Reader-Oriented Criticism

Reader-Oriented Criticism
According to the novelist, essayist, literary critic and short story writer, Henry James (1843-1916), readers reads the same text but “see” unique scenes, coming away from the text with different impressions and interpretations. Each person most certainly reads the same text, but all will gain entrance into the meaning of that text through different apertures and comeaway with a variety of different impressions.
Historical Development
Reader-oriented criticism has its historical roots on 1920s and 1930s.Such specific dating is artificial, because readers have obviously been responding to what they have read and experienced since the dawn of literature itself. Even the classical writers Plato and Aristotle were aware of and concerned about the reader’sreactions.
As if watching a play or reading a book were a spectator sport, readers sit passively, absorbing the contents of the artistic creation and allowing it to dominate their thoughts and actions. From this point of view, readers bring little to the play or text. The text provides all that is needed to interpret itself.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, emphasis in textual analysis againshifted to the text. If studied thoroughly, the new critics believed, the text would reveal its own meaning. Extrinsic factors, such as historical or social context, mattered little.
The new critics did acknowledge the effects a text could have on its readers. Studying the effects of a literary work was not the same as studying the text itself. This emphasis on the objective nature of the textagain created a passive reader who did not bring personal experiences or private emotions to bear when engaged in textual analysis.
I.A Richards
 Interested in the midst of New Criticism, Richards is one of the two early pioneers.
 He was a Cambridge University professor, where he made an investigation about reader-response approach to textual analysis. He realized that the students freeresponses to and evaluations of different short texts, was a wide variety and contradictory responses. After collecting and analyzing these responses Richards published his findings in Principles of Literary Criticism (1925).
 Decreed that poetry, above all other art forms, can best harmonize and satisfy humankind’s appetencies and thereby create a fulfilling and intellectually acceptable worldview. The poem itself contains all the necessary information to arrive at the “right” interpretation.
 In his text Practical Criticism (1929), he said that a reader brings to the text a vast array of ideas amassed through life’s experiences, including previous literary experiences.
 The reader is no longer the passive receiver of acknowledge but is instead an active participant in the creation ofa text meaning.
Louise M. Rosenblatt
 Literary theorist, author, scholar, and professor of literacy
 In her text literature as Exploration (1938). “She summed up her position as follows: "A poem is what the reader lives through under the guideline of the text and experiences as relevant to the text."
 Rosenblatt wrote, "The idea that a poem presupposes a reader actively involvedwith a text is particularly shocking to those seeking to emphasize the objectivity of their interpretations."
 For Rosenblatt a text the readers bring their individual personalities, their memories of the past events, their present’s concerns, their particular physical condition, and all of their personhood to the reading of the text.
 For Rosenblatt, a poem is defined as the result of anevent that takes place during the reading processor.
 The reading process involves both a reader and a text.
 Text: acts as a stimulus for eliciting various past experiences thoughts, and ideas from the reader, through this transitional experience, the reader and the text produce a new creation, a poem.
 Reader: readers can and do read in one of two ways:
 Efferently
 Aesthetically
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