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READER-RESPONSE THEORY INTRODUCTION
In a Nutshell
When you think about literature, you probably think of authors and texts. Authors write literary works.
So they're the ones who decide what a textmeans, right? And us readers? Well, we're secondary to
authors, because hey, we're just readers.
Yeah, not so fast.
If you hadn't already guessed by the name of the movement, Reader-Response theory says that readers
are just as important as the authors who write literary works. Hey, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is
around to hear it, does it make a sound? Same goes for The Iliad and War and Peace: if no reader is
around to get through those hundreds of pages, then it's almost like that text doesn't exist.
Don't let this blow your mind, but Reader-Response theorists actually think that readers are active
participants who create a work of literature in the process of reading it. The meaning of a text, according
to Reader-Response theorists, exists somewhere between the words on the page and the reader's mind.
Think of it this way. If we say, "The Shmoop labradoodle totally ate that cupcake," each individual person
reading that sentence will have a different image of the Shmoop labradoodle, of the Shmoop
headquarters, and of the cupcake. Some readers will probably imagine a cute dog, others will imagine a
naughty dog, and everyone will try to fill in the blanks to figure out what happened and why. It'll all
depend on each individual reader's experience with dogs, cupcakes, and Shmoop.
The interpretation each reader has will probably be similar, but each will be slightly different.
The big contribution of Reader-Response theorists was to call attention to the importance of the reader
in the making of literary meaning. Reader-Response theorists like to ask questions like: How do we feel
when we read a certain poem, or a passage from a novel? Why do we feel that way? How does our
psychology affect the way we read literary texts? How does each of us read differently? Only when we
ask those questions, these theorists argue, can we truly begin to understand literature.

Why Should I Care?

Why Should Readers Care?
Ever read a book and think, "I'm just not getting this. Am I stupid or something?" Ever get bored to death
by the text, or so excited you want to jump up and run and tell everyone you know how great this book
is? That's part of being a reader, right?
Texts move you or they don't move you. They confuse you or they clarify things for you. Characters in a
novel may remind you of real people in your life; a description in a poem may make you remember some
childhood incident; heck, a book can even change your life. Reading is a totally personal experience, after
all.
Well, that's the whole point of Reader-Response theory. This theory allows you to take your own
personal feelings and your own perspective into account when you analyze a literary text. According to
Reader-Response theorists, it is significant that a certain character reminds you of Dad, or that a certain
passage recalls something from your childhood. Reader-Response theory isn't just about understanding a
text better; it's also about understanding yourself better.
Why Should Theorists Care?
Up until the 1960s, New Criticism reigned supreme in American universities. New Criticism was all about
focusing on the text itself: you weren't supposed to think about the context, or about the author
andcertainly not about the reader.
Reader-Response theorists helped dethrone New Criticism from its privileged position by, well, drawing
attention to the reader. They also helped pave the way for a lot of other literary schools that followed in
the 1970s and 1980s, like Poststructuralism and New Historicism. The ideas of both these schools were
closely affiliated with the focus on reading and subjectivity that the Reader-Response theorists first
called attention to.

Big Concepts from Big Minds

Reader
Okay, so you want us to explain to you what a reader is? All right, all rightthis is Reader-Response
theory, after all. The reader's that person who sits in the library (or just on the couch) for hours and
hours reading literary works. More importantly, the reader is someone who interprets a literary work.
According to Reader-Response theorists, the reader is responsible formakingnot just findingmeaning
in literary works.
Response
We're all individuals, right? There are over seven billion people on the planet, and each person has his or
her own unique memories, relationships, interests, identity. A person's response to a literary text is
shaped by his or her own unique perspective and experience. According to Reader-Response theory, that
means that every person's responseyup, even your teacher'sis going to be, at least some extent,
subjective.

mplied Reader
According to theorist Wolfgang Iser, each literary work has an implied reader. The
implied reader of a young adult book, for example, isyou guessed ita young adult.
But there's more. If the narrator of a novel keeps telling us, "Are you following me?
Does this make sense?" then the implied reader is a confused reader. If another
narrator uses really fancy vocabulary when she or he speaks, then the implied reader is
probably someone who's well educated.

Blank

Literary texts are full of blanks, or "gaps" that leave us readers scratching our heads.
You knowit's like when the text suddenly skips twenty years, or when a character
suddenly disappears. We go: huh? What just happened? According to Wolfgang Iser,
these blanks are actually really important. Why? Because they stimulate our
imagination. By being forced to fill in the "blanks," we readers are also forced to play a
part in constructing the story.

Affective Stylistics
Stanley Fish came up with this term to describe the way in which literary critics must
rely on their own subjective or "affective" reaction to a literary text in order to understand
it. How do these words make us feel? (Yes, even critics have feelingsor so we've
been told.) How and what do they make us think? Only by asking these questions can
any reader begin to understand a literary work.
Interpretive Community

When we read, it's true that we each have a subjective reaction to a literary work. But
it's also true that we're not reading in a vacuum. If you ask Stanley Fish, we're actually
part of an interpretive community, a group of readers who not only share the same
language but who also share the same reading conventions. In college English class,
for example, we're all lectured about the importance of doing "close reading." That's one
reading convention that many of us share, and that makes close readers part of the
same interpretive community.

Interaction

Reader-Response theorists believe that meaning isn't something stable located inside a
text. For them, a book isn't like a puzzle with one clear answer; meaning is found in the
interaction between the reader and the text. The text has some suggestions, sure, but
each reader will bring something a bit different to the text and will interpret it in different
ways.

Identity

We each have a unique psychological identity, right? Well, Reader-Response theorists

think that when we read, we project our own identities onto the text we're reading.
Whatever psychological hang-ups we have (issues with mom and dad, fear of cats,
obsession with The Bachelor) will affect the way that we understand a literary text.

Meaning as Event
Reader-Response theorists have this idea that the meaning we find in a literary text isn't
just static. It's not some concrete thing just sitting there, waiting to be discovered. For
these theorists, meaning is an event, something that happens as a result of the
interaction between the reader and the text.

Subjective Criticism

Many Reader-Response critics think that objectivity doesn't exist. They say that, try as
we might, we just plain can't arrive at an objective interpretation of a literary work. So,
they say, let's stop trying to. Instead, let's focus on understanding literary texts through
our own unique perspectives as individual human beingsin other words, let's focus
on subjective criticism.
How It All Got Started

Officially, Reader-Response theory got going in the late 1960s, when a group of critics
including Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, and Norman N. Holland started asking questions
about how a reader's response to a literary text actually creates that literary text.

But the real roots of Reader-Response theory can be traced further back to 1938. That's
the year that Literature as Exploration, a book by scholar Louise Rosenblatt, was
published. In this book, Rosenblatt deals at length with how the reader's response to a
text is fundamental to the understanding of a literary work. These ideas didn't catch on
until the 1960s, but when they did, they became the theory we know and maybe love
today.

The Big Names in Reader-Response Theory

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: it all started with Louise Rosenblatt and her
book Literature as Exploration. That's the first work of literary criticism that set out in
detail a Reader-Response perspective.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, a whole crop of critics emerged who focused on analyzing
readers' responses to texts. The most important of these critics was a dude called
Stanley Fish. He applied a Reader-Response perspective to works like John Milton's
epic poem Paradise Lost, and he argued that we just can't understand a literary work
like Milton's epic without considering the reader's reaction to it.

A second important theorist is Wolfgang Iser, a German scholar who wrote a lot about
how the meaning of a literary text isn't in the text itself but can be found in the
interaction between the reader and the text. Iser also had a thing for "blanks," gaps in a
text that force the reader to fill in with his or her own imagination.

Norman N. Holland and David Bleich were two guys who were into psychoanalytic
theory. They were influenced by the ideas of the psychoanalyst and theorist Sigmund
Freud, and they argued that understanding literary texts is all about understanding the
psychology of the person who's actually reading the texts.

For instance, if you're a reader who has hang-ups about mommy and daddyand who
doesn't?then you're probably going to project those issues onto the text you're
reading. So when you analyze a text, you not only have to understand the words on the
page, you have to understand the mind of the person reading those words.

Batayang Teoretikal
 Isang simbolikong order ang komunikasyon. Ayon nga kina Allen at Rodman (1997, p. 5), symbols
are used to represent things, processes, ideas, or events in way that makes communication possible.
Nangangahulugan lamang ito na hindi lamang sa salita nasusukat ang komunikasyon kung hindi posible
rin ang pagkakaroon ng komunikasyon sa pamamagitan ng simbolo. Sa pamamagitan ng pagbibigay-
interpretasyon, maaaring makabuo ang indibidwal ng mensahe o kaisipan.
Bago natutong magsalita ang tao ay una niyang natutunan ang pagpapahayag sa pamamagitan
ng pagsulat na pinatutunayan ng mga larawang ginuhit ng mga sinaunang tao (Hufana, Magracia at
Santos, 2011). Pinatunayan ito ng mga larawang nakaguhit sa Espanya at Kanlurang Francia noong unang
panahon. Mga simpleng larawan ito ng mga bagay-bagay o mga pangyayari na madaling maiguhit o
maililok at mula sa mga simpleng larawan ay nakapagbibigay sila ng mga kahulugan.
Maaaring makipagkomunikasyon ang tao gamit ang mga nakaguhit na larawan ng mga
mensaheng nais ipabatid at bilang pagtugon, iniinterpreta rin ng tao ang mga ito na siyang
pinagbabatayan ng semiotiks. Itinuturing na sentro ng daluyan ng ibat ibang larangan ng isipan at
disiplina ng pag-aaral ang wika tulad ng linggwistika, pilosopiya at sikolohiya (Garcia, 1992). Kaya
masasabing tumatalakay ito sa kahulugan o sa pagpapahayag ng kahulugan.
May kinalaman ang semiotiks sa lahat ng bagay na mayroong sinasagisag. Ang terminong ito ay
likha ng isang linggwistang Swiss na si Ferdinand de Saussure (Griffin, 1997). Tinanggap ng semiotiks ang
pag-aaral sa kahulugan sa pamamagitan ng pang-amoy, panlasa, pakiramdam, tono ng boses, galaw,
musika, larawan at hugis ng mga bagay.
Sa aklat naman ni Eco na A Theory of Semiotics, pinalahulugan niya ang semiotiks bilang theory
of the lie. Dahil sa ang semiotiks ay may kinalaman sa lahat na maaaring maging simbolo na maaaring
magkaroon ng sagisag, lahat ng simobolo ay maaring magkaroon ng ibat ibang pakahulugan sa bawat
tao. Ayon pa nga kay Tayag (2011), ang kahulugan ay hindi matatagpuan sa loob ng libro, kompyuter o sa
anumang audio-visual na midya sapagkat ang tao ang lumikha nito ayon na rin sa kanyang kamalayang
panlipunan.
Tumatalakay ang teoryang semiotiks sa pagbibigay pakahulugan sa mga signos o simbolo.
Ginamit ng mananaliksik ang semiotiks kahulugan sa likod ng mga simbolong ipinakikita sa mga
pelikulang kartun. Pinakapuso ng semiotiks ang sikolohikal na pagpapakahulugan ng bawat nilalang sa
kanilang nakikita, nababasa at naririnig; sa mga senyales o sa mga simbolong nagbibigay ng ibat ibang
interpretasyon batay sa lipunang ginagalawan ng tao kaya maituturing na mayroong kaugnayan ang
teoryang semiotiks sa teoryang pagtanggap at pagbasa. Ang simbolo man ay may mensaheng nais
ipahayag na maaaring basahin at unawain ng tao. Sa teoryang pagtanggap at pagbasa binibigyang pokus
ang pansariling ideolohiya ng mambabasa. Sa teoryang ito malayang makapagbibigay-kahulugan ang
isang indibidwal.
Bawat nilalang ay kaiba sa isat isa at kaankla nito ang pagkakaiba-iba ng hinuha at pagtingin ng
tao sa mundo. Kaya masasabing magkakaiba rin ang tao sa paraan ng pagpapahayag at pag-unawa.
Ang readers response theory ay nagtatangkang ilarawan ang nagaganap sa isipan ng mambabasa habang
binibigyang-kahulugan ang akda o teksto. Nagkakaiba-iba ng lebel ng subhektibidad ang mga kritiko sa
kanilang pagtingin sa mga teorya ng interpretasyon. Marami nang mga kritiko ang tinitingnan ang akda,
katulad ni David Bleich bilang salamin kung saan nakikita ng mambabasa ang kanyang sarili sa akdang
binabasa. Samantala, ayon naman kay Louise Rosenblatt na ang isang akda ay nagkakaroon lamang na
kahulugan kung ito ay binabasa o babasahin ng mambabasa. Nakasentro ang mambabasa sa teksto at
gumagawa ng sariling paghihinuha kung ano ang ibig ipahiwatig ng akda habang ito ay binabasa. Dahil
dito masasabing walang iisang pagpapakahulugan o interpretasyon ang maaaring ibigay sa akda.
Naiimpluwensiyahan ang mambabasa ng kanyang mga pagpapahalagang kultural, sosyal at panrelihiyon
(Santos at Tayag, 2011, p. 149). Nangangahulugan lamang na ginagamit ng mga mambabasa ang kanilang
isipan sa pagbibigay interpretasyon sa kanilang mga nakikita batay na rin sa kanilang nalalaman sa
kanilang paligid. Bumubuo ang mambabasa ng animation sa kanilang isipan at ginagawa ang sarili bilang
kasama sa sariling palabas. Ginamit sa pag-aaral ang readers response theory sa pagbibigay-kahulugan
sa mga paksa ng mga kartung pinapanood ng mga bata.