READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM

Reader-response criticism encompasses various approaches to literature that explore

and seek to explain the diversity (and often divergence) of readers' responses to literary
works.

Louise Rosenblatt is often credited with pioneering the approaches in Literature as

Exploration (1938). In her 1969 essay "Towards a Transactional Theory of Reading,"
she summed up her position as follows: "A poem is what the reader lives through under
the guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text." Recognizing that many
critics would reject this definition, Rosenblatt wrote, "The idea that a poem presupposes
a reader actively involved with a text is particularly shocking to those seeking to
emphasize the objectivity of their interpretations."

Rosenblatt implicitly and generally refers to formalists (the most influential of whom are
the New Critics) when she speaks of supposedly objective interpreters shocked by the
notion that a "poem" is cooperatively produced by a "reader" and a "text." Formalists
spoke of "the poem itself," the "concrete work of art," the "real poem." They had no
interest in what a work of literature makes a reader "live through." In fact, in The Verbal
Icon (1954), William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley used the term affective
fallacy to define as erroneous the very idea that a reader’s response is relevant to the
meaning of a literary work.

Stanley Fish, whose early work is seen by some as marking the true beginning of
contemporary reader-response criticism, also took issue with the tenets of formalism. In
"Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics" (1970), he argued that any school of
criticism that sees a literary work as an object, claiming to describe what it is and never
what it does, misconstrues the very essence of literature and reading. Literature exists
and signifies when it is read, Fish suggests, and its force is an affective one.

Furthermore, reading is a temporal process, not a spatial one as formalists assume

when they step back and survey the literary work as if it were an object spread out
before them. The German critic Wolfgang Iser has described that process in The
Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett
(1974) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976). Iser argues
that texts contain gaps (or blanks) that powerfully affect the reader, who must explain
them, connect what they separate, and create in his or her mind aspects of a work that
aren’t in the text but are incited by the text.

With the redefinition of literature as something that only exists meaningfully in the mind
of the reader, and with the redefinition of the literary work as a catalyst of mental events,
comes a redefinition of the reader. No longer is the reader the passive recipient of those
ideas that an author has planted in a text. "The reader is active," Rosenblatt had
insisted. Fish makes the same point in "Literature in the Reader": "Reading is . . .
something you do." Iser, in focusing critical interest on the gaps in texts, on the blanks
that readers have to fill in, similarly redefines the reader as an active maker of meaning.
Other reader-response critics define the reader differently. Wayne Booth uses the
phrase the implied reader to mean the reader "created by the work." Iser also uses the
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term the implied reader but substitutes the educated reader for what Fish calls the
intended reader.

Since the mid-1970s, reader-response criticism has evolved into a variety of new forms.
Subjectivists like David Bleich, Norman Holland, and Robert Crosman have viewed the
reader’s response not as one "guided" by the text but rather as one motivated by deep-
seated, personal, psychological needs. Holland has suggested that, when we read, we
find our own "identity theme" in the text by using "the literary work to symbolize and
finally replicate ourselves. We work out through the text our own characteristic patterns
of desire." Even Fish has moved away from reader-response criticism as he had initially
helped define it, focusing on "interpretive strategies" held in common by "interpretive
communities"—such as the one comprised by American college students reading a
novel as a class assignment.

Fish’s shift in focus is in many ways typical of changes that have taken place within the
field of reader-response criticism—a field that, because of those changes, is
increasingly being referred to as reader-oriented criticism. Recent reader-oriented
critics, responding to Fish’s emphasis on interpretive communities and also to the
historically oriented perception theory of Hans Robert Jauss, have studied the way a
given reading public’s "horizons of expectations" change over time. Many of these
contemporary critics view themselves as reader-oriented critics and as practitioners of
some other critical approach as well.

Certain feminist and gender critics with an interest in reader response have asked
whether there is such a thing as "reading like a woman." Reading-oriented new
historicists have looked at the way in which racism affects and is affected by reading
and, more generally, at the way in which politics can affect reading practices and
outcomes. Gay and lesbian critics, such as Wayne Koestenbaum, have argued that
sexualities have been similarly constructed within and by social discourses and that
there may even be a homosexual way of reading.

STRUCTURALISM
Structuralism is a theory of humankind in which all elements of human culture, including
literature, are thought to be parts of a system of signs. Critic Robert Scholes has
described structuralism as a reaction to "’modernist’ alienation and despair."
European structuralists such as Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland
Barthes (before his shift toward poststructuralism) attempted to develop a semiology, or
semiotics (science of signs). Barthes, among others, sought to recover literature and
even language from the isolation in which they had been studied and to show that the
laws that govern them govern all signs, from road signs to articles of clothing.

Structuralism was heavily influenced by linguistics, especially by the pioneering work of

Ferdinand de Saussure. Particularly useful to structuralists was Saussure’s concept of
the phoneme (the smallest basic speech sound or unit of pronunciation) and his idea
that phonemes exist in two kinds of relationships: diachronic and synchronic. A
phoneme has a diachronic, or "horizontal," relationship with those other phonemes that
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precede and follow it (as the words appear, left to right, on this page) in a particular
usage, utterance, or narrative—what Saussure, a linguist, called parole (French for
"word"). A phoneme has a synchronic, or "vertical," relationship with the entire system of
language within which individual usages, utterances, or narratives have meaning—what
Saussure called langue (French for "tongue," as in "native tongue," meaning language).

An means what it means in English because those of us who speak the language are
plugged into the same system (think of it as a computer network where different
individuals can access the same information in the same way at a given time).
Following Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, studied hundreds of myths,
breaking them into their smallest meaningful units, which he called "mythemes."
Removing each from its diachronic relations with other mythemes in a single myth (such
as the myth of Oedipus and his mother), he vertically aligned those mythemes that he
found to be homologous (structurally correspondent).

He then studied the relationships within as well as between vertically aligned columns,
in an attempt to understand scientifically, through ratios and proportions, those thoughts
and processes that humankind has shared, both at one particular time and across time.
Whether Lévi-Strauss was studying the structure of myths or the structure of villages, he
looked for recurring, common elements that transcended the differences within and
among cultures.

Structuralists followed Saussure in preferring to think about the overriding langue, or

language of myth, in which each mytheme and mytheme-constituted myth fits
meaningfully, rather than about isolated individual paroles, or narratives. Structuralists
also followed Saussure's lead in believing that sign systems must be understood in
terms of binary oppositions (a proposition later disputed by poststructuralist Jacques
Derrida). In analyzing myths and texts to find basic structures, structuralists found that
opposite terms modulate until they are finally resolved or reconciled by some
intermediary third term. Thus a structuralist reading of Milton's Paradise Lost (1667)
might show that the war between God and the rebellious angels becomes a rift between
God and sinful, fallen man, a rift that is healed by the Son of God, the mediating third
term.

Although structuralism was largely a European phenomenon in its origin and

development, it was influenced by American thinkers as well. Noam Chomsky, for
instance, who powerfully influenced structuralism through works such as Reflections on
Language (1975), identified and distinguished between "surface structures" and "deep
structures" in language and linguistic literatures, including texts.

MARXIST CRITICISM
Marxist criticism is a type of criticism in which literary works are viewed as the product
of work and whose practitioners emphasize the role of class and ideology as they
reflect, propagate, and even challenge the prevailing social order. Rather than viewing

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texts as repositories for hidden meanings, Marxist critics view texts as material products
to be understood in broadly historical terms. In short, literary works are viewed as a
product of work (and hence of the realm of production and consumption we call
economics).

Marxism began with Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century German philosopher best known
for Das Kapital (1867; Capital), the seminal work of the communist movement. Marx
was also the first Marxist literary critic, writing critical essays in the 1830s on such
writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and William Shakespeare. Even after Marx met
Friedrich Engels in 1843 and began collaborating on overtly political works such as The
German Ideology (1846) and The Communist Manifesto (1848), he maintained a keen
interest in literature. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels discuss the relationship
between the arts, politics, and basic economic reality in terms of a general social theory.
Economics, they argue, provides the base, or infrastructure, of society, from which a
superstructure consisting of law, politics, philosophy, religion, and art emerges.

The revolution anticipated by Marx and Engels did not occur in their century, let alone in
their lifetime. When it did occur, in 1917, it did so in a place unimagined by either
theorist: Russia, a country long ruled by despotic czars but also enlightened by the
works of powerful novelists and playwrights including Anton Chekhov, Alexander
Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Russia produced revolutionaries like
Vladimir Lenin, who shared not only Marx's interest in literature but also his belief in its
ultimate importance. Leon Trotsky, Lenin's comrade in revolution, took a strong interest
in literary matters as well, publishing Literature and Revolution (1924), which is still
viewed as a classic of Marxist literary criticism.

Of those critics active in the Soviet Union after the expulsion of Trotsky and the triumph
of Stalin, two stand out: Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács. Bakhtin viewed language—
especially literary texts—in terms of discourses and dialogues. A novel written in a
society in flux, for instance, might include an official, legitimate discourse, as well as one
infiltrated by challenging comments. Lukács, a Hungarian who converted to Marxism in
1919, appreciated pre revolutionary realistic novels that broadly reflected cultural
"totalities" and were populated with characters representing human "types" of the
author's place and time.

Perhaps because Lukács was the best of the Soviet communists writing Marxist
criticism in the 1930s and 1940s, non-Soviet Marxists tended to develop their ideas by
publicly opposing his. In Germany, dramatist and critic Bertolt Brecht criticized Lukács
for his attempt to enshrine realism at the expense not only of the other "isms" but also of
poetry and drama, which Lukács had largely ignored. Walter Benjamin praised new art
forms ushered in by the age of mechanical reproduction, and Theodor Adorno attacked
Lukács for his dogmatic rejection of nonrealist modern literature and for his elevation of
content over form.

In addition to opposing Lukács and his overly constrictive canon, non-Soviet Marxists
took advantage of insights generated by non-Marxist critical theories being developed in
post—World War II Europe. Lucien Goldmann, a Romanian critic living in Paris,
combined structuralist principles with Marx’s base superstructure model in order to
show how economics determines the mental structures of social groups, which are
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reflected in literary texts. Goldmann rejected the idea of individual human genius,
choosing instead to see works as the "collective" products of "trans-individual" mental
structures. French Marxist Louis Althusser drew on the ideas of psychoanalytic theorist
Jacques Lacan and the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who discussed the
relationship between ideology and hegemony, the pervasive system of assumptions and
values that shapes the perception of reality for people in a given culture. Althusser’s
followers included Pierre Macherey, who in A Theory of Literary Production (1966)
developed Althusser’s concept of the relationship between literature and ideology; Terry
Eagleton, who proposes an elaborate theory about how history enters texts, which in
turn may alter history; and Frederic Jameson, who has argued that form is "but the
working out" of content "in the realm of the superstructure."

POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM
A type of cultural criticism, postcolonial criticism usually involves the analysis of literary
texts produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European
colonial powers at some point in their history. Alternatively, it can refer to the analysis of
texts written about colonized places by writers hailing from the colonizing culture. In
Orientalism (1978), Edward Said, a pioneer of postcolonial criticism and studies,
focused on the way in which the colonizing First World has invented false images and
myths of the Third (postcolonial) World—stereotypical images and myths that have
conveniently justified Western exploitation and domination of Eastern and Middle
Eastern cultures and peoples. In the essay "Postcolonial Criticism" (1992), Homi K.
Bhabha has shown how certain cultures (mis)represent other cultures, thereby
extending their political and social domination in the modern world order.

Postcolonial studies, a type of cultural studies, refers more broadly to the study of
cultural groups, practices, and discourses—including but not limited to literary
discourses—in the colonized world. The term postcolonial is usually used broadly to
refer to the study of works written at any point after colonization first occurred in a given
country, although it is sometimes used more specifically to refer to the analysis of texts
and other cultural discourses that emerged after the end of the colonial period (after the
success of the liberation and independence movements). Among feminist critics, the
postcolonial perspective has inspired an attempt to recover whole cultures of women
heretofore ignored or marginalized—women who speak not only from colonized places
but also from the colonizing places to which many of them fled.

Postcolonial criticism has been influenced by Marxist thought, by the work of Michel
Foucault (whose theories about the power of discourses have influenced the new
historicism), and by deconstruction, which has challenged not only hierarchical, binary
oppositions such as West/East and North/South but also the notions of superiority
associated with the first term of each opposition.

THE NEW CRITICISM

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The New Criticism is a type of formalist literary criticism that reached its height during
the 1940s and 1950s and that received its name from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book
The New Criticism. New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were a self-contained,
self-referential object. Rather than basing their interpretations of a text on the reader’s
response, the author’s stated intentions, or parallels between the text and historical
contexts (such as author’s life), New Critics perform a close reading, concentrating on
the relationships within the text that give it its own distinctive character or form. New
Critics emphasize that the structure of a work should not be divorced from meaning,
viewing the two as constituting a quasi-organic unity. Special attention is paid to
repetition, particularly of images or symbols, but also of sound effects and rhythms in
poetry. New Critics especially appreciate the use of literary devices, such as irony, to
achieve a balance or reconciliation between dissimilar, even conflicting, elements in a
text.

Because it stresses close textual analysis and viewing the text as a carefully crafted,
orderly object containing formal, observable patterns, the New Criticism has sometimes
been called an "objective" approach to literature. New Critics are more likely than
certain other critics to believe and say that the meaning of a text can be known
objectively. For instance, reader-response critics see meaning as a function either of
each reader’s experience or of the norms that govern a particular interpretive
community, and deconstructors argue that texts mean opposite things at the same time.
The foundations of the New Criticism were laid in books and essays written during the
1920s and 1930s by I. A. Richards (Practical Criticism [1929]), William Empson (Seven
Types of Ambiguity [1930]), and T. S. Eliot ("The Function of Criticism" [1933]).

The approach was significantly developed later, however, by a group of American

poets and critics, including R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Allen
Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and William K. Wimsatt. Although we associate the New
Criticism with certain principles and terms—such as affective fallacy (the notion that the
reader’s response is relevant to the meaning of a work) and intentional fallacy (the
notion that the author’s intention determines the work’s meaning)—the New Critics were
trying to make a cultural statement rather than to establish a critical dogma. Generally
southern, religious, and culturally conservative, they advocated the inherent value of
literary works (particularly of literary works regarded as beautiful art objects) because
they were sick of the growing ugliness of modern life and contemporary events.

Some recent theorists even link the rising popularity after World War II of the New
Criticism (and other types of formalist literary criticism such as the Chicago School) to
American isolationism. These critics tend to view the formalist tendency to isolate
literature from biography and history as symptomatic of American fatigue with wider
involvements. Whatever the source of the New Criticism’s popularity (or the reason for
its eventual decline), its practitioners and the textbooks they wrote were so influential in
American academia that the approach became standard in college and even high
school curricula through the 1960s and well into the 1970s.

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FORMALISM
Formalism is a general term covering several similar types of literary criticism that arose
in the 1920s and 1930s, flourished during the 1940s and 1950s, and are still in evidence
today. Formalists see the literary work as an object in its own right. Thus, they tend to
devote their attention to its intrinsic nature, concentrating their analyses on the interplay
and relationships between the text’s essential verbal elements. They study the form of
the work (as opposed to its content), although form to a formalist can connote anything
from genre (for example, one may speak of "the sonnet form") to grammatical or
rhetorical structure to the "emotional imperative" that engenders the work's (more
mechanical) structure. No matter which connotation of form pertains, however,
formalists seek to be objective in their analysis, focusing on the work itself and
eschewing external considerations. They pay particular attention to literary devices used
in the work and to the patterns these devices establish.

Formalism developed largely in reaction to the practice of interpreting literary texts by

relating them to "extrinsic" issues, such as the historical circumstances and politics of
the era in which the work was written, its philosophical or theological milieu, or the
experiences and frame of mind of its author. Although the term formalism was coined by
critics to disparage the movement, it is now used simply as a descriptive term.
Formalists have generally suggested that everyday language, which serves simply to
communicate information, is stale and unimaginative. They argue that "literariness" has
the capacity to overturn common and expected patterns (of grammar, of story line),
thereby rejuvenating language. Such novel uses of language supposedly enable
readers to experience not only language but also the world in an entirely new way.

A number of schools of literary criticism have adopted a formalist orientation, or at least

make use of formalist concepts. The New Criticism, an American approach to literature
that reached its height in the 1940s and 1950s, is perhaps the most famous type of
formalism. But Russian formalism was the first major formalist movement; after the
Stalinist regime suppressed it in the early 1930s, the Prague Linguistic Circle adopted
its analytical methods. The Chicago School has also been classified as formalist, insofar
as the Chicago critics examined and analyzed works on an individual basis; their
interest in historical material, on the other hand, was clearly not formalist.