PREFACE

Thank God because of the blessing to the writer for finishing the term paper assignment entitled
“Reader Response”.

The writer also wishes to express her deep and sincere gratitude for those who have support her
to completing this paper. This term paper contains of definition of Reader Response itself.

Hopefully, this paper can help the readers to enrich their knowledge about “Reader Response”

Malang, 16 October 2017

Writer

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 BAB I
Introduction

A theory, which gained prominence in the late 1960s, that focuses on the reader or

audience reaction to a particular text, perhaps more than the text itself. Reader-response criticism

can be connected to post-structuralism’s emphasis on the role of the reader in actively

constructing texts rather than passively consuming them. Unlike text-based approaches such as

New Criticism, which are grounded upon some objective meaning already present in the work

being examined, reader-response criticism argues that a text has no meaning before a reader

experiences—reads—it. The reader-response critic’s job is to examine the scope and variety of

reader reactions and analyze the ways in which different readers, sometimes called “interpretive

communities,” make meaning out of both purely personal reactions and inherited or culturally

conditioned ways of reading. The theory is popular in both the United States and Germany; its

main theorists include Stanley Fish, David Bleich, and Wolfgang Iser.

Although literary theory has long paid some attention to the readers role in creating the

meaning and experience of a literary work, modern reader-response criticism began in the 1960s

and 70s, particularly in America and Germany, in work by Norman Holland, Stanley Fish,

Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, Roland Barthes, and others. Important predecessors were I.

A. Richards, who in 1929 analyzed a group of Cambridge undergraduates misreadings; Louise

Rosenblatt, who, in Literature as Exploration (1938), argued that it is important for the teacher to

avoid imposing any "preconceived notions about the proper way to react to any work"; and C. S.

Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism (1961).

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 BAB II
Discussion

Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real

existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader- response

criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates

his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total opposition to the

theories of formalism and the New Criticism, in which the readers role in re-creating literary

works is ignored. New Criticism had emphasized that only that which is within a text is part of

the meaning of a text. No appeal to the authority or intention of the author, nor to the psychology

of the reader, was allowed in the discussions of orthodox New Critics.

Kinds of Reader-Response Criticism One can sort reader-response theorists into three

groups: those who focus upon the individual readers experience ("individualists"); those who

conduct psychological experiments on a defined set of readers ("experimenters"); and those who

assume a fairly uniform response by all readers ("uniformists"). One can therefore draw a

distinction between reader-response theorists who see the individual reader driving the whole

experience and others who think of literary experience as largely text- driven and uniform (with

individual variations that can be ignored). The former theorists, who think the reader controls,

derive what is common in a literary experience from shared techniques for reading and

interpreting which are, however, individually applied by different readers. The latter, who put the

text in control, derive commonalities of response, obviously, from the literary work itself. The

most fundamental difference among reader-response critics is probably, then, between those who

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regard individual differences among readers responses as important and those who try to get

around them.

 Individualists

In the 1960s, David Bleich began collecting statements by influencing students of their

feelings and associations. He used these to theorize about the reading process and to refocus the

classroom teaching of literature. He claimed that his classes "generated" knowledge, that is,

knowledge of how particular persons recreate texts. Michael Steig and Walter Slatoff have, like

Bleich, shown that students highly personal responses can provide the basis for critical analyses

in the classroom. Jeffrey Berman has encouraged students responding to texts to write

anonymously and share with their classmates writings in response to literary works about

sensitive subjects like drugs, suicidal thoughts, death in the family, parental abuse and the like.

Michael Steig and Walter Slatoff have, like Bleich, shown that students highly personal

responses can provide the basis for critical analyses in the classroom. Jeffrey Berman has

encouraged students responding to texts to write anonymously and share with their classmates

writings in response to literary works about sensitive subjects like drugs, suicidal thoughts, death

in the family, parental abuse and the like.

Kind of catharsis bordering on therapy results. In general, American reader-response critics

have focused on individual readers responses. American magazines like Reader, Reading

Research Quarterly, and others publish articles applying reader-response theory to the teaching

of literature. In 1961, C. S. Lewis published An Experiment in Criticism, in which he analyzed

readers role in selecting literature. He analyzed their selections in light of their goals in reading.

In 1967, Stanley Fish published Surprised by Sin, the first study of a large literary work

(Paradise Lost) that focused on its reader experience. In an appendix, "Literature in the Reader",

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Fish used "the" reader to examine responses to complex sentences sequentially, word-by-word.

Since 1976, however, he has turned to real differences among real readers. He explores the

reading tactics endorsed by different critical schools, by the literary professoriate, and by the

legal profession, introducing the idea of "interpretive communities" that share particular modes

of reading.

In 1968, Norman Holland drew on psychoanalytic psychology in The Dynamics of

Literary Response to model the literary work. Each reader introverts a fantasy "in" the text, then

modifies it by defense mechanisms into an interpretation. In 1973, however, having recorded

responses from real readers, Holland found variations too great to fit this model in which

responses are mostly alike but show minor individual variations.

Holland then developed a second model based on his case studies 5 Readers Reading. An

individual has (in the brain) a core identity theme (behaviors then becoming understandable as a

theme and variations as in music). This core gives that individual a certain style of being--and

reading. Each reader uses the physical literary work plus invariable codes (such as the shapes of

letters) plus variable canons (different "interpretive communities", for example) plus an

individual style of reading to build a response both like and unlike other readers responses.

Holland worked with others at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Murray Schwartz,

David Willbern, and Robert Rogers, to develop a particular teaching format, the "Delphi

seminar," designed to get students to "know themselves".

 Experimenters

Reuven Tsur in Israel has developed in great detail models for the expressivity of poetic

rhythms, of metaphor, and of word-sound in poetry (including different actors readings of a

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single line of Shakespeare). Richard Gerrig in the U.S. has experimented with the readers state of

mind during and after a literary experience. He has shown how readers put aside ordinary

knowledge and values while they read, treating, for example, criminals as heroes. He has also

investigated how readers accept, while reading, improbable or fantastic things (Coleridges

"willing suspension of disbelief"), but discard them after they have finished.

In Canada, David Miall, usually working with Donald Kuiken, has produced a large body

of work exploring emotional or "affective" responses to literature, drawing on such concepts

from ordinary criticism as "defamiliarization" or "foregrounding". They have used both

experiments and new developments in neuropsychology, and have developed a questionnaire for

measuring different aspects of a readers response.

There are many other experimental psychologists around the world exploring readers

responses, conducting many detailed experiments. One can research their work through their

professional organizations, the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and

Media, and International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, and through such psychological

indices as PSYCINFO.

Two notable researchers are Dolf Zillmann and Peter Vorderer, both working in the field

of communications and media psychology. Both have theorized and tested ideas about what

produces emotions such as suspense, curiosity, surprise in readers, the necessary factors

involved, and the role the reader plays .

 Uniformists

Wolfgang Iser exemplifies the German tendency to theorize the reader and so posit a

uniform response. For him, a literary work is not an object in itself but an effect to be explained.

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But he asserts this response is controlled by the text. For the "real" reader, he substitutes an

implied reader, who is the reader a given literary work requires. Within various polarities created

by the text, this "implied" reader makes expectations, meanings, and the unstated details of

characters and settings through a "wandering viewpoint". In his model, the text controls. The

readers activities are confined within limits set by the literary work.

Another important German reader-response critic was Hans-Robert Jauss, who defined

literature as a dialectic process of production and reception (Rezeption--the term common in

Germany for "response"). For Jauss, readers have a certain mental set, a "horizon" of

expectations, from which perspective each reader, at any given time in history, reads. Reader-

response criticism establishes these horizons of expectation by reading literary works of the

period in question.

Both Iser and Jauss, and the Constance School they exemplify, return reader-response

criticism to a study of the text by defining readers in terms of the text. In the same way, Gerald

Prince posits a "narratee", Michael Riffaterre posits a "super reader", and Stanley Fish an

"informed reader." And many text-oriented critics simply speak of "the" reader who typifies all

readers.

 Objections

Reader-response critics hold that, to understand the literary experienc or the meaning of a

text, one must look to the processes readers us to create that meaning and experience.

Traditional, text-oriente critics often think of reader-response criticism as an anarchi

subjectivism, allowing readers to interpret a text any way they want They accuse reader-response

critics of saying the text doesnt exis (Reader-response critics respond that they are only saying

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that explore someone literary experience, one must ask the someone, no pore over the text.) By

contrast, text-oriented critics assume that on can understand a text while remaining immune to

ones own culture status, personality, and so on, and hence "objectively."

To reader-response based theorists, however, reading is always both subjective and

objective, and their question is not "which" but "how".[clarification needed] Some reader-

response critics (uniformists) assume a bi-active model of reading: the literary work controls part

of the response and the reader controls part. Others, who see that position as internally

contradictory, claim that the reader controls the whole transaction (individualists). In such a

reader-active model, readers and audiences use amateur or professional procedures for reading

(shared by many others) as we as their personal issues and values.

Another objection to reader-response criticism is that it fails to account for the text being

able to expand the readers understanding. While readers can and do put the own ideas and

experiences into a work, they are at the same time gaining new understanding through the

text.This is something that is generally overlooked in reader-response criticism.

Some argue that artworks are now purposely being fabricated which lack meaning but rather the

artworks are fabricated only to generate a reader response.The reader response then is corralled

via interpretative communities.Reader response rather than handing a freedom to the reader

empowers the leaders of an interpretative community against the reader.The reader has no

ground to evaluate the artwork as the artwork is senseless.Only a reader response, basically an

emotive response, is legitimate.The Web provides an ideal way to form such interpretative

communities.The power of reader response strategy is that people are fundamentally hungry for

culture and will attempt to impart meaning even to artworks that are senseless. Of course, people

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can always opt out of these interpretative communities centered around senseless artworks with

little to no loss via-a-vis culture and almost certainly a cultural gain.

 Extensions

Reader-response criticism relates to psychology, bot experimental psychology for those

attempting to find principles of response, and psychoanalytic psychology for those studyin

individual responses. Post-behaviorist psychologists of reading an of perception support the idea

that it is the reader who make meaning. Increasingly, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics

neuroscience, and neuropsychoanalysis have given reader-respons critics powerful and detailed

models for the aesthetic process.

In 2011 researchers found that during listening to emotionally intens parts of a story,

readers respond with changes in heart rate variabilit , indicative of increased activation of the

sympathetic nervous system . Intense parts of a story were also accompanied by increased brai

activity in a network of regions known to be involved in th processing of fear, including

amygdala.

Because it rests on psychological principles, a reader-response approac readily

generalizes to other arts: cinema (David Bordwell), music, or visual art (E. H. Gombrich), and

even to history (Hayden White). In stressing the activity of the scholar, reader-response theory

justifies such upsettings of traditional interpretations as, for example, deconstruction or cultural

criticism.Since reader-response critics focus on the strategies readers are taught to use, they

address the teaching of reading and literature. Also, because reader-response criticism stresses

the activity of the reader, reader-response critics readily share the concerns of feminist critics and

critics writing on behalf of gays, ethnic minorities, or post- colonial people.

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 Prominent figure and their thought

1. Stanley fish

Fish's literary theory before criticizing it and then tie it in more broadly

with the privatization of meaning and other phenomena occurring in philosophy

and society which I will argue are historically conditioned. In other words, Fish's

thesis is influenced by existential notions of truth and the rise of modernism/post-

modernism.

There are really two kinds of reader-response criticism: one is a

phenomenological approach to reading which characterizes much of Fish's earlier

work, and the other is an epistemological theory characteristic of Fish's later

work. The phenomenological method has much to commend itself to us as it

focuses on what happens in the reader's mind as he or she reads. Fish applies this

method in his early work "Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost." His

thesis in this work is that Milton used a number of literary techniques

intentionally to lead the reader into a false sense of security whereupon he would

effect a turn from the reader's expectations in order to surprise the reader with his

own prideful self-sufficiency. The supposed intent of Milton was to force the

reader to see his own sinfulness in a new light and be forced back to God's grace.

Fish's thesis is a rather ingenious approach to Paradise Lost and to Milton's

(mis)leading of the reader.

Fish's concern at this point in his career is with what "is really happening

in the act of reading," and this is reflected in his compilations of essays entitled Is

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There a Text in This Class? Especially the first half. Fish defines his own

phenomenological approach as "an analysis of the developing responses of the

reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time. His concern is

with what the text does as opposed to what it means. As J. F. Worthen suggests,

much of his work can be seen as a reaction against the formalism that

characterized the age of New Critical theory which held that meaning was

embedded in the textual artifact or, as Wimsatt and Beardsley referred to it, "the

object". He suggests that, "The context for the discussion is the question of

whether formal features exist prior to and independently of interpretive strategies.

As one might imagine Fish eventually offers a negative response to this question.

He posits that rather than having a text that contains formal features identifiable in

all times and places that it is the reader that projects these features onto the text,

thereby also answering "No" to the question, "Is there a text in this class?"

This theory is sometimes called "reception aesthetics" or "affective

stylistics." Fish claims that it is the interpretive community that creates its own

reality. It is the community that invests a text, or for that matter life itself, with

meaning. Those who claim that meaning is to be found in some eternal

superstructure or substructure of reality he labels "foundationalists." Naturally,

because foundationalists comprise their own interpretive communities and

interpret through such a grid, they will be opposed to theories such as his own.

His theory is epistemological in that it deals not so much with literary criticism

(although the implications for such are tremendous) as with how one comes to

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know. In the following analysis of Fish's theory I will focus primarily on his later

reader-response theory.

Fish's theory is one of the most radical and controversial. He posits that

meaning inheres not in the text but in the reader, or rather the reading community.

"In the procedures I would urge," he writes, "the reader's activities are at the

center of attention, where they are regarded not as leading to meaning but as

having meaning. He can hold this because he believes that there is no stable basis

for meaning. There is no correct interpretation that will always hold true. Meaning

does not exist "out there" somewhere. It exists, rather, within the reader.

In his earlier work he made a claim, not wholly disavowed in his later

material, that what a text means is the experience that it produces in the reader. To

define meaning he says, "It is an experience; it occurs; it does something; it makes

us do something. Indeed, I would go so far as to say, in direct contradiction of

Wimsatt and Beardsley, that what it does is what it means. Here Fish stakes out

the territory of his critical enterprise which is to set himself against the formalist

principles of the past with its supposed scientific agenda. This project he admits

took some time from which to effect a complete liberation. But this is the

principle that will eventually lead his theory from (what his critics would call) an

"objective" to a fully blown "subjective" interpretive theory. Indeed, his early

theory appears to be completely vulnerable to the criticism of subjectivity as he

posits an experiential dimension to meaning which inheres in "the active and

activating consciousness of the reader," a charge he will later attempt to counter.

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 Fish's next move in his anti-formalist agenda is to deny the text as object,

which was so important to Wimsatt and Beardsley and the New Critics. "The

objectivity of the text is an illusion and, moreover, a dangerous illusion, because it

is so physically convincing. What exactly Fish means by this statement is

somewhat unclear. He does not, as it may appear, deny the ontological reality or

the existence of the palpable object, although one could argue that that is exactly

what this sentence by itself means because he apparently pairs the word

"objective" with "physical. It is the context that illuminates what he is driving at.

But he does deny the text's independence as a repository of meaning. The text

does not contain meaning: despite being written upon, it is a tabula rasa, a blank

slate onto which the reader, in reading, actually writes the text.

Fish takes the idea of the hermeneutical circle seriously. The reader is

always reading her preunderstanding back into the text with no possibility of

achieving an "objective" or author-centered interpretation. Fish claims that an

interpretive theory is itself circular, that the interpreter will always find what he is

looking for in the text, that formal patterns "are themselves constituted by an

interpretive act. He claims at one point that:

Theories always work and they will always produce exactly the results

they predict, results that will be immediately compelling to those for whom the

theory's assumptions and enabling principles are self-evident. Indeed, the trick

would be to find a theory that didn't work.

Because the assumptions one begins with will determine the outcome of

the study, for Fish, "success is inevitable. The methods with which one

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 approaches the text have already determined the outcome, one's presuppositions

actuate the product.

For Fish a text is only a Rorschach blot onto which the reader projects her

self-understanding or, as we shall see, her culturally determined assumptions. The

text contains nothing in itself, rather the content is supplied by the reader. It is the

reader that determines the shape of text, its form, and its content. This is how Fish

can claim that reader's write texts. Worthen's comment is apt. He says, "as far as

Fish is concerned, reading can only repeat reality, in that it necessarily consists of

nothing but replications of independently existing collective interpretive

strategies. This is exactly what reading does and this is one of the difficulties of

his theory. It fails to account for the text being able to expand the readers'

understanding or Weltanshung by introducing her to a different way of perceiving.

For Fish the text can only function as a mirror that provides a reflection of its

reader.

2. David Bleich

In theory, the reader-response approach enables students to create meaning

from their own, legitimate interpretations of literature. I was impressed by how

one method of reader-response--one developed by David Bleich (I975)--was used

with a group of teachers. The Bleich "heuristic," or strategy. encouraged the

readers to pay attention to both their experiences and the text in creating

interpretations. The teachers I witnessed seemed to use this strategy very

effectively. But I wondered how realistic it was to expect students. who did not

have the teachers' education or experience, to be able to respond successfully to

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literature in this way. To satisfy my curiosity, I asked Roberta Lott. a teacher at

Holt Junior High, if she would be interested in trying the Bleich heuristic in one

of her classes. She was familiar with reader-response theory and agreed to try it

with her eighth-grade students.

David Bleich's approach encourages the reader to respond emotionally to

literature and then translate the responses into decisions about meaning. The

reader's written responses are a record of his or her perception of the reading

experience. The responses contain spontaneous consequences of the reading. as

well as feelings, thoughts, memories, and associations. A reader may write a

response to the literature during or after the reading, and, in the act of writing this

response, the reader-writer becomes more aware of how and why meaning is

assigned or constructed. Bleich identifies the essential purpose of the response

statement as to objectify, first to ourselves and then to others, our perceptions of

the literature. Thus, students are encouraged to establish knowledge through

sharing their perceptions and subjective reactions. This approach denies the

existence of one objective "truth" that can be sought and found in a literary work.

Instead. it assumes that meaning comes from response to literature within a social

context. That is. in sharing their individual responses. the students negotiate a

collective understanding. or common knowledge.

Specifically. Bleich divides the response statement into three phases:

perception, affective response. and associative response. In the perception phase

the reader is asked to "say what the poem says." Bleich emphasizes that it is

important to resist the temptation to criticize such statementsand instead ask why

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 the reader saw the poem in just the way he or she did. In the second phase, the

affective response, the reader describes the actual feeling experienced while

reading the poem. The third and most complex form of response is the associative

response. which asks the reader to identify associated thoughts and feelings that

come to mind when reflecting on the work. Bleich emphasizes that the associative

response shows that each reader reads a poem according to the demands of his or

her personality. Through the associative phase of the response we are able to see

what motivated the reader's particular interpretation.

3. Wolfgang Iser

In Iser’s view, a literary text contains a number of “gaps” or “indeterminate

elements” which the reader must fill by active participation, and he observes that

meaning evolves through the convergence of the text and the reader, as the active

and creative reader fills the “gaps” or the “unwritten implications” by exercising

his/her imagination. Iser distinguishes between the “implied reader” who is

established by the text itself, as one who is expected to respond in specific ways

to the “response inviting structures” of the text, and the “actual reader” whose

responses are influenced and determined by his/her experiences, perception and

background. Iser suggests that reading is a temporal and non-linear activity, a

process of aesthetic recreation that is dialectic and continually interrupted by

expectation, defamiliarization, contradictions, disillusion. In fitting the “gaps” or

the in.determinate areas, the readers attempt to impart consistency and coherence

to the text, which, in a typical poststructuralist vein, is eternally delayed, thereby

making the reader aware of the inexhausabitity of the text and its potential to

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generate numerous meanings, according to the interpretation of different readers.

Iser further elaborates his concept of the “implied reader” in The Act of Reading,

in which he discusses the “real reader” (the actual reader whose response is

documented in the text” and the “hypothetical reader” (who is a “projection of all

possible realisation of the text”).

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 BAB III
CONCLUSION

Reader response focuses on the reader or audience reaction to a particular text, perhaps

more than the text itself. This criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing

art in which each reader creates his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance.

Kinds of Reader-Response Criticism One can sort reader-response theorists into three

groups: those who focus upon the individual readers experience ("individualists"); those who

conduct psychological experiments on a defined set of readers ("experimenters"); and those who

assume a fairly uniform response by all readers ("uniformists").

The main figures of the reader response are Stanley Fish, David Bleich and Wolfgang

Iser. Fish said that meaning inheres not in the text but in the reader, or rather the reading

community, and also the reader's activities are at the center of attention, where they are regarded

not as leading to meaning but as having meaning. Bleich said, this theory approach encourages

the reader to respond emotionally to literature and then translate the responses into decisions

about meaning. The reader's written responses are a record of his or her perception of the reading

experience. And Iser said, a literary text contains a number of “gaps” or “indeterminate

elements” which the reader must fill by active participation, and he observes that meaning

evolves through the convergence of the text and the reader, as the active and creative reader fills

the “gaps” or the “unwritten implications” by exercising his/her imagination.

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 REFERENCES

https://literariness.wordpress.com/2016/11/08/wolfgang-iser-as-a-reader-response-critic-a-brief-

note/

https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1727&context=lajm

https://www.slideshare.net/marioeduardopinheiro/reader-response-13121880

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._David_Bleich

https://www.shmoop.com/wolfgang-iser/bio.html

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanley-Fish

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