security survey that nearby buildings are accounted for. The Secret Service regularly secures public areas such as parade routes peppered with large buildings, and advance teams interview building owners and business managers to determine who has access to the building and at what times to determine if agents need to stand watch.

“We know who’s there, why they’re there, we have control over those buildings,” Pickle said. “It seems like somewhere in this security survey, someone dropped the ball on those particular buildings.”

Though Pickle said the counter-sniper that took out the shooter did an “outstanding” job, he questioned if the Secret Service had posted additional counter-sniper teams to sufficiently cover the entire event perimeter. “A gunshot knows no boundaries except by the velocity and distance a bullet can travel,” Pickle said. “This was a relatively easy shot, and Donald Trump may have been the luckiest man in the world yesterday. He survived by about half an inch."

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told USA TODAY on Sunday that he was traveling to Milwaukee, the site of the upcoming Republican National Convention, and would not be in a position to talk until later in the day. At 2 p.m., he said he was still "unable to respond" to claims that the Secret Service made mistakes in allowing the shooter to gain such a close vantage point.

Three hours later, another senior Secret Service official also declined to comment on whether the agency failed in its mission to protect Trump at the Saturday rally.

“Any questions regarding yesterday’s event can be directed to our public affairs office out of DC,” said Audrey Gibson-Cicchino, the agency’s coordinator for the upcoming Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Speaking at a news conference there, she said she could only discuss convention security measures.

In a news conference early Sunday morning, the FBI special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh field office, Kevin Rojek, had confirmed that the FBI is leading the investigation into the shooting and that it “is our assessment at this time” that law enforcement did not know the shooter was on the roof until he began firing.

“It is surprising,” Rojek said when asked about the gunman’s close vicinity to the rally. He said that proximity is among the details that will be a focus of the investigation. Rojek added: “The Secret Service really needs to answer that question. They conduct the initial site survey.”

At the midnight news conference, State Police Lt. Col. George Bivens had deferred questions about whether there was anything about the venue that made it particularly difficult to secure by the Secret Service, which did not have representatives at the televised briefing.

Bivens also said he would not speculate on “how close a call” it was for Trump.

But Bivens confirmed that law enforcement is following up on a “number of suspicious occurrences” including accounts from witnesses who said they tried to flag police about the activity of a person outside the rally moments before the shooting.

Calls for answers from both sides of the aisle

Sen. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who chairs the House Oversight committee, was one of several lawmakers who called for an immediate investigation into potential lapses by the Secret Service.

Comer said in a statement that he has already contacted the Service Service for a briefing and he called on Cheatle – the director – to testify about what went wrong. His committee will send a formal invitation soon, Comer said.

"Political violence in all forms is unamerican and unacceptable," Comer said in his statement. "There are many questions and Americans demand answers."

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat, also called morning for an urgent investigation to explain what happened. Several hours later, however, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, also a Democrat, sidestepped a question at his own news conference about potential Secret Service failures in preventing the shooter from climbing atop the building.

"I'm not getting into ... any questions regarding the ongoing investigation," Shapiro said. "I trust that the FBI and the Pennsylvania State Police will keep you posted throughout the day and in the days ahead as to their investigations."

Contributing: Melissa Brown, a state political reporter at The Tennessean in Nashville, Tennessee.

COMMENTS

6.2: Reader-Response Theory: An Overview
You will see that "likes" and "dislikes" are important markers in reader-response theory. Here's an example: in Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (1984), the author, Fay Weldon, writes to her niece Alice, trying to convince her of the importance of Austen. "You tell me in passing," writes Weldon, "that you are doing ...
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.".
Reader Response Theory
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 ...
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An Excerpt from Reader Response Scholarship. Read the following excerpt from Louise Rosenblatt's 1978 book, The Reader, the Text, and the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. before proceeding with this chapter. (The entire book can be read at the Internet Archive). Critics and literary theorists, who have traditionally lavished attention on authors and texts, have only ...
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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.
Reader-response theory
Reader-response theory. A theory, which gained prominence in the late 1960s, that focuses on the reader or audience reaction to a particular text, perhaps more than the text itself. Reader-response criticism can be connected to poststructuralism's emphasis on the role of the reader in actively constructing texts rather than passively ...
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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: An Essay
It designates multiple critical approaches to reading a text. According to Reader Response criticism, the reader is a producer rather than a consumer of meanings (parallel to Barthes's Birth of the Reader). In this sense, a reader is a hypothetical construct of norms and expectations that can be derived or projected or extrapolated from the work.
Reader-Response Criticism
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, …. Continue reading. Literary Theory and Criticism. 5.
16 Reader Response Lecture Notes and Presentation
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.
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Views: 447,694. To write a reader response, develop a clear thesis statement and choose example passages from the text that support your thesis. Next, write an introduction paragraph that specifies the name of the text, the author, the subject matter, and your thesis. Then, include 3-4 paragraphs that discuss and analyze the text.
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 ...
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Essays and criticism on Reader-Response Criticism - Critical Essays ... Start your 48-hour free trial to get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help ...
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 ...
Reader-Response Criticism
Reader-Response Criticism. "How do readers feel about what they read?" (Tyson 161). Reader-Response theory focuses on the individual reaction and interpretation of a text by the reader as it is proposed that only the reader can give a text sufficient meaning. Each and every reader will interpret a text differently between readings depending ...
Reader Response: What It Is and How It Works
Schools increasingly use reader response as a strategy for students to interact more actively with the text. A reader's response can be an essay, a critique, an analysis, or a paper about a certain piece of writing. This might be a novel, a poem, a short story, or a nonfiction work. One form of reading response is during-reading response ...
What Is Reader Response Criticism?
Foundational Beliefs. In reader response criticism, the act of reading is like a dialogue between the reader and the text that has meaning only when the two are joined in conversation. It redefines the role of the text from an independent object into something that can only exist when it is read and interacts with the mind of the reader.
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Two videos posted on social media that were verified by The New York Times appeared to show the person suspected of shooting at former President Donald J. Trump lying motionless on the roof of a ...
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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 ...
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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.
6: Writing about Readers
14835. Understand the theory of reader response, which focuses on the reader's reading experience. Apply the reader-response methodology to works of literature. Engage in the writing process of a peer writer, including peer review. Review and evaluate a variety of reader-response papers by peer writers. Draft and revise a reader-response ...

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

Reader-response theory

Literary Theory and Criticism

Reader-Response Criticism

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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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How to Write a Reader Response

What to Include in a Reader Response

Writing the Reader Response

Drafting the Reader Response

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Literary Analysis

The Purpose of Reader-Response

Write as a Scholar

The Structure of a Reader-Response Essay

Key Takeaways

Reader-Response Essay Example

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Foundational Questions of Reader-Response Criticism

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