reader-response theory
reader-response theory,a body of literary investigations, chiefly German and American, into the nature of the reader's activity in the process of understanding literary texts. A major contribution to debates on this topic was made by Wolfgang Iser ( 1926 – ), whose books The Implied Reader ( 1974 ) and The Act of Reading ( 1979 ) argue that a literary work is incomplete until the reader has ‘actualized’ those elements that are left to her imagination. The American psychologist Norman H. Holland ( 1927 – ) attempted to demonstrate in Five Readers Reading ( 1975 ) that individual interpretations of the same text vary according to the reader's ‘identity theme’. The more controversial arguments of Stanley Fish ( 1938 – ) in his essays collected as Is There a Text in This Class? ( 1980 ) include the claim that literary texts are produced by the strategies of interpretation that guide us to...
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