Reader-Response Criticism - Steven Mailloux (essay date 1990)
Steven Mailloux (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: Mailloux, Steven. “The Turns of Reader-Response Criticism.” In Conversations: Contemporary Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature, edited by Charles Moran and Elizabeth F. Penfield, pp. 38-54. Urbana. Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1990.
[In the following essay, Mailloux presents a brief overview of reader-response theories prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s.]
The goal of reader-response criticism is to talk more about readers than about authors and texts. During the last twenty years such talk has involved a diversity of tropes and arguments within the institutional activities of literary criticism, history, theory, and pedagogy. In this brief essay I analyze early forms of this diversity in the 1970s and suggest some new turns reader-response criticism has taken in the 1980s.
Rhetoric as trope (figurative language) and as argument (persuasion) provides the...
[The entire page is 6478 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
Related Topics
