Reader response theories Flashcards
Jauss, Eco, Iser, Fish
The reader becomes the focus of
the interpretive
attention.
The conceptual premise of reader response
theory derives from
hermeneutical reasoning
as conceptualised by Gadamer.
The text addresses the reader.
Reading is a dialogic process wherein the reader
engages with the text by way of interpretation.
The hermeneutic conception of interpretation
posits that
understanding brings forth a certain
truth.
Gadamer highlights how interpretation
transforms the
reader’s subjectivity, giving
reader response theorists an idea to elaborate
on.
Reader Response theorists see the reader as
a
sense-maker, rather than a sensuous figure.
Aesthetics of reception
focuses on the ways in which
literary texts interact with
their recipients and deploy their
potential meanings and the
roles they assign to their
readers.
Jauss addresses the ways in which readers
understand texts similarly or differently across
time and culture.
Jauss attempts to bridge the gap between
the
aesthetic and historical approaches to
literature.
Reader’s relationship with texts has
aesthetic as
well as historical implications.
Aesthetic reception is prone
to historical change.
Understanding is dependent
on prejudgment. (cf.
Gadamer, Heidegger)
Readers need to have foreknowledge,
prejudgment of literature in order to
be able to
appreciate new texts.
The horizon of expectations
a mindset that a reader
brings to the text.
The horizon of expectations contains
the elements of
the reader’s pre-understanding.
Readers’ disposition towards literary texts is
determined by:
- Familiar norms or the immanent poetics of the
genre; - The implicit relationships to familiar works of the
literary-historical surroundings; - The opposition between fiction and reality,
between the poetic and the practical function of
language.
Jauss is interested in
the hermeneutic difference
between the present and the past reception of
literature.
Jauss reiterates Gadamer’s observation about
reading as a process of question and answer. Reading is a dialogic process. Aesthetic judgment derives from an
intersubjective experience.
Iser
Iser revises
some of the ideas of
hermeneutic analysis.
Implied reader
is the role
of the reader as inscribed
in the text; any individual
reader must assume this
role in order to realise
the potential offered
by the text.
The text is a determination of points of
‘finished
unfinishedness’, i.e. it is formally complete, but
hermeneutically open to reinterpretation.
Gaps are
indeterminacies which each reader fills in
differently by means of imagination.
Readers are
active
participants in the
process of the actualisation
of the meanings of the text.
Literary work is not
‘words on the page’, but the
concretisation of what is merely hinted at in the
text, the interaction between the reader and the
raw material of the text.
Empirical readers slip into the role mapped out by
the text, the role Iser calls the implied reader
Readers always bring their own…
horizons to the
process of reading.
Implied reader is generated by
he text as a set of
competences in narrative codes, languages,
cultural and historical references, hints, winks, and
traps.
Texts not only hope for a reader they construct, but
also create a specific competence in the reader
(cf. hermeneutic analysis expands the reader’s
horizon).
Umberto Eco
offers a semiotician’s
perspective on the
aesthetics of reception.
Literary texts are created for a
community of
readers rather than a single addressee.
Model reader
r is an textual construct, a set of
reading strategies empirical readers adopt as
their reading initiative.
Texts can foresee
a model reader entitled to try
infinite conjectures.
Text’s intention can only be discovered
by way
of interpretation.
The text’s intention both offers a
reading strategy
to the model reader and legitimates his or her
interpretation.
Stanley Fish
rethinks
the New Criticism’s
notion of affective fallacy
and the reader response
approach of the
Constance school.
readers are not at liberty to choose the way
in which they read, but
are predetermined by the
interpretive community to which they belong.
Fish suggests that
there is nothing in the
text,
everything is supplied
by the reader.
Interpretation is the
“source” of texts rather
than their consequence.
Interpretive community
is conceived as a set of
reading practices one tends to adopt as part of
one’s appreciation of literary texts.
Interpretive communities are made up of
those who
share interpretive strategies for constituting the
texts’ properties and assigning their intentions.
Reader Response theories derive from
the
hermeneutic reasoning about reading as a
dialogic process.
The conceptual focus is placed on the
competences texts demand from their readers
and the competences they instill in readers in
the course of interpretation
For Jauss, understanding of texts is shaped by
our horizons of expectations, which shape the
discrepancies in our appreciations of the same
texts.
The horizon of expectation correlates with
the
conventions operative in a received tradition,
which explains why avant-garde experiments
gain mainstream appreciation rather belatedly.
Iser’s notion of the implied reader is conceptually
akin to Eco’s notion of the model reader
both
denoting the implicit role the empirical reader is
expected to perform by way of interpretation.
Fish’s reasoning is particularly at odds with Iser’s
in
that while Iser grants agency to the reader’s
imagination to fill in the gaps in the narrative, Fish
attributes interpretative power to the institution of
literature, which legitimises the work of interpretive
communities.
