Literary and theoretical texts for all your Reader-Response Theory needs.
Primary Literary Texts
Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667)
It's Milton's epic about Adam and Eve's fall from grace. Getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden sure hurts. How do you respond to the character of Satan as a reader? Do you find Satan as seductiv...
Endgame by Samuel Beckett (1957)
Is it the end of the world? Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on how you read Beckett's famous play Endgame. What sort of "blanks" do we find in Endgame? And what effect do these blanks have on us a...
Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1603)
Hamlet, the prince of procrastinators, can't get his act together to avenge his father's murder. Makes us feel better about procrastinating on our school work!Question 1: Why do you think critics o...
"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner (1930)
Emily Grierson did not appreciate being jilted by her fiancé. So she killed him and kept his corpse in her house for decades. Of course we want to read this story. In what ways can readers interpr...
Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne (1642)
In this work, Browne muses on various topics including religion, spirituality, and how to live the good life. It's like a self-help manual from the 1600s.Browne is a great prose stylist. Following...
Primary Theoretical Texts
Literature as Exploration by Louise Rosenblatt (1938)
Rosenblatt pioneered Reader-Response theory with this study, in which she considers how the reader's response is critical to our understanding of a literary work. What is the difference between "ef...
Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost by Stanley Fish (1967)
Fish shows us just how seductive Satan is in John Milton's epic poem. Not only does he manage to seduce Adam and Eve, he also manages to seduces us readers. According to Stanley Fish, in what ways...
"Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics" by Stanley Fish (1970)
In this essay, Fish insists that we must start with our own personal response to a literary work in order to understand it. What does Fish mean when he says that meaning is an "event"?According to...
Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities by Stanley Fish (1980)
At a later stage in his career, Fish decides in this book that it ain't just readers who are important. Interpretive communities are, too. How do "interpretive communities" shape the way that indiv...
The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett by Wolfgang Iser (1972)
Wolfgang Iser helped change the course of literary studies by bringing attention to the reader, as opposed to the author, in this famous study. In what ways do texts imply a reader? And what does t...
"Unity Identity Text Self" by Norman N. Holland (1975)
We can't escape who we are—even when we're reading. In this essay, Holland argues that our identity shapes the way that we respond to and understand literary texts.How do psychoanalytic ideas fra...
The Nature of Literary Response: 5 Readers Reading by Norman n. Holland (1975)
Holland gives five readers the same texts to read, and guess what? They come up with all kinds of different responses. That's what this one is all about.To what extent is Holland "reading" not only...
Subjective Criticism by David Bleich (1978)
There's no such thing as objective criticism, people, so let's just stop looking for it. At least according to Bleich in this book. Why is Bleich so opposed to "objective" criticism? Is an objectiv...