Reader‑response criticism
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responsibility for the strategies they choose to teach instead of hiding behind the belief that certain ways of reading are natural or inherently right because they represent what’s in the text. Defining readers
Before we turn to the uses of reader-response theory in literary criticism, there’s one final concept we need to discuss that relates to all the approaches discussed above. You may have noticed that some reader-response theorists refer to “read‑ ers” while others refer to “the reader.” When theorists discuss actual readers whose responses they analyze, as Norman Holland and David Bleich do, for example, they refer to them as “readers” or “students” or call them by some other name that denotes real people. Many theorists, however, analyze the reading experience of a hypothetical ideal reader encountering a specific text, as we saw, for example, in our examination of affective stylistics. In these cases, refer‑ ences to “the reader” are really references to the critic analyzing his or her own carefully documented reading experience of a specific text according to specific reader-response principles. Because the experience of hypothetical readers may or may not correspond to the experience of actual readers, some hypothetical readers have been given names that describe the reading activity they represent. Thus, in Fish’s practice of affective stylistics, he refers to the informed reader: the reader who has attained the literary competency necessary to experience the text as Fish himself does, in the fullness of its linguistic and literary complexity, and who conscientiously tries to suppress the personal or idiosyncratic dimension of his or her response. Of course, there is a variety of informed readers because the informed reader of, say, Emily Dickinson’s poetry may or may not be the informed reader of Richard Wright’s fiction. Other terms you may run across that refer to similar hypothetical readers include the educated reader, the ideal reader, and the optimal reader. Analogously, Wolfgang Iser uses the term implied reader, by which he means the reader that the text seems to be addressing, whose characteristics we can deduce by studying the style in which the text is written and the apparent “attitude” of the narrative toward the reader. Thus, the implied reader of a Harlequin romance is quite different from the implied reader of a philosophical novel like Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) or the implied reader of a psychologically intense, historical novel like Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Other terms you may encounter that refer to readers implied by the text include the intended reader and the narratee. The point here is that critics who use hypothetical readers are trying to show us what particular texts require of readers or how particular texts
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