Ms. Crandell
AP English Lit
Literary Theory: Reader Response
(adapted from Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide by Lois Tyson and
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/06/)
Read, annotate, and be ready to discuss!
As its name implies, reader-response criticism focuses on readers’ responses to literary texts.
Many new students of critical theory are relieved and happy when they get to the unit on readerresponse criticism, perhaps because they enjoy the idea that their responses are important enough
to become the focus of literary interpretation. Or perhaps they assume that reader-response
criticism means “I can’t be wrong because any way I interpret the text is my response, so the
professor can’t reject it.” Let me break the bad news to you up front. Depending on the kind of
reader-response theory we’re talking about, your response to a literary text can be judged
insufficient or less sufficient than others. Even when reader-response theory does assert that there
is no such thing as an insufficient (or inaccurate or inappropriate) response, your job isn’t merely to
respond but to analyze your response, or the responses of others, and that analysis can be found
wanting.
The good news, however, is that reader-response criticism is a broad, exciting, evolving domain of
literary studies that can help us learn about our own reading processes and how they relate to,
among other things, specific elements in the texts we read, our life experiences, and the
intellectual community of which we are a member. If you’re getting the feeling that reader-response
criticism covers a good deal of diverse ground, you’re right. In fact, any time an essay analyzes the
act of reading or readers’ responses, one could classify that essay as reader-response criticism.
For example, psychoanalytic criticism, when it investigates the psychological motives for certain
kinds of interpretations of a literary text, is also a form of reader-response criticism. Feminist
criticism, when it analyzes how patriarchy teaches us to interpret texts in a sexist manner, is also a
form of reader-response criticism. And lesbian and gay criticism, when it studies how our
homophobic culture suppresses our ability to see homoeroticism in literary texts, is also a form of
reader-response criticism.
Attention to the reading process emerged during the 1930s as a reaction against the growing
tendency to reject the reader’s role in creating meaning, a tendency that became a formal principle
of the New Criticism that dominated critical practice in the 1940s and 1950s. The New Critics
believed that the timeless meaning of the text—what the text is—is contained in the text alone. Its
meaning is not a product of the author’s intention and does not change with the reader’s response.
New Critics claimed that attention to the reader’s response confuses what the text is with what the
text does.
Reader-response theory maintains that what a text is cannot be separated from what it does. For
despite their divergent views of the reading process, reader-response theorists share two beliefs:
(1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and (2) that
readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text;
rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature.
This second belief, that readers actively make meaning, suggests, of course, that different readers
may read the same text quite differently. In fact, reader-response theorists believe that even the
same reader reading the same text on two different occasions will probably produce different
meanings because so many variables contribute to our experience of the text. Knowledge we’ve
acquired between our first and second reading of a text, personal experiences that have occurred
in the interim, a change in mood between our two encounters with the text, or a change in the
purpose for which we’re reading it can all contribute to our production of different meanings for the
same text.
To get a clear idea of just how much the nature of the reader’s involvement with a text can alter its
meaning, let’s look at the following passage. As you read it, imagine that you’re a home buyer and
circle any detail, positive or negative, that you think would be important if you were considering
buying the house described in the passage.
The house passage:
The two boys ran until they came to the driveway. “See, I told you today was good for skipping
school,” said Mark. “Mom is never home on Thursday,” he added. Tall hedges hid the house from
the road so the pair strolled across the finely landscaped yard. “I never knew your place was
so big,” said Pete. “Yeah, but it’s nicer now than it used to be since Dad had the new stone siding
put on and added the fireplace.”
There were front and back doors and a side door which led to the garage, which was empty except
for three parked 10-speed bikes. They went in the side door, Mark explaining that it was always
open in case his younger sisters got home earlier than their mother. Pete wanted to see the house
so Mark started with the living room. It, like the rest of the downstairs, was newly painted. Mark
turned on the stereo, the noise of which worried Pete. “Don’t worry, the nearest house is a quarter
of a mile away,” Mark shouted. Pete felt more comfortable observing that no houses could be seen
in any direction beyond the huge yard.
The dining room, with all the china, silver, and cut glass, was no place to play so the boys moved
into the kitchen, where they made sandwiches. Mark said they wouldn’t go to the basement
because it had been damp and musty ever since the new plumbing had been installed.
“This is where my dad keeps his famous paintings and his coin collection,” said Mark as they
peered into the den. Mark bragged that he could get spending money whenever he needed it since
he’d discovered that his Dad kept a lot in the desk drawer.
There were three upstairs bedrooms. Mark showed Pete his mother’s closet, which was filled with
furs and the locked box which held her jewels. His sisters’ room was uninteresting except for the
color TV, which Mark carried to his room. Mark bragged that the bathroom in the hall was his
since one had been added to his sisters’ room for their use. The big highlight in his room, though,
was a leak in the ceiling where the old roof had finally rotted.
Now reread the passage and underline any detail, positive or negative, that you think would be
important if you were casing the house in order to rob it. During our second reading of this
passage, because we’re thinking of robbing the house, we focus on very different details, and even
when we focus on the same details, they have a very different meaning for us.
For example, the privacy that is an asset for many home buyers becomes a liability in terms of the
home’s vulnerability to burglars. Merely changing the purpose for which we read a passage can
radically alter the passage we read. Of course, some home-buying readers might immediately see
the negative aspect of the home’s privacy because their experience has made them more aware of
crime, illustrating reader-response theory’s assertion that readers draw on their personal
experiences to create meaning.
As the above exercise illustrates, a written text is not an object, despite its physical existence, but
an event that occurs within the reader, whose response is of primary importance in creating the
text. Theorists disagree, however, about how our responses are formed and what role, if any, the
text plays in creating them. Opinions range from the belief that the literary text is as active as the
reader in creating meaning to the belief that the text doesn’t exist at all except as it is created by
readers.
Take a look at the following example of reader-response analysis of a passage of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.
“I don’t think it’s so much that,” argued Lucille skeptically; “it’s more that he was a German
spy during the war.”
One of the men nodded in confirmation.
“I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,” he
assured us positively.
“Oh no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during
the war.“ As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You
look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man” (48).
The speculation Jay Gatsby inspires in his gossip‐ hungry party guests, who have an
obvious desire to be shocked, is, in two important ways, a prototype of the speculation he inspires
in the reader of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Our credulity, like that of Gatsby’s
party guests, is continually “switched” in different directions as we make our way through Nick
Carraway’s narration, and the final outcome of our speculation—our interpretation of Gatsby and
therefore of the meaning of the novel as a whole—is largely a product of our own beliefs and
desires, which the tale’s indeterminacy invites us to project. In other words, The Great Gatsby
dramatizes reader‐ response theory’s concept of reading as the making of meaning, and the novel
reproduces within the action of the story the reader’s experience while reading it.
Some questions to ask as you analyze a poem or longer work:
• What descriptions are omitted or incomplete? What images might have multiple associations?
• Do the sounds/shapes of the words as they appear on the page or how they are spoken by the
reader enhance or change the meaning of the word/work?