Reader-response-Theory(1)

单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,*,单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,*,单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,*,单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,*,单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,*,单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,*,单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,*,READER-RESPONSE THEORY,1.When,Who and How?,1.1 When?,Late 1960s heydays in 1970s and early 1980s,Modern reader-response criticism began in the 1960s and”70s,particularly in America and Germany,in work by Norman Holland,Stanley Fish,Wolfgang Iser,Hans-Robert Jauss,Roland Barthes,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).,1.2 Who?,Wolfgang Iser,Reading involves in,interaction between elements of the text and the act of reading itself.,The text is a potential structure actualised by the reader.Do not study either the text or the reader in isolation,but look at how the reader completes the text.The text has,blanks/gaps,which the reader must complete.,Stanley Fish,Any individual reader is necessarily part of a community of readers,and the individual readers response is determined by the conventions of reading that he has been educated into within a certain socio-historical context.,Norman Holland/David Bleich,The reader reacts according to his own personal identity his identity theme,that is,his personal psychic dispositions,the individual character of his desires,needs,experiences,resistances,etc.Interpretation is a function of identity(Holland)subjective criticism,Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates his or her 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.,Reader response criticism focuses on the reader and 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.,Reader response criticism places strong emphasis on the reader”s role in producing the meaning of a literary work.It is in some senses an opposite approach from that of formalism.,Whereas formalists treat meaning as objectively inherent in the text,in reader response criticism,the text has no meaning until it is read by a reader who creates the meaning.,Unlike the formalistic critical approach,this type of literary criticism insists that works are not universal,that is,that they will not always mean more or less the same thing to readers everywhere.,Like New Critics,reader-response critics focus on what texts do;but instead of regarding texts as self-contained entities,reader-response criticism plunges into what the New Critics called the affective fallacy:what do texts do in the minds of the readers?In fact,a text can exist only as activated by the mind of the reader.Thus,where formalists saw texts as spacial,reader-response critics view them as temporal phenomena.,2.Theoretical Assumptions:,Literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance,analogous to playing/singing a musical work,etc.Literature exists only when it is read.,The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning or value;there is no one“correct“meaning.Literary meaning and value are“transactional,“dialogic,“created by the interaction of the reader and the text.,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.,Reader response criticism 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.This allows theorists to explain why people can have different responses to and interpretations of the same text.,3.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