to other literary works

Social reader‑response theory

While the individual reader’s subjective response to the literary text plays the crucial role in subjective reader‑response theory, for social reader‑response the‑ ory, usually associated with the later work of Stanley Fish, there is no purely individual subjective response. According to Fish, what we take to be our indi‑ vidual subjective responses to literature are really products of the interpretive community to which we belong. By interpretive community, Fish means those who share the interpretive strategies we bring to texts when we read, whether or not we realize we’re using interpretive strategies and whether or not we are aware that other people share them. These interpretive strategies always result from various sorts of institutionalized assumptions (assumptions established, for example, in high schools, churches, and colleges by prevailing cultural attitudes and philosophies) about what makes a text a piece of literature—instead of a letter or a legal document or a church sermon—and what meanings we are sup‑ posed to find in it. An interpretive community can be as sophisticated and aware of its critical enterprise as the community produced by the followers of a specific Marxist critical theorist. Or an interpretive community can be as unsophisticated and unaware of its interpretive strategies as the community produced by a high school teacher who instructs his students that it is natural to read literature in search of static symbols that tell us the “hidden meaning” of the story. Of course, interpretive communities aren’t static; they evolve over time. And read‑ ers can belong, consciously or unconsciously, to more than one community at the same time, or they can change from one community to another at different times in their lives. In any case, all readers come to the text already predisposed to interpret it in a certain way based on whatever interpretive strategies are operating for them at the time they read. Thus, while Bleich believes his students produce communal authority through a negotiation that occurs after they’ve read the text, Fish claims that a multiplicity of communal authorities, based on the multiplicity of interpretive communities to which students already belong, determines how students read the text in the first place. In other words, for Fish, readers do not interpret poems; they create them. He demonstrated this point rather dramatically when he taught two college courses back to back. At the end of his first class he wrote an assignment on the board that consisted of the following list of linguists’ names his students were study‑ ing. (The question mark after the final name was to indicate Fish’s uncertainty about the spelling.)