Abstract
Students arc routinely asked in English courses for their reactions to the texts they arc reading. Sometimes there arc so many different reactions that wc may wonder whether everyone has read the same text. And some students respond so idiosyncratically to what they read that wc say their responses arc “totally off the wall.” This variety of response interests rcadcr-rcsponsc critics, who raise theoretical questions about whether our responses to a work arc the same as its meanings, whether a work can have as many meanings as we have responses to it, and whether some responses arc more valid than others. They ask what determines what is and what isn’t “off the wall.” What, in other words, is the wall, and what standards help us define it?
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Works Cited
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Some Introductions to Reader-Response Criticism
Beach, Richard. A Teacher’s Introduction to Reader-Response Theories. Urbana: NCTE, 1993.
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Leitch, Vincent B. American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.
Mailloux, Steven. “Learning to Read: Interpretation and Reader-Response Criticism.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 12 (1979): 93–108.
Mailloux, Steven. “Reader-Response Criticism?” Genre 10 (1977): 413–31.
Mailoux, Steven. “The Turns of Reader-Response Criticism.” Conversations: Contemporary Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature. Ed. Charles Moran and Elizabeth F. Penfield. Urbana: NCTE, 1990. 38–54.
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Tompkins, Jane P. “An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism.” Tompkins ix-xxiv.
Reader-Response Criticism in Anthologies and Collections
Flynn, Elizabeth A., and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.
Garvin, Harry R., ed. Theories of Reading, Looking, and Listening. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1981. Essays by Cain and Rosenblatt.
Machor, James L., ed. Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Contains Mailloux essay “Misreading as a Historical Act: Cultural Rhetoric, Bible Politics, and Fuller’s 1845 Review of Douglass’s Narrative.”
Primeau, Ronald, ed. Influx: Essays on Literary Influence. Port Washington: Kennikat, 1977. Essays by Fish, Holland, and Rosenblatt.
Suleiman, Susan R, and Inge Crosman, eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. See especially the essays by Culler, Iser, and Todorov.
Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. See especially the essays by Bleich, Fish, Holland, Prince, and Tompkins.
Reader-Response Criticism: Some Major Works
Bleich, David. Subjective Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.
Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.
Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.
Fish, Stanley Eugene. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.
Fish, Stanley Eugene. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. This volume contains most of Fish’s most influential essays, including “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” “What It’s Like to Read L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” “Interpreting the Variorum,” “Is There a Text in This Class?” “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” and “What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?”
Fish, Stanley Eugene. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972.
Fish, Stanley Eugene. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost.” 2nd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.
Holland, Norman N. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.
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Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Intro. Paul de Man. Brighton, Eng.: Harvester, 1982.
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Mailloux, Steven. Rhetorical Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.
Messent, Peter. New Readings of the American Novel: Narrative Theory and Its Application. New York: Macmillan, 1991.
Prince, Gerald. Narratology. New York: Mouton, 1982.
Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.
Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration. 4th ed. New York: MLA, 1983.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978.
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Exemplary Short Readings of Major Texts
Anderson, Howard. “Tristram Shandy and the Reader’s Imagination.” PMLA 86 (1971): 966–73.
Berger, Carole. “The Rake and the Reader in Jane Austen’s Novels.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 15 (1975): 531–44.
Booth, Stephen. “On the Value of Hamlet.” Reinterpretations of English Drama: Selected Papers from the English Institute. Ed. Norman Rabkin. New York: Columbia UP, 1969. 137–76.
Easson, Robert R. “William Blake and His Reader ’ in Jerusalem.” Blake’s Sublime Allegory. Ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph A. Wittreich. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1973. 309–28.
Kirk, Carey H. “Moby-Dick: The Challenge of Response.” Papers on Language and Literature 13 (1977): 383–90.
Leverenz, David. “Mrs. Hawthorne’s Headache: Reading The Scarlet Letter” Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Scarlet Letter.” Ed. Ross C Murfin. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1991. 263–74.
Lowe-Evans, Mary. “Reading with a ‘Nicer Eye’: Responding to Frankenstein.” Mary Shelley, “Frankenstein.” Ed. Johanna M. Smith. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1992. 215–29.
Rabinowitz, Peter J. “’A Symbol of Something’: Interpretive Vertigo in ‘The Dead.’” James Joyce, “The Dead.” Ed. Daniel R. Schwarz. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1994. 137–49.
Treichler, Paula. “The Construction of Ambiguity in The Awakening” Kate Chopin, “The Awakening.”Ed. Nancy A. Walker. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1993. 308–28.
Other Works Referred to in What Is Reader-Response Criticism?
Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.
Culler, Jonathan. Structural Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.
Koestenbaum, Wayne. “Wilde’s Hard Labor and the Birth of Gay Reading.” Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. Ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden. New York: Rout-ledge, 1990.
Richards, I.A. Practical Criticism. New York: Harcourt, 1929. Rpt. in Criticism: The Major Texts. Ed. Walter Jackson Bate. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt, 1970. 575.
Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1954. See especially the discussion of “The Affective Fallacy,” with which reader-response critics have so sharply disagreed.
Reader-Oriented Approaches to Heart of Darkness
Lenta, Margaret. “Narrators and Readers: 1902 and 1975.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 20 (1989): 19–36.
Rosmarin, Adena. “Darkening the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism and Heart of Darkness” Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness.” Ed. Ross C Murfin. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1989.
Straus, Nina Pelikan. “The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 20(1987): 123–37.
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Murfin, R.C., Rabinowitz, P.J. (1996). Reader-Response Criticism and Heart of Darkness. In: Murfin, R.C. (eds) Heart of Darkness. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14016-9_4
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