Reader-Response Theory Basics
Reader-Response Theory Basics
The Who, What, Where, When, and Why of Reader-Response Theory
Beginnings
Officially, Reader-Response theory got going in the late 1960s, when a group of critics including Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, and Norman N. Holland started asking questions about how a reader's re...
Big Players
We've said it before, and we'll say it again: it all started with Louise Rosenblatt and her book Literature as Exploration. That's the first work of literary criticism that set out in detail a Read...
Key Debates
Reader-Response theorists really don't like the New Critics, a bunch of mostly dudes who were all about the text. The New Critics They thought that the meaning of a literary work could be found in...
State of the Theory
Okay, we'll be honest here: Reader-Response theory isn't exactly the most visible theory around today. Sure, the ideas of Reader-Response theorists have been incorporated by a whole lot of differen...
Talking the Talk
What is literature? Literature provides us with texts, and we make meaning out of those texts by interacting with them as readers.What is an author? An author gives us a text that we readers then r...