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Reader Response: Major Concepts
 What is reading? What is literary criticism?
reading: reading outloud, memorizing, reading books as well as everything else (signs on the street, advertisement, toilet literature, our life, etc.), dialogue, re-creation;
literary criticism: appreciation, analysis, biographical studies, textual studies, history of idea approach, etc.
Two views of reader:
| This "I" which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost). Objectivity and subjectivity are of course forces which can take over the text, but they are forces which have no affinity with it. Subjectivity is a plenary image, which which I may be thought to encumber the text, but whose deceptive plenitude is merely the wake of all the codes that constitute me, so that ultimately my subjectivity has the generality of stereotypes.
Roland Barthes 1974: 10
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| The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what is it and what it does) . . . It begins by trying to derive the standards of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. The outcome is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.
Wimsatt and Beardley 1954: 21
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| The reader . . . is this informed reader, rather an abstraction, not an actual living reader, but a hybrid, . . .
Fish 1980: 49
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| one text is potentially capable of several different realizations, and no reading can even exhaust the full potential for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities.
Iser 1974: 271
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different emphases on reader's role-
A more balanced view: we read both to discover ourselves and to learn about the world. We are both solitary readers and readers of one community. (Cf. Robert Crosman)
A. reading experience: transaction, filling in gaps/blanks e.g. "London"; "The Sound Collector"; "Baby-sitter"
B. context of reading: horizons of expectation; reading as a dialogue, as fusion of horizons
e.g. excerpt from Magus; "A Rose for Emily"
paradigm & history of reception of--e.g. Pope in 19th-century, Shelley in Modern period, Madame Bovary, Lawrence's work, The Importance of Being Ernest, Fatal Attraction
a text which re-interprets of an older text〈好男好女〉(both the film and the short story)、《阮玲玉》、The French Lieutenant's Woman
C. readers in/of the text: narratee, authorial (implied) reader, resisting reader
any dramatic monologue; stories/poems which is an I-you narration ("I Stand Here Ironing"; M. Atwood's poems); stories with a story-teller (and story) within it ("Should Wizard Kill Mommy");
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