AP ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION
—Reader Response Essay
General Objective: Write a minimum three page essay on Pride and Prejudice using a reader
response strategy.
Specific Objectives:
 R1H Apply post-reading skills to comprehend, interpret, analyze and evaluate a text
 R1I Compare, contrast, analyze and evaluate connections between text ideas and own experiences/the
world
 W1AApply a writing process to write effectively in various forms and types of writing
 W2A Compose a text choosing a form and point of view appropriate to purpose and audience
 W2B Compose a text with a strong controlling idea, relevant specific details, complex ideas and freshness
of thought
 W2C Compose a text with an effective beginning, middle and end, a logical order, effective paragraphing,
cohesive devices, varied sentence structure, clarity of expression and active voice
 W2D Compose a text using precise and vivid language and writing techniques such as imagery, humor,
voice, figurative language, and rhetorical devices
 W2E In a written text, use conventions of capitalization, standard usage and conventions of punctuation
 3A Compose a variety of texts including literary analysis
Purpose: Your purpose is to make a personally meaningful connection with the assigned text
and to reveal this connection in a way that is meaningful to your audience.
Audience: You should assume that your audience has read the text you analyze and has a basic
understanding and appreciation of both.
Style/Structure: Reader response essay (yes, bring the “I”).
Format: Size 12 , Times New Roman font, double-spaced using one side of the page.
Do include a title and make sure to accurately cite any text that needs to be documented. Include
a works cited page at the end using proper MLA format.
Submission:
Final drafts must be posted to the 2013 READER RESPONSE ESSAY FINAL DRAFT link on
the READER RESPONSE ESSAY page. If at all possible, upload your final draft to the wiki vs.
pasting it directly on a page—this prevents format shifts. You will also want to post your essay
to your homepage as soon as possible.
READER RESPONSE
The special meaning, and more
particularly, the submerged
associations that these words and
images have for the individual reader
will largely determine what the work
communicates to him[or her]. The
reader brings to the work personality
traits, memories of past events,
present needs and preoccupations, a
particular mood of the moment, and a
particular physical condition. These
and many other elements in a neverto-be-duplicated combination
determine his response to the peculiar
contribution of the text. (pp. 30-31)
The Significance of Louise Rosenblatt on the Field of
Teaching Literature
excerpted from
by Gladdys Westbrook Church
from Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 1, Spring 1997, 71-77
© Copyright 1997 Virginia Community College System
Brief Abstract
Louise Rosenblatt first advanced the Reader-Response Theory in 1938. Currently, this theory remains a dominant
teaching approach with Rosenblatt’s influence readily apparent in contemporary research. English professors today
can work the magic of the literary experience through the use of the Reader-Response Theory in the teaching of
literature.
…Basically, reader response theories reject the New Criticism of the late 1930s through
the 1950s which assumed that the texts themselves were central and that teachers were to teach
the skills of close, concise, attentive analysis while discouraging expression of and attention to
differences in students' own individual responses. Thus, in the 1960's and early 70's there
occurred a paradigm shift in the teaching of literature away from viewing the text as authority to
a view that focuses on the reader's relationship with text (Rosenblatt, 1938, 1964, 1968, 1978;
Squire, 1964; Squire and Applebee, 1968; Purves, 1975; Purves and Beach, 1972; Bleich, 1975).
…
Central to the theory of reader response is Louise Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt's work is
primarily interested in describing readers' processes of engagement and involvement for
composing their own “poem” [the reader's construction of a text] (1964). Her theories which
allow for the whole gamut of different response strategies, first expressed in her 1938 edition of
Literature as Exploration, focus on responding as an “event.” While examining responding as an
“event,” Rosenblatt writes:
The special meaning, and more particularly, the submerged associations that these words
and images have for the individual reader will largely determine what the work
communicates to him[or her]. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories
of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and
a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-beduplicated combination determine his response to the peculiar contribution of the text.
(pp. 30-31)
… Her critical reaction to the narrow focus of much literature instruction on literal recall or
recitations of teacher-made meaning prompted her to provide a useful distinction between two
opposing modes of experiencing a text—the “efferent” and the “aesthetic.” When responding
from the efferent stance (from the Latin effere to carry away), readers are motivated by specific
needs to acquire information; they basically just want to understand what the text is saying. On
the other hand, when readers are responding in the aesthetic stance, their own unique livedthrough experience or engagement with a text is primary.
Rosenblatt notes that during any one reading experience readers may shift back and forth
along a continuum between efferent and aesthetic modes of reading processing. Thus, in
adopting an aesthetic stance, a reader may briefly focus on analyzing the techniques interacting
in a text. Or, in an efferent stance, a reader may be stimulated to remember a related personal
experience (The Aesthetic Transaction, 1986). However,
despite the mix of private and public aspects of meaning in each stance, the two dominant
stances are clearly distinguishable: someone else can read a text efferently for us, and
acceptably paraphrase, but no one else can read aesthetically—that is, experience the
evocation of—a literary work of art for us. (p.125)
She also argues that …“There is no such thing as a generic reader or a generic literary work;
there are in reality only the potential millions of individual readers of the potential millions of
individual literary works” (Literature, 1938, p. 32). … she focuses on the concept that shared
criteria of validity of interpretation in a particular social context allows for different
interpretations of the same physical text to be acceptable while some readings may satisfy the
criteria more fully than others. Thus we can be open to alternative readings of Hamlet, but we
also can consider some readings superior to others according to certain criteria. “Always,
therefore, a full understanding of literature requires both a consciousness of the reader's own
'angle of refraction' and any information that can illuminate the assumptions implicit in the text”
(p.115).
Rosenblatt's focus on the uniqueness of a particular, momentary transaction has become known
as the “transactional theory” (1969) which proposes that the meaning of a text derives from a
transaction between the text and reader within a specific context thus
emphasizing the essentiality of both reader and text, in contrast to other theories that
make one or the other determinate....'Transaction'...permits emphasis on the to-and-fro,
spiraling, nonlinear, continuously reciprocal influence or reader and text in the making
of meaning. The meaning — the poem — 'happens' during the transaction between the
reader and the signs on the page. (p. xvi 1995)
Because each individual reader extracts his or her own unique, subjective meanings (“evokes”),
this theory calls into question the New Criticism assumption that the meaning resides solely in
the text, accessible only to the trained eye of the critic/teacher. Rather than emphasize formalist
analysis of a text, the primary goal of instruction from a transactional perspective is to foster
students' trust in the expression of their individual experience with a text.
.
http://www.vccaedu.org/inquiry/inquiry-spring97/i11chur.html