Theories of Reader Response and Reception
• Fish, "Interpreting the Variorium" (NATC, 2067-89)
• Iser, "Interaction between Text and Reader" (NATC, 1670-82)
• Jauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory" (NATC, 1547-64)
“Central to the reading of every literary work is the interaction between someone and its recipient” (1673). Consider literature as having two poles: the artistic, and the aesthetic. If we define the artistic pole as the author’s text, and the aesthetic pole as the realization accomplished by the reader, it is somewhere between the two where Reader Response it generated. In Wolfgang Iser’s text, he proposes that there are various gaps within a text which the reader must ‘fill in,’ initiating the active role as the text’s true producer. Iser states, “the shifting blank maps out the path along which the wandering viewpoint is to travel, guided by the self-regulatory sequence in which the structural qualities of the blank interlock” (1681). Essentially this process will reveal the connection between the text’s structure and the reading subject.
“Central to the reading of every literary work is the interaction between someone and its recipient” (1673). Consider literature as having two poles: the artistic, and the aesthetic. If we define the artistic pole as the author’s text, and the aesthetic pole as the realization accomplished by the reader, it is somewhere between the two where Reader Response it generated. In Wolfgang Iser’s text, he proposes that there are various gaps within a text which the reader must ‘fill in,’ initiating the active role as the text’s true producer. Iser states, “the shifting blank maps out the path along which the wandering viewpoint is to travel, guided by the self-regulatory sequence in which the structural qualities of the blank interlock” (1681). Essentially this process will reveal the connection between the text’s structure and the reading subject.
While Iser viewed reading as a dialectical process between reader and text, Hans-Robert Jauss considered a reader’s aesthetic experience to be bound by time and historical determinants. Jauss developed the term ‘Horizons of Expectations’ to explain how the reader’s expectations are based on past experiences of literature. Jauss states, “The obvious historical implication of this is that the understanding of the first reader will be sustained and enriched in a chain of receptions from generation to generation; in this way the historical significance of a work will be decided and its aesthetic value made evident” (1552). Similaririly, Stanley Fish’s term ‘Interpretive Communities’ suggests that readers within and interpretive community share reading strategies, values and interpretive assumptions. Therefore, as a reader, we bring certain assumptions to a text based on our framework of ‘learned interpretive strategies,’ thus prohibiting bizarre interpretations. Consequently, we see what our interpretive principals have allowed us to see, and then we attribute what has ‘been seen’ to a text and an intention.
No comments:
Post a Comment