Reader-Response: Various Positions–Span. 301– 1
Reader-Response: Various Positions
Copyright John Lye,1996; may be used, with attribution, for non-profit purposes.
URL of this page: http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/rr.html
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------These are general positions within the understanding that the 'meaning' of a text is what happens when the reader
reads it. The positions presuppose various attitudes towards such considerations as:
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the question of in what sense a text, ink-marks on a page or electrons on a screen, exists,
the extent to which knowledge is objective or subjective,
the question of whether the world as we experience it is culturally constructed or has an essential existence,
how the gap, historically, culturally and semiotically (as reading is a decoding of signs which have varying
meanings) between the reader and the writer is bridged, and the extent to which it is bridged,
the question of the extent to which interpretation is a public act, conditioned by the particular material and
cultural circumstances of the reader, vs the extent to which reading is a private act governed by a response
to the relatively independent codes of the text,
the question of what the process of reading is like, what it entails,
and so forth.
Psychoanalytic view:
The reader responds to the core fantasies and the symbolic groundwork of the text in a highly personal way; while
the text contributes material for inner realization which can be shared across consciousnesses (as we share
fundamental paradigms, symbols, etc), the real meaning of the text is the meaning created by the individual's psyche
in response to the work, at the unconscious level and at a subsequent conscious level, as the material provided by the
text opens a path between the two, occasioning richer self-knowledge and realization.
Hermeneutic view:
The text means differently because the reader decodes it according to her world-view, her horizons, yet with the
understanding that the text may be operating within a different horizon, hence there is an interaction between the
world of the text as it was constructed and the world of the reader. The reader can only approach the text with her
own foreunderstanding, which is grounded in history. However as the text is similarly grounded in history, and as
often there is much in the histories that is shared and well as what is not, there is both identity and strangeness. See
my page Phenomenological Hermeneutics.
Phenomenological view:
The text functions as a set of instructions for its own processing, but is as well indeterminate, needs to be completed,
to be concretized. The 'reality' of the text lies between the reader and the text: it is the result of the dialectic between
work and reader.
Structuralist view:
Decoding the text requires various levels of competence -- competence in how texts work, in the genre and tradition
of the text, etc, as the work is constructed according to sets of conventions which have their basis in an objective,
socially shared reality. The 'meaning' then depends largely on the competence of the reader in responding to the
structures and practices of the text and which operate implicitly (i.e. they affect us without our knowing it); the
competent reader can make these explicit.
Political or ideological view:
Texts include statements, assumptions, attitudes, which are intrinsically ideological, i.e. express attitudes towards
and beliefs about certain sets of social and political realities, relations, values and powers. As a text is produced in a
certain social and material milieu it cannot not have embedded ideological assumptions. The reader herself will have
ideological convictions and understandings as well, often unrecognized, as is the nature of ideology, which
understandings will condition and direct the reading and the application of the reading (you might see my brief page
on Ideology).
A 'critical' reading will demystify the ideologies of the text within the frame of the ideologies of the reader while
maintaining awareness of the reader's ideologies. . Without such a 'critical' reading, the text may reinforce
(potentially pernicious, even if only because unrecognized) aspects of the reader's (culturally produced) ideology,
Reader-Response: Various Positions–Span. 301– 2
and/or the reader may 'miss' meanings and connections for want of an understanding of the ideological structure of
the text.
Post-structuralist view(s):
Meaning is indeterminate, is not 'in' the text but in the play of language and the nuances of conventions in which the
reader is immersed: hence the reader constructs a text as she participates in this play, driven by the instabilities and
meaning potentials of the semantic and rhetorical aspects of the text. Stanley Fish's view here is that the reader
belongs to an interpretive community which will have taught the reader to see a certain set of forms, topics and so
forth; his is one view which refers to the world of discourse of the reader as being the determining factor. Tony
Bennett, from a more marxist position, sees readers as belonging to 'reading formations'. In various sorts of
post-structuralist reading the reading process may involve the reader's countering and/or re-interpreting prevailing
views, depending on various things, including: the force of the direction of the text to the reader; the potential
reconceptualization, freeing-up of meaning the text can effect; the openness to the play of language and meaning of
the reader. The text may 'deconstruct itself', i.e. the reader may experience or see that the language of the text
implicitly undermines its own assumptions -- the real agent here as in all post-structuralist positions being the
reader, open to polysemy (multiple meanings and the sliding and interplay of signs) -- in her 'own' (socially shared)
world of discourse, in a world discursively and socially constructed.
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