Reader Response Theory Quotes

In 1938, Louise Rosenblatt introduced reader response theory or the transactional view of reading. She asserted that what the reader brings to the reading act - his or her world of experiences, personality, and current frame of mind - is just as important in interpreting the text as what the author writes. According to this view, reading is a fusion of text and reader.

I remember a lecture from one of my lit classes about a theory called "Reader Response", which basically says: More often than not, it's the readers --- not the writers --- who determine what a book means.

Augustine, who assumed that Genesis 1 was chapter 1 in a book that contained the literal words of God, and that Genesis 2 was the second chapter in the same book, put the two chapters together and read the latter as a sequel. Genesis 2, he assumed, described the fall from the perfection and original goodness of creation depicted in chapter 1. So almost inevitably the Christian scriptures from the fourth century on were interpreted against the background of this (mis) understanding. The primary trouble with this theory was that by the fourth century of the Common Era there were no Jews to speak of left in the Christian movement, and therefore the only readers and interpreters of the ancient Hebrew myths were Gentiles, who had no idea what these stories originally meant. Consequently, they interpreted them as perfection established by God in chapter 1, followed by perfection ruined by human beings in chapter 2. Why was that a problem? Well I, for one, have never known a Jewish scripture scholar to treat the Garden of Eden story in the same way that Gentiles treat it. Jews tend to see this story not as a narrative about sin entering the world, but as a parable about the birth of self-consciousness. It is, for the Jews, not a fall into sin, but a step into humanity. It is the birth of a new relationship with God, changing from master-servant to interdependent cooperation. The forbidden fruit was not from an apple tree, as so many who don’t bother to read the text seem to think. It was rather from “the tree of knowledge,” and the primary thing that one gained from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge was the ability to discern good from evil. Gaining that ability did not, in the minds of the Jewish readers of the book of Genesis, corrupt human nature. It simply made people take responsibility for their freely made decisions. A slave has no such freedom. The job of the slave is simply to obey, not to think. The job of the slave-master is to command. Thus the relationship of the master to the slave is a relationship of the strong to the weak, the parent to the child, the king to the serf, the boss to the worker. If human beings were meant to live in that kind of relationship with God, then humanity would have been kept in a perpetual state of irresponsible, childlike immaturity. Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden, not because they had disobeyed God’s rules, but because, when self-consciousness was born, they could no longer live in childlike dependency. Adam and Eve discovered, as every child ultimately must discover, that maturity requires that the child leave his or her parents’ home, just as every bird sooner or later must leave its nest and learn to fly on its own. To be forced out of the Garden of Eden was, therefore, not a punishment for sin, so much as it was a step into maturity.

This excerpt from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, appeared in 2002 as part of Harvard Magazine’s coverage of recent books by Harvard affiliates. The excerpt concerns author Noel Ignatiev’s role in launching a journal “to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness.” … The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course, we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being "racists," just like the KKK, and have even been called a "hate group." ... Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc.... Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race. That applies to labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers, and white women. Race Traitor will not abandon its focus on whiteness, no matter how vehement the pleas and how virtuously oppressed those doing the pleading. The editors meant it when they replied to a reader, "Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed—not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.

In the 1990s legal scholar and public policy advocate Wendy Kaminer published a brace of books engaged with the New Age cultures of recovery and self-help. She represented an Old Left perspective on new superstition, and although she was of the same generation as the cultural studies scholars, she did exactly what Andrew Ross warned academics and elites against. She criticized the middlebrow, therapeutic culture of self-help for undermining critical thinking in popular discourse. She encouraged the debunking of superstition, deplored public professions of piety. Her books were polemical and public interventions that were addressed to the maligned liberal and more or less thoughtful reader who took an interest in the issues of the day. In some ways, her writing was a popularization of some of psychoanalytic theory scholar, sociologist, and cultural critic Philip Rieff’s and Richard Hofstadter’s critiques of a therapeutic culture of anti-intellectualism.77 She speculated that the decline of secular values in the political sphere was linked to the rise of a culture of recovery and self-help that had come out of the popularization of New Age, countercultural beliefs and practices. In both I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety, Kaminer publicly denounced the decline of secular culture and the rise of a therapeutic culture of testimony and self-victimization that brooked no dissent while demanding unprecedented leaps of faith from its adherents.78 Kaminer’s work combined a belief in Habermasian rational communication with an uncompromising skepticism about the ubiquity of piety that for her was shared by both conservatives and liberals. For Kaminer, argument and persuasion could no longer be operative when belief and subjective experience became the baseline proofs that underwrote public and private assertions. No speaker or writer was under any obligation to answer his or her critics because argument and testimony were fatefully blurred. When reasoned impiety was slowly being banished from public dialogue, political responsibility would inevitably wane. In the warm bath of generalized piety and radical plurality, everyone could assert a point of view, an opinion, and different beliefs, but no one was under any obligation to defend them. Whereas cultural studies scholars saw themselves contesting dominant forms of discourse and hegemonic forms of thinking, Kaminer saw them participating in a popular embrace of an irrational Counter-Enlightenment. Like Andrew Ross, Kaminer cited Franz Mesmer as an important eighteenth-century pioneer of twentieth-century alternative healing techniques. Mesmer’s personal charisma and his powers of psychic healing and invocation of “animal magnetism” entranced the European courts of the late eighteenth century. Mesmer performed miracle cures and attracted a devoted, wealthy following. Despite scandals that plagued his European career, the American middle class was eager to embrace his hybrid of folk practices and scientific-sounding proofs. Mesmerism projected an alternative mystical cosmology based upon magnets and invisible flows of energy. Mesmer, who was said to control the invisible magnetic flow of forces that operated upon human and animal bodies, built upon a network of wealthy patrons who were devoted to the powers of a charismatic leader, Mesmer himself. Mesmer’s manipulation of magnets and hands-on healing evoked for the French court the ancient arts of folk healing while it had recourse to ostensibly modern scientific proofs. Historian of the French eighteenth century Robert Darnton insisted that mesmerism could not be dismissed as mere quackery or charlatanism but represented a transitional worldview, one that bridged the Enlightenment and the particular forms of nineteenth-century Romanticism that followed.

I suggest that the Thelemic ideological position shares consanguinity with the general orientation of postmodernism in assigning the principal value to the relative (individual) experience of the world and point of view, and in assuming a plurality of truths about the nature of reality. Thelema also distances itself from monotheistic traditions in its syncretism, an attribute that is congenial to the worldview of esotericism and shares parallels with the postmodern notions of pastiche and intertextuality. Hermeneutically, Thelemic perspective is at home with the conjectures about the death of author and with the reader-response theories of literary criticism, for its central scripture, The Book of the Law, is denied an official commentary and the meaning of the text is left to be decided ‘each for himself.’ In addition, Thelema abounds in aporias to such an extent that the play of contradictions and reversals provides ‘the key’ to The Book of the Law. By claiming that “existence is pure joy” (AL II: 9) this ideology seems to incarnate what Nietzsche, a major influence on both Crowley and postmodernism, calls la gaya scienza; the other links to Nietzsche include notions such as will to power, glorification of individualism, martial rhetoric, and a critique of Christianity. My main argument is that Thelema may be conceptualized as a postmodern, post-monotheistic, esoteric religion.

The idea of literary competence focuses attention on the implicit knowledge that readers (and writers) bring to their encounters with texts: what sort of procedures do readers follow in responding to works as they do? What sort of assumptions must be in place to account for their reactions and interpretations? Thinking about readers and the way they make sense of literature has led to what has been called ‘reader-response criticism’, which claims that the meaning of the text is the experience of the reader (an experience that includes hesitations, conjectures, and self-corrections). If a literary work is conceived as a succession of actions upon the understanding of a reader, then an interpretation of the work can be a story of that encounter, with its ups and downs: various conventions or expectations are brought into play, connections are posited, and expectations defeated or confirmed. To interpret a work is to tell a story of reading.

All I wanted was to live the life of the mind, and I know it’s a terribly shopworn thing to say, but there you have it. I didn’t stand in any camp, I wasn’t a formalist or a feminist, I didn’t want to call myself a reader-response person or a deconstructionist or a poststructuralist. I wasn’t a Marxist or a proponent of queer theory, or a Freudian, a post colonialist, or God help us! there was a black man in our department, a graduate student like me, who wanted us to start a movement to rename Multiculturalism ‘Slave Studies.’ He believed there was some sort of cleansing, revolutionary power in the ‘ironic distancing,’ that’s what he called it.” Langston took a deep breath, then sighed, remembering it all. “And no one could say anything to him, because we had no authority—that’s the key to the recent developments in the critical tradition: if you’re inside—and believe me, academia is nothing but a cult of expertise, it is the only religion alive and well—only if you’re inside do you have any authority, and if that’s the case, no one can speak to you. Your curriculum vitae becomes your fortress.

literary study with little or no interest in diachronic development (coupled with a de-emphasis on ancient langages apart from Hebrew) has tended to minimize the significance of ancient Near Eastern contexts of Israelite culture, not to mention Israelite history in general and the history of Israelite religion specifically. To name only a handful of subdisciplines applied to the Hebrew Bible, structuralism, reader-response theory, ideological criticism, and postmodern readings have contributed to a devaluation of diachronic research, including the history of the religion of Israel.

Whether or not these ideas alone would solve any of the problems discussed, I look forward to the day when SLA is more widely recognized as the serious and socially responsive discipline I believe it can be. Chapters like this one (unpleasant for writer and assuredly some readers alike) would no longer be needed. One could instead concentrate on the genuine controversies and excitement in SLA and L3A: the roles of nature and nurture; special and general nativism; child-adult differences and the possibility of maturational constraints; cross-linguistic influence; acquisition and socialization; cognitive and social factors; resilience; stabilization; fossilization, and other putative mechanisms and processes in interlanguage change; the feasibility of pedagogical intervention; and, most of all, the development of viable theories.