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Reader‑response criticism
Jacobs–Rosenbaum Levin Thorne Hayes Ohman (?) (Is There a Text? 323) When his second class entered the room, he told them that the writing on the board was a seventeenth-century religious poem like the ones they’d been study‑ ing and asked them to analyze it. In the discussion that ensued, his students concluded that the poem celebrated God’s love and mercy in giving his only begotten son for our redemption. Their interpretation accounted beautifully for every word in the poem, including, among other evidence, the following points: the poem is in the shape of a cross or an altar; “Jacobs” suggests Jacob’s ladder, a reference to the Christian ascent into heaven; “Rosenbaum” literally means rose tree and refers to the Virgin Mary, the rose without thorns, whose son Jesus is the means by which human beings can climb to heaven; “Thorne” thus refers to Jesus’ crown of thorns, a symbol of the sacrifice he made to redeem us; and the letters that occur most frequently in the poem are S, O, N (Is There a Text? 322–29). I don’t need to recount the students’ argument in its entirety for you to see Fish’s point: every literary judgment we make, including the judgment that a particu‑ lar piece of writing is a poem, results from the interpretive strategies we bring with us when we read the text. A list of linguists’ names, or anything else, can become a poem if a reader or group of readers uses the interpretive strategies required to make it one. That is, the qualities that make a poem a poem do not reside in the text but in the interpretive strategies we’ve learned, consciously or unconsciously, before we ever encountered the text. Social reader-response theory doesn’t offer us a new way to read texts. Nor does it promote any form of literary criticism that already exists. After all, its point is that no interpretation, and therefore no form of literary criticism, can claim to reveal what’s in a text. Each interpretation will simply find whatever its inter‑ pretive strategies put there. This doesn’t mean, however, that we are left with the anarchy of unconstrained interpretation. As Fish notes, interpretations will always be controlled by the relatively limited repertoire of interpretive strategies available at any given point in history. By understanding the principles of social reader-response theory, however, we can become more aware of what it is we’re doing when we interpret a text and more aware of what our peers and students are doing as well. Such awareness could be especially useful to teachers by help‑ ing them analyze their students’ interpretive strategies; helping them decide if and when to try to replace those strategies with others; and helping them take
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