Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theories that focus on the reader (or "audience") and their experience in literature, in contrast to schools and other theories that focus primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.
Although literary theory has long been concerned with the role of readers in creating meaning and experience of literary works, modern reader-response criticism began in the 1960s and 70s, particularly in the US and Germany, in Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, Roland Barthes, and others. Its important predecessor is I. A. Richards, who in 1929 analyzed a group of mis-translations of Cambridge students; Louise Rosenblatt, who, in Literature as Exploration (1938), argues that it is important for teachers not to impose "preconceived notions on the proper way to react to any work"; and C. S. Lewis in Experiments in Criticism (1961).
The response-response theory acknowledges the reader as an active agent who instills a "real existence" in the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Critics of the reader's response argue that literature should be seen as a performing art in which each reader creates his own, perhaps unique, performance-related text. He stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and New Criticism, in which the reader's role in recreating literary works is ignored. New Criticism has emphasized that only what is in the text is part of the meaning of the text. There is no appeal to the author's authority or intent, or the psychology of the reader, allowed in the discussion of orthodox New Criticism.
Video Reader-response criticism
Jenis
There are several approaches in the theoretical branch of reader-response criticism, but all unite in their belief that the meaning of the text comes from the reader through the process of reading. Lois Tyson attempted to define variations into five critically acclaimed responses critics approach while warning that grouping of response theorists explicitly invites difficulties due to overlapping beliefs and practices. The theory of transactional responses , led by Louise Rosenblatt and supported by Wolfgang Iser, involves a transaction between the implied meaning of the text and the interpretation of the individual by readers who are influenced by their emotions and personal knowledge. Affective language styles , set by Fish, believe that text can only appear when read; therefore, a text can not have an independent meaning from the reader. The subjective reader response theory , associated with David Bleich, looks entirely at the reader's response to literary meaning as an individual's written response to a text and then compared with another individual's interpretation to discover the continuity of meaning. Psychological reader response theory, employed by Norman Holland, believes that reader motives strongly influence the way they read, and then use this reading to analyze the psychological response of the reader. Social-reader response theory is Stanley's extension of his earlier work, which states that every individual's interpretation of the text is made in an interpretive mind community composed of participants who share certain reading and interpretation strategies. In all interpretive communities, readers tend to use certain forms of interpretation as a consequence of the strategies used at the time of reading.
An alternative way to organize the response-reader theory is to separate them into three groups: those who focus on individual ("individualist") readers' experiences; those who perform psychological experiments on a group of clear readers ("researchers"); and those who assume a fairly uniform response by all readers ("uniformists"). Therefore, one can draw the distinction between reader-response theorists who see the individual readers who move the whole experience and others who think about literary experiences as largely text-driven and uniform (with negligible individual variations). The former theorists, who think that readers control, get what is common in the literary experience of sharing techniques for reading and interpreting which, however, are individually applied by different readers. The latter, which places the text in control, obtains the same response, of course, from the literary work itself. The most fundamental difference between read-response criticisms may be, then, between those who perceive individual differences between readers' responses as important and those who try to surround them.
Individual
In the 1960s, David's pedagogical literary theory inspired by the priest requires that the text is the reader's interpretation of it as it is in their minds, and that objective reading is impossible due to the process of symbolization and its symbolization. The process of symbolization and resolutions consists of how one's personal emotions, needs and life experiences affect how a reader engages with a text; slightly change the meaning. Bleich supports his theory by researching with his students in which they record the meaning of each text as they experience it, then responding to their own initial written response, before comparing it with other students' responses to collectively assigning literary meaning to the class of "generating" knowledge of how certain people re-create the text. He uses this knowledge to theorize about the process of reading and refocusing the teaching of literature in the classroom.
Michael Steig and Walter Slatoff, like Bleich, point out that a very personal response from students can be the basis for critical analysis in the classroom. Jeffrey Berman has encouraged students to respond to texts to write anonymously and share with the writings of their classmates in response to literary works on sensitive subjects such as drugs, suicidal thoughts, deaths in the family, parental abuse and the like. A kind of catharsis that borders on the outcome of therapy. In general, American response-response critics focus on individual reader responses. American magazines such as Reading Research Quarterly and others publish articles that apply reader-response theory to literary teaching.
In 1961, C. S. Lewis published the Experiment in Critics , where he analyzed the reader's role in selecting literature. He analyzed their choice in the light of their purpose in reading.
In 1967, Stanley Fish published Shocked by Sin , the first study of the great literary works (Paradise Lost ) focusing on the reader's experience. In the appendix, "Literature in the Reader", Fish uses the "reader" to examine responses to complex sentences in sequence, word for word. But since 1976, it has turned into a noticeable difference among the real readers. He explores reading tactics supported by different critical schools, by professoriate literature, and by the legal profession, introducing the idea of ââ"interpretive communities" that share certain modes of reading.
In 1968, Norman Holland drew psychoanalytic psychology in The Dynamics of Literary Response to model literary works. Each reader introjects a fantasy "in" text, then modifies it with a defense mechanism into an interpretation. However, in 1973, after recording responses from real readers, Holland found too much variation to adapt this model in which most responses were identical but showed little individual variation.
Holland then developed a second model based on his case study 5 Reading Readers . Someone has (in the brain) a core identity theme (behavior then becomes understandable as themes and variations as in music). This core gives the individual a certain style to be - and read. Each reader uses a physical literary work plus an unchanged code (such as a form of letters) plus a variable canon ("different interpretive community", for example) plus individual reading styles to build the preferred response and unlike other readers' responses. The Netherlands worked with others at the State University of New York in Buffalo, Murray Schwartz, David Willbern, and Robert Rogers, to develop a specific teaching format, the "Delphi seminar," designed to make students "self-knowledge".
Experiments
Reuven Tsur in Israel has evolved in very detailed models to express poetic rhythms, metaphors, and word-of-voice in poetry (including the reading of different actors from a single line of Shakespeare). Richard Gerrig in the US has experimented with the reader's mind state during and after the literary experience. He has shown how readers put aside knowledge and commonplace values ââas they read, treat, for example, criminals as heroes. He has also investigated how readers receive, while reading, impossible or fantastic things (Coleridge "is willing to resist mistrust"), but discard them after they are done.
In Canada, David Miall, usually working with Donald Kuiken, has produced many works that explore emotional or "affective" responses to literature, taking such concepts from ordinary criticism as "defamiliarization" or "foreground". They have used both experiments and new developments in neuropsychology, and have developed a questionnaire to measure various aspects of the reader's response.
There are many other experimental psychologists around the world who explore readers' responses, do a lot of detailed experiments. One can examine their work through their professional organizations, the International Society for Literature and Empirical Media Studies, and the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, and through psychological indexes such as PSYCINFO.
Two notable researchers are Dolf Zillmann and Peter Vorderer, both of whom work in media communications and psychology. Both have theorized and tested the idea of ââwhat produces emotions such as tension, curiosity, surprise in the reader, the factors required, and the role played by the reader. Jenefer Robinson, a researcher in emotion, recently combined his studies of emotions with his role in literature, music, and the arts.
Uniform
Wolfgang Iser exemplifies the German tendency to theorize the readers and thus make a uniform response. For him, literature is not the object itself but the effect that must be explained. But he insists this response is controlled by the text. For the "real" reader, he replaces the implied reader, who is the reader of the required literary work. In the various polarities created by the text, this "implied" reader makes hope, meaning, and detail of characters and arrangements not expressed through the "traveler's perspective". In the model, the control text. The reader's activities are limited within the limits specified by the literary works.
Another important criterion of German response-readers is Hans-Robert Jauss, who defines literature as a dialectical process of production and acceptance (Rezeption - a common term in Germany for "response"). For Jauss, the reader has a certain mental assemblage, the "horizon" of hope ( Erwartungshorizont ), from which perspective each reader, at any given time in history, reads. The response criticism-the reader shapes this expectation horizon by reading literary works from the period in question.
Both Iser and Jauss, and the Constance School they emulate, return criticism of responses to the study of texts by defining the reader in terms of text. In the same way, Gerald Prince presupposes "narrative", Michael Riffaterre presupposes "superreader", and Stanley Fish "knowledgeable reader". And many text-oriented critics talk only of "" readers who mark all readers.
Maps Reader-response criticism
Objection
The reader-response critics argue that in order to understand a text one must look at the process by which the reader creates meaning and experience. Traditional text-oriented schools, such as formalism, often think about criticism of reader-responses as anarchist subjectivism, which allows readers to interpret the texts in whatever way they wish. Text-oriented critics claim that one can understand text while remaining immune to culture, status, personality, etc., and therefore "objectively."
However, for read-response-based theorists, reading is always subjective and objective. Some critics of reader-response (uniformis) assume active reading models: literary work controls part of response and reader control. Others, who see the position as an internal contradiction, claim that the reader controls all transactions (individualists). In such reader-active models, readers and audiences use amateur or professional procedures to read (shared by many others) as well as their personal problems and values.
Another objection to reader-response criticism is that it fails to explain a text capable of broadening the reader's understanding. While readers can and do place their own ideas and experiences into a work, they at the same time gain new insights through the text. This is something that is generally ignored in reader-response criticism.
Extensions
The reader-response criticism deals with psychology, both experimental psychology for those who seek to find the principles of response, and psychoanalytic psychology for those who study individual responses. Post-behaviorist psychologists read and perception support the idea that it is the reader who makes meaning. Increasingly, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and neuropsychoanalysis have provided strong reader-response criticism and detailed models for aesthetic processes. In 2011, the researchers found that during listening to emotionally charged parts of the story, the reader responded with a change in heart rate variability, indicating an increase in sympathetic nervous system activation. The intense part of a story is also accompanied by an increase in brain activity in a network of areas known to be involved in processing fear, including the amygdala.
Based on psychological principles, reader-response approaches easily generalize to other arts: cinema (David Bordwell), music, or visual art (E. H. Gombrich), and even to history (Hayden White). In emphasizing reader activity, reader-response theory can be used to justify the persecution of traditional interpretations such as deconstruction or cultural criticism.
Because reader-response criticism focuses on the strategies taught readers to use, they may discuss reading and literature teaching. Also, since reader-response critics emphasize reader activity, reader-response critics may share concerns of feminist criticism, and criticism of Gender and Queer Theory and Post-Colonialism.
Notes and references
Further reading
- Tompkins, Jane P. (ed.) (1980). Critique of Responses: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism . Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBNÃ, 0-8018-2401-X.
- Tyson, Lois (2006). Today's critical theory: user friendly guide , 2nd edn. Routledge, New York, and London.
External links
- Definition of Response-Criticism
Source of the article : Wikipedia