Reader-Response Criticism

The ‘triumph of theory’ in contemporary, postmodern literary criticism has toned much of our current intellectual climate. To those who are neither fans nor adepts, however, literary theory can seem a hopeless maze. The school known as reader-response criticism provides a point of entry into the labyrinth. It opens up questions, particularly psychological questions, that other theories often tacitly subsume. Reader-response provides a vantage-point from which to assess some of the ideas in postmodern literary theory.

To some extent, all studies of literature fall under the reader-response rubric, because all involve some notion of response. Plato banned poets from his Republic, because he assumed poetry enfeebled, while Aristotle defended drama's moral effect. Both were positing ideas of response, as do such twentieth-century theories as Brecht's alienation effect or the ‘making strange’ of today's ‘language poets’. It is only in the twentieth century, however, after Freud and others, that we have verifiable psychologies capable of addressing our responses to literature.

These days, reader-response criticism describes a school of critics who focus not on a text as such, but people's experience of that text. It was a reaction to New Criticism, which was in turn a reaction to still earlier practice. Early in this century, critics and professors of literature dealt with books through philology, bibliography, literary history, or intellectual background, information about a text. In the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, however, New Criticism began to dominate literary thinking in the US and UK (and somewhat later and differently on the continent under the name ‘structuralism’).

The New Critics ruled out (more or less) all background to ‘the text’, as ‘extrinsic’ knowledge, which didn't count, compared to ‘intrinsic’. Instead, New Critics treated the text as a free-standing, self-contained, unified object. They analysed the text itself (‘the words on the page’) for a ‘mea