Reader-response criticism or aesthetics of reception, 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 asks about the conceptual and emotional perception of artistic works and the extent to which it is already created in the object or to what extent it only arises in the process of reception.
Although literary theory has long paid some attention to the reader’s role in creating the meaning and experience of a literary work, modern reader-response criticism began in the 1960s and ’70s, particularly in the US and Germany, in work by Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, Roland Barthes, and others. Important predecessors were I. A. Richards, who in 1929 analyzed a group of Cambridge undergraduates’ misreadings; Louise Rosenblatt, who, in Literature as Exploration (1938), argued that it is important for the teacher to avoid imposing any “preconceived notions about the proper way to react to any work”; and C. S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism (1961).
Most of the currents are concerned with the understanding that the object generates itself by starting from an understanding position and supplying it with information – handling an “implicit” reader designed by the text itself. The interpretation is intended to determine what this presumed recipient must understand when the text (or any work of art in its offerings of meaning) is fully developed. In expanding this approach, research can note how historically developed understanding. Research directions that are interested in real “empirical” readersSocial history assigned to literature or art, even if they can claim the term for themselves in the interest of its further development.
Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts “real existence” to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates their own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and the New Criticism, in which the reader’s role in re-creating literary works is ignored. New Criticism had emphasized that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text. No appeal to the authority or intention of the author, nor to the psychology of the reader, was allowed in the discussions of orthodox New Critics.
Problem
In a larger context, the aesthetics of reception is an answer to the 19th-century interpretation of literature that had an impact on the 20th century. What they shared was a strong interest in the author and his intentions, as well as the goal of interpreting the artwork as an artifact of a time and nation, reading it as the key to understanding other eras and cultures.
In the 20th century, the textual approaches to interpretation opposed these reading offers. In the interest of refocusing research on the object, the artwork, in currents such as New Criticism, the question was asked as to what gives this artwork its special aesthetic value and what exactly its art is compared to less accomplished artifacts.
The aesthetics of reception break with these interpretative approaches – but not completely. It pushes back questions about the work versus questions about the perception that it triggers, and thereby opens up questions about the process in which the perception takes place, about the information that flows into it, and also about horizons of understanding that the artwork tacitly or in open innuendo. The return to the question of what the author wanted to say is therefore excluded – this question is at best part of the effect that the text has. On the other hand, the question of how the text works, how it works, what makes it exciting, what gives it appeal, what it does with the reader is at the center, as in the interpretations inherent in the text, but now much more clearly. Skepticism remains here about the empirically verifiable reader.
In theory, the ideally uses opportunities that are set out in the text. In the worst case, however, he imposes a meaning of his choice on the text. The literary scholar, on the other hand, acts as a reader who examines reading opportunities theoretically given with the text; the entire “history of reception”, the history of understanding that a work finds, can be seen as part of the field of investigation if the term is appropriately understood: Here, possible understandings unfold, here possible horizons of understanding emerge in the course of historical exploration. The representatives of the aesthetics of reception remained controversial as to how to deal with these expansions, which extend into social history as well as cultural and specialist history.
The aesthetics of reception attracted criticism as a project that was ultimately unclearly positioned. The horizons of understanding that she asked for could not be established as clearly as hoped. Research that contextualizes its objects more simply than other documents dealt more openly here with the problem of the researcher who creates a position of understanding (as with time documents of the reception, which were sometimes dismissed as unhelpful, accidental to misleading readings in the strict aesthetics of reception).
Positions
For both Hans Robert Jauß and Wolfgang Iser, the text-reader discussion is the most important point of reference for the constitution of meaning in the reading act.
In his famous inaugural lecture, Hans Robert Jauß focuses on the historical course of the reception of a work and thus its meaning. Initially, the view of a work is always that of the reader. However, in order to understand the work in the sense of Jauß’s hermeneutic view – which Iser does not share because he is interested in text theory – the history of reception, i.e. how the work was understood at what time, must also be taken into account. According to Jauß, the aesthetic content should be measured according to whether a work changes the horizon of the reader (that would be classic, aesthetically valuable) or not (trivial literature, abbreviation for short).
According to Wolfgang Iser, the “aesthetic content” of a text is only brought out in the process of reading. He does not make the above distinction and is oriented in a completely different way. The following terms are important to him: indeterminacy / empty spaces, schematic view, implicit readers and others. The text unfolds meaning as communication with an “implicit reader” – a text-theoretical instance of the reader, if you like, an imaginary reader.
For Iser, the “professional reader” / “ideal reader” is fundamental. In this sense, this is the experienced reader who has in-depth literary experience and knowledge and is therefore able to recognize the signals and cross-references created in the text. With these settings, the aesthetics of reception, or rather aesthetics of effect, proved to be partly a continuation of existing interpretation practice. Jauß and Iser’s investigations were characterized by the communication model with (decoding) recipient. Jauß’s hermeneutic approach, which goes back to Hans-Georg Gadamer, endeavors in the process of understanding the hermeneutic circlewhile Iser – as mentioned above – is interested in the text, its nature and structure.
However, the meaning of the text is strongly pre-defined here by the implicit reader. Literary science was given a privileged position with the settings: it can develop meanings that real readers have not yet developed; namely when it proves which aesthetic experience the transmitter pre-designed for the recipient. With poetic expertiseand knowledge of time horizons, literary studies help real readers here. On the other hand, it gains new control. So she can come to the conclusion that the author did not think of a reader who dares this or that new interpretation, and thus tell this reader that he is playing his own game here – a scientifically unsustainable one.
The work of the Konstanz School was most likely to be the result of historical research by the resistance it aroused. The question of historical evidence of dealing with texts, of actual reports of reception, of diary entries by readers, of letters from which it can be seen how texts were read, was far more likely to be found in literary sociology and book science. Representatives of the Konstanz School noted here the threat of research being restricted, its restriction to random documents and their time-related perspectives. Research is at a standstill here, where exploration of textual meaning that has not yet been realized must remain the goal.
Art historian Wolfgang Kemp is a key representative in art studies. In his approach, he refers to the aesthetics of reception in literary studies and argues that art science should not refuse methodology, because there is a particularly close relationship between viewer and image in visual art, and it is only the mutual relationship between the two that enables the development of the Artwork as well as its purpose.
Types
There are multiple approaches within the theoretical branch of reader-response criticism, yet all are unified in their belief that the meaning of a text is derived from the reader through the reading process. Lois Tyson endeavors to define the variations into five recognized reader-response criticism approaches whilst warning that categorizing reader-response theorists explicitly invites difficulty due to their overlapping beliefs and practices. Transactional reader-response theory, led by Louise Rosenblatt and supported by Wolfgang Iser, involves a transaction between the text’s inferred meaning and the individual interpretation by the reader influenced by their personal emotions and knowledge. Affective stylistics, established by Fish, believe that a text can only come into existence as it is read; therefore, a text cannot have meaning independent of the reader. Subjective reader-response theory, associated with David Bleich, looks entirely to the reader’s response for literary meaning as individual written responses to a text are then compared to other individual interpretations to find continuity of meaning.
Psychological reader-response theory, employed by Norman Holland, believes that a reader’s motives heavily affect how they read, and subsequently use this reading to analyze the psychological response of the reader. Social reader-response theory is Stanley Fish’s extension of his earlier work, stating that any individual interpretation of a text is created in an interpretive community of minds consisting of participants who share a specific reading and interpretation strategy. In all interpretive communities, readers are predisposed to a particular form of interpretation as a consequence of strategies used at the time of reading.
An alternative way of organizing reader-response theorists is to separate them into three groups: those who focus upon the individual reader’s experience (“individualists”); those who conduct psychological experiments on a defined set of readers (“experimenters”); and those who assume a fairly uniform response by all readers (“uniformists”). One can therefore draw a distinction between reader-response theorists who see the individual reader driving the whole experience and others who think of literary experience as largely text-driven and uniform (with individual variations that can be ignored). The former theorists, who think the reader controls, derive what is common in a literary experience from shared techniques for reading and interpreting which are, however, individually applied by different readers. The latter, who put the text in control, derive commonalities of response, obviously, from the literary work itself. The most fundamental difference among reader-response critics is probably, then, between those who regard individual differences among readers’ responses as important and those who try to get around them.
Individualists
In the 1960s, David Bleich’s pedagogically inspired literary theory entailed that the text is the reader’s interpretation of it as it exists in their mind, and that an objective reading is not possible due to the symbolization and resymbolization process. The symbolization and resymbolization process consists of how an individual’s personal emotions, needs and life experiences affect how a reader engages with a text; marginally altering the meaning. Bleich supported his theory by conducting a study with his students in which they recorded their individual meaning of a text as they experienced it, then response to their own initial written response, before comparing it with other student’s responses to collectively establish literary significance according to the classes “generated” knowledge of how particular persons recreate texts. He used this knowledge to theorize about the reading process and to refocus the classroom teaching of literature.
Michael Steig and Walter Slatoff have, like Bleich, shown that students’ highly personal responses can provide the basis for critical analyses in the classroom. Jeffrey Berman has encouraged students responding to texts to write anonymously and share with their classmates writings in response to literary works about sensitive subjects like drugs, suicidal thoughts, death in the family, parental abuse and the like. A kind of catharsis bordering on therapy results. In general, American reader-response critics have focused on individual readers’ responses. American magazines like Reading Research Quarterly and others publish articles applying reader-response theory to the teaching of literature.
In 1961, C. S. Lewis published An Experiment in Criticism, in which he analyzed readers’ role in selecting literature. He analyzed their selections in light of their goals in reading.
In 1967, Stanley Fish published Surprised by Sin, the first study of a large literary work (Paradise Lost) that focused on its readers’ experience. In an appendix, “Literature in the Reader”, Fish used “the” reader to examine responses to complex sentences sequentially, word-by-word. Since 1976, however, he has turned to real differences among real readers. He explores the reading tactics endorsed by different critical schools, by the literary professoriate, and by the legal profession, introducing the idea of “interpretive communities” that share particular modes of reading.
In 1968, Norman Holland drew on psychoanalytic psychology in The Dynamics of Literary Response to model the literary work. Each reader introjects a fantasy “in” the text, then modifies it by defense mechanisms into an interpretation. In 1973, however, having recorded responses from real readers, Holland found variations too great to fit this model in which responses are mostly alike but show minor individual variations.
Holland then developed a second model based on his case studies 5 Readers Reading. An individual has (in the brain) a core identity theme (behaviors then becoming understandable as a theme and variations as in music). This core gives that individual a certain style of being—and reading. Each reader uses the physical literary work plus invariable codes (such as the shapes of letters) plus variable canons (different “interpretive communities”, for example) plus an individual style of reading to build a response both like and unlike other readers’ responses. Holland worked with others at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Murray Schwartz, David Willbern, and Robert Rogers, to develop a particular teaching format, the “Delphi seminar,” designed to get students to “know themselves”.
Experimenters
Reuven Tsur in Israel has developed in great detail models for the expressivity of poetic rhythms, of metaphor, and of word-sound in poetry (including different actors’ readings of a single line of Shakespeare). Richard Gerrig in the U.S. has experimented with the reader’s state of mind during and after a literary experience. He has shown how readers put aside ordinary knowledge and values while they read, treating, for example, criminals as heroes. He has also investigated how readers accept, while reading, improbable or fantastic things (Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”), but discard them after they have finished.
In Canada, David Miall, usually working with Donald Kuiken, has produced a large body of work exploring emotional or “affective” responses to literature, drawing on such concepts from ordinary criticism as “defamiliarization” or “foregrounding”. They have used both experiments and new developments in neuropsychology, and have developed a questionnaire for measuring different aspects of a reader’s response.
There are many other experimental psychologists around the world exploring readers’ responses, conducting many detailed experiments. One can research their work through their professional organizations, the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media, and International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, and through such psychological indices as PSYCINFO.
Two notable researchers are Dolf Zillmann and Peter Vorderer, both working in the field of communications and media psychology. Both have theorized and tested ideas about what produces emotions such as suspense, curiosity, surprise in readers, the necessary factors involved, and the role the reader plays. Jenefer Robinson, a philosopher, has recently blended her studies on emotion with its role in literature, music, and art.
Uniformists
Wolfgang Iser exemplifies the German tendency to theorize the reader and so posit a uniform response. For him, a literary work is not an object in itself but an effect to be explained. But he asserts this response is controlled by the text. For the “real” reader, he substitutes an implied reader, who is the reader a given literary work requires. Within various polarities created by the text, this “implied” reader makes expectations, meanings, and the unstated details of characters and settings through a “wandering viewpoint”. In his model, the text controls. The reader’s activities are confined within limits set by the literary work.
Two of Iser’s reading assumptions have influenced reading-response criticism of the New Testament. The first is the role of the reader, who is active, not passive, in the production of textual meaning. The reader fills in the “gaps” or areas of “indeterminacy” of the text. Although the “text” is written by the author, its “realization” (Konkritisation) as a “work” is fulfilled by the reader, according to Iser. Iser uses the analogy of two people gazing into the night sky to describe the role of the reader in the production of textual meaning. “Both be looking at the same collection of stars, but one will see the image of a plough, and the other will make out a dipper. The ‘stars’ in a literary text are fixed, the lines that join them are variable.” The Iserian reader contributes to the meaning of the text, but limits are placed on this reader by the text itself.
The second assumption concerns Iser’s reading strategy of anticipation of what lies ahead, frustration of those expectations, retrospection, and reconceptualization of new expectations. Iser describes the reader’s maneuvers in the negotiation of a text in the following way: “We look forward, we look back, we decide, we change our decisions, we form expectations, we are shocked by their nonfulfillment, we question, we muse, we accept, we reject; this is the dynamic process of recreation.”
Iser’s approach to reading has been adopted by several New Testament critics, including Culpepper 1983, Scott 1989, Roth 1997, Darr 1992, 1998, Fowler 1991, 2008, Howell 1990, Kurz 1993, Powell 2001, and Resseguie 1984, 2016.
Another important German reader-response critic was Hans-Robert Jauss, who defined literature as a dialectic process of production and reception (Rezeption—the term common in Germany for “response”). For Jauss, readers have a certain mental set, a “horizon” of expectations (Erwartungshorizont), from which perspective each reader, at any given time in history, reads. Reader-response criticism establishes these horizons of expectation by reading literary works of the period in question.
Both Iser and Jauss, along with the Constance School, exemplify and return reader-response criticism to a study of the text by defining readers in terms of the text. In the same way, Gerald Prince posits a “narratee”, Michael Riffaterre posits a “superreader”, and Stanley Fish an “informed reader.” And many text-oriented critics simply speak of “the” reader who typifies all readers….
Objections
Reader-response critics hold that in order to understand a text, one must look to the processes readers use to create meaning and experience. Traditional text-oriented schools, such as formalism, often think of reader-response criticism as an anarchic subjectivism, allowing readers to interpret a text any way they want. Text-oriented critics claim that one can understand a text while remaining immune to one’s own culture, status, personality, and so on, and hence “objectively.”
To reader-response based theorists, however, reading is always both subjective and objective. Some reader-response critics (uniformists) assume a bi-active model of reading: the literary work controls part of the response and the reader controls part. Others, who see that position as internally contradictory, claim that the reader controls the whole transaction (individualists). In such a reader-active model, readers and audiences use amateur or professional procedures for reading (shared by many others) as well as their personal issues and values.
Another objection to reader-response criticism is that it fails to account for the text being able to expand the reader’s understanding. While readers can and do put their own ideas and experiences into a work, they are at the same time gaining new understanding through the text. This is something that is generally overlooked in reader-response criticism.
Extensions
Reader-response criticism relates to psychology, both experimental psychology for those attempting to find principles of response, and psychoanalytic psychology for those studying individual responses. Post-behaviorist psychologists of reading and of perception support the idea that it is the reader who makes meaning. Increasingly, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and neuropsychoanalysis have given reader-response critics powerful and detailed models for the aesthetic process. In 2011 researchers found that during listening to emotionally intense parts of a story, readers respond with changes in heart rate variability, indicative of increased activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Intense parts of a story were also accompanied by increased brain activity in a network of regions known to be involved in the processing of fear, including the amygdala.
Because it rests on psychological principles, a reader-response approach readily generalizes to other arts: cinema (David Bordwell), music, or visual art (E. H. Gombrich), and even to history (Hayden White). In stressing the activity of the reader, reader-response theory may be employed to justify upsettings of traditional interpretations like deconstruction or cultural criticism.
Since reader-response critics focus on the strategies readers are taught to use, they may address the teaching of reading and literature. Also, because reader-response criticism stresses the activity of the reader, reader-response critics may share the concerns of feminist critics, and critics of Gender and Queer Theory and Post-Colonialism.