Reader Response Theory: A Comprehensive Guide
Chapter 11: Reader Response
Ideal, Implied, and Actual Readers
Stanley Fish
- Fish’s reader is an “informed reader” or an “ideal reader.” The ideal reader responds to challenges and mysteries with relish.
- Especially when we have trouble understanding a text, we can ask what kind of ideal reader it seems to address.
- Fish tends to take the ideal reader in a more limited way. He ends up basing his suppositions about how ideal readers respond on his own understanding of how he himself responds.
Wolfgang Iser
- German critic Wolfgang Iser follows the way a text sets up an implied reader.
- For both Fish and Iser, reading a text is a continuous dialogue between expectations that the text provokes in the reader and how readers respond to those expectations.
- Readers respond by making hypotheses about the text and then testing those hypotheses against the continuing sequence of text.
More Reader Response Models
- There is no text except in the mind of the reader.
- For Fish, Iser, and Rosenblatt, reading is described as an ongoing transaction between the text and the reader working together; the text guides readers’ responses.
- Reading enacts a continuous dialogue between the shifting directions of a text and the shifting responses of a reader. The meaning of a text comes from the text and the reader.
Norman Holland and David Bleich
- Norman Holland and David Bleich both study actual readers.
- Holland supposes that each reader forms a particular ego or primary identity based on early childhood and then projects the concerns of that identity onto a literary text.
- In his model, the text almost disappears in favor of different readers’ more or less idiosyncratic responses.
- Bleich takes Holland’s model to its logical conclusion by focusing on the reader’s subjectivity, calling for readers to write out their responses and grounding their view of a text in the ways that it connects to their personal experience.
- For Bleich, more objective interpretations of a text are less important.
The Structuralist Models of Reading and Communication
Roman Jakobson’s Model of Communication
- (Roman) Jakobson’s model of communication proposed a basic model of communication that helped bring attention to the role of readers in a larger arc of connected structures.
- For Jakobson, any communication has six components: “The addresser sends a message to the addressee. To be operative the message requires context referred to.. seizable by the addressee, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a code; and finally, a contact.”
- All communications include all six components, but different kinds of communications give different weights to different components.
- Jakobson calls the addressee the cognitive function (focused on the addressee).
- The addressee is the reader and hence the center of interest for reader-response criticism; six functions are tied to each other and attract their own interest, inflecting how we understand the addressee/reader.
- Declarative sentences focus on the referential function; they refer to the context, the world around us.
- Emotive or expressive function concentrates on the addresser expressing an attitude or emotion. The emotive function puts little weight on the referential function and has little in the way of developed syntax.
- Phatic messages focus on the contact between addresser and addressee. They try to begin the communication or to continue it.
- Metalingual communication is language about language, about the code we use to communicate.
- For Jakobson (of greatest interest), communication that focuses on the message itself concentrates on the poetic function (includes poetry and any other language that attends to aesthetics).
The Narratee: The Fictional Reader
- Narratologists see the narratee as one pole of a structuralist binary opposition between narrators and narratees.
- Stuart Hall believes that a communication model is not efficient; it is asymmetrical, and what gets sent is not always the same as what is received.
- Encoding and decoding: When a message is received, it has to be decoded, and the decoding, like encoding, shapes the message. Readers and listeners are decoders.
Aesthetic Judgment, Interpretive Communities, and Resisting Readers
- Critics theorize about what has come to be called the canon.
- Critics and teachers study and teach how the canon changes over time.
- Interpretive Communities – Fish proposes that our readings of literary texts depend not so much on what the texts say in an absolute way as they depend on interpretive communities.
- Resisting Readers – Jonathan Culler
- To Fish’s critics, his view of interpretive communities gives us little reason to care, little reason to favor one interpretation over another.
- Fish acknowledges differences within interpretive communities, but to most other critics’ way of thinking, interpretive communities themselves are less stable entities than Fish’s model allows for.