SOURCE: Spurlin, William J. “New Critical and Reader-Oriented Theories of Reading: Shared Views on the Role of the Reader.” In The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities, edited by William J. Spurlin and Michael Fischer, pp. 229-45. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995.

[In the following essay, Spurlin presents a comparative analysis between reader-oriented theories of criticism and the New Critics, theorizing that although the New Critics did not address issues of gender, race, and other subjective positions as clearly as reader-response critics do, they were not indifferent to the context a reader brings to a text.]

Contemporary critics and theorists often repudiate the New Criticism as narrowly formalistic because of its primary focus on the text, which allegedly precludes discussion of any social, historical, political, or existential contextualization in the act of reading. Indeed, the reflective and compelling arguments of more recent reader-oriented, feminist, New Historical, psycho-analytic, African-American, and lesbian and gay male theorists have helped to show how a variety of interlocking contexts for reading, as well as gender, race, social class, sexual orientation, and other subject positions, contribute to the construction of meaning.

It is true that the New Critics did not address these issues with the detail and sophistication of later theorists, and it is also important to recognize that recent theoretical work has helped to broaden our understandings of literature and culture. But I am skeptical of the opposition that is often posited between New Criticism and contemporary theory concerning the act of reading, where the New Critics are assumed to center reading almost exclusively on the internal features of the text while more recent reader-oriented theorists have (supposedly) liberated the reader from the tyranny of the text by considering the reader's role in textual understanding. I think it may be more productive to dismantle this opposition and inscribe a space for more meaningful discussion on the possible continuities between theories of reading proposed by the New Critics and the stances taken by reader-oriented theorists. From my reading and understanding of the New Critics, I have found that they were not indifferent to the reader's existential context, and that New Critical concerns for the affective fallacy, “close reading,” and textual autonomy neither necessarily nor logically obscure any close relation between text and reader.

Moreover, not only have New Critical theories of reading been misjudged conceptually in theory, they have also been misapplied in classroom practice, resulting in routinized, unreflective, and often dogmatic teacher and text-centered methodologies for the teaching of literature performed in the name of the New Criticism—methods that, in short, do not account for the reader's active role in the shaping of literary meaning. This is indeed surprising, especially when we consider that a great deal of New Critical writing raised issues, questions, and problems concerning the purposes of literary education. The New Critics were highly reflective on their roles as teachers of literature and the questions they raised for discussion eventually helped to bring about a different kind of literature curriculum that would seriously challenge specialized textual analysis and place the student face-to-face with the literary work as opposed to the empirical standards imposed upon it by the positivist researcher. The New Critics both derived and revised many of their theories about literature from the classroom and helped to mark the classroom as a site of theoretical and pedagogical inquiry so that the teaching of literature could move away from what Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo have referred to as the “academic approach” to reading. According to Freire and Macedo, academic approaches to reading are traditionally organized around the acquisition of predefined forms of knowledge (such as an unproblematic notion of what constitutes the cultural tradition, the literary canon, etc.) and/or the acquisition of reading skills, both of which ignore the lived experiences, histories, and language practices of students and reduce the role of texts to vehicles for mastery and comprehension (146). I would stipulate, however, that the New Critics were not arguing for the kind of politically-infused emancipatory literacy that Freire and Macedo strongly advocate. But I think it would be too simplistic to assume that they are complicit with the academic approach to reading that Freire and Macedo critique; rather, the New Critics argue against it as well. For instance, because of the difficulty students of his time experienced with modern poetry, Allen Tate observes in Reason in Madness that literary education has historically taught students to believe that they are being conditioned, that something is being done to them, while modern poetry requires the fullest interaction and cooperation of the student's intellectual resources, that is, his or her direct and active participation, as opposed to actual practice, where Tate's own students, for example, often read poetry passively, saving their persistence and alertness for scientific studies (91-92). Also remarking on this pedagogical problem, Cleanth Brooks points out in The Well Wrought Urn that literature professors seem to have some theory of communication embedded in their doctrine of theory of poetry so that students often seem to be saying to the poet, “Here I am, it's your job to ‘get it across’ to me,” when they should be assuming that task themselves (76).

I select these pedagogical examples to illustrate that the New Critics were not obsessed, as they are often accused, with only the text, either with an accumulation of knowledge about it, or with a mechanical set of skills, such as “close reading,” to be mastered, but were very much interested in and dedicated to helping students engage with texts in meaningful ways. Of course, this seems like nothing new to us in the present; after all, since pedagogy has come to be regarded as important again and has been the topic of articles and books in the field of literary and cultural studies, we've become more self-reflexive about our own pedagogical assumptions and practices, about helping students become more involved with texts, about our own roles as teachers, and how our authority may help or hinder our students' transactions with the texts they read in our classes. But for the New Critics, this was a somewhat radical departure from institutionalized teaching practices which took pedagogy more or less for granted as the transmission of knowledge and skills under the positivist paradigm. John Crowe Ransom illustrates this pedagogical problem in his important essay “Criticism, Inc.” Speaking of students studying literature at the time, he points out that their expectation for the text to work for them with minimal use of their own resources was the result of the professional practices of literature professors themselves whom he viewed as learned but not critical; that is, spending a lifetime compiling data about literature, but rarely committing themselves to a literary judgment or erecting intelligent standards of criticism. Ransom also noted that for criticism to become more precise, not in an empirical sense, but in terms of defining its own methods, purposes, and terminology, it would require the collected and sustained effort of learned persons (328-29). The New Critics had a role in bringing about this pedagogical shift, moving away from the positivist techniques of the literary historian to a focus on the transaction between student and text. With more students attending college than ever before, especially after the GI Bill, the New Critics helped to make literary studies available to a broader range of students; there was, I think, a democratic impulse to their work though now that impulse has come to be understood and represented as a hegemonic one.

The New Criticism is much more indicative of a theory of reading that accounts for the reader's interactive and collaborative relation with the text in the production of literary meaning. I think we need to seriously question the validity of claims that the New Criticism is concerned solely with the text without any regard at all for the frames of reference readers bring to texts that help shape the meanings they construct in the act of reading. I cannot agree, for instance, with Stanley Fish's claim that formalist methods assume that the text is a self-sufficient repository of meaning, and that this assumption is positivistic and therefore devalues the role of the reader (2, 158).

The purpose of this essay, then, is to challenge uncritical preconceptions of New Critical theories of reading as being rooted in epistemological essentialism and pseudo-objectivities, and to suggest that New Critical theories of “close reading,” as opposed to their widespread institutionalized practice, do not take the text to be a self-sufficient artifact, but postulate that literary meaning is constituted in the interaction between the text and the reader in a very similar manner that has been further developed by work on reader reception (Iser, Riffaterre, Wimmers, and others). I must point out that I am excluding from this discussion work on reader response (Fish, Holland, Bleich) because these theorists generally propose the radical displacement of the locus of interpretive authority from the text to the reader and by extension to the reader's interpretive community.¹ Theoretically, it may be possible to show how indebted to the New Criticism reader response theory may be, but I find it troubling that by focusing so much attention on the reader, the role of the text in reading is under-theorized and the reader/text opposition (for which the New Criticism is often faulted for maintaining) still left intact. We see this, for instance, in Norman Holland's distinction between text-active, bi-active, and transactive models of reading, where the transactive model, which includes his own, turns “the literary process around, making the reader the active one instead of the text” (Brain of Robert Frost 134).² I would like to see the reader/text relation interrogated more fully rather than arguing whether we give more weight to the text or to the reader, which I think is more dependent on our purposes for reading and the kinds of questions that we bring to texts as readers. Further, I am wary of the position of many reader response theorists who claim that the New Critics viewed the reader as the recipient of a force exerted by the text, and that literary meaning lies embedded in the text unmediated by the act of reading. David Bleich, for example, has uncritically placed the New Criticism under the domain of the “objective paradigm” in contrast to his own theory of subjective interpretation. Remarking on Louise Rosenblatt's early theories of literary experience, Bleich argues that her work began to receive critical attention only recently because in the intervening years “the highly objectivist New Criticism” prevailed, and that “[o]nly after the objective paradigm had run its course in critical and literary study did the subjective forms of thought become viable” (110). I strongly question this line of argument simply because the approach of the New Critics does not fit the framework of the objective paradigm but stands in sharp contrast to the objective methods of philology and historical literary scholarship that preceded the New Criticism, as well as to later objective theories of interpretation such as those put forth by E.D. Hirsch and P.D. Juhl.

These clear-cut dichotomies between objective and subjective ways of knowing, between text or reader as locus of interpretive authority, are limiting to an understanding of reading. In a personal and reflective critique of developments in contemporary literary theory entitled Literature and Its Theorists (trans., Critique de la Critique, Seuil, 1984), Tzvetan Todorov characterizes literary theorists as frequently presenting the adversary's position as the only possible alternative to the one they occupy themselves (159). An either/or approach such as this has often been the prevailing mode in literary theory and in critical practice, and it is simplistic to assume that the degree of attention necessarily given to the text in the reader/text relationship leads to a repression of the reader, as the reader response theorist may contend, or that questioning the validity of so-called objectivist approaches automatically, logically, or naturally leads to subjective relativism, or an “anything goes” approach, which are often criticisms and suspicions levelled against theories of literature that give attention to the reader. I am proposing that this all-or-nothing logic is problematic and that any responsible discussion of reading must discern, at least, a reader and a text, which is not only the project of work on reader reception, but of the New Criticism as well.

A significant feature of the New Criticism that is often a source of critical misunderstanding, is what W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley have termed the “affective fallacy.” They define this as the confusion between what the poem is and what it does so that “the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear” (21). The danger that concerned Wimsatt and Beardsley was that personal associations evoked in reading could possibly carry the reader beyond the text so that he or she would be responding instead to a psychological state of mind.

However, it would be reductive to conclude from the affective fallacy that the New Critics postulate the dissociation of images, emotions, and memories and personal associations from the words on the page. Although I.A. Richards points out in Principles of Literary Criticism that a poem must be preserved from personal contamination and from irruptions of personal particularities in order to engender an experience that is “literary,” he specifically clarifies at the same time that poetic experience cannot be separated from life, and that readers cannot be expected to wear blinkers or to shut any part of themselves from participation (78-80). In Practical Criticism, he writes that

[t]he personal situation of the reader inevitably (and within limits rightly) affects his [or her] reading. … For a comparison of the feelings active in a poem with some personal feeling still present in the reader's lively recollection does give a standard, a test for reality. The dangers are that the recollected feelings may overwhelm and distort the poem and that the reader may forget that the evocation of somewhat similar feelings is probably only a part of the poem's endeavour. It exists perhaps to control and order such feelings and to bring them into relation with other things. … Thus memories … are not to be hastily excluded as mere personal intrusions. That they are personal is nothing against them—all experience is personal. …

(227; brackets mine)

The important point to be made here is that the affective fallacy does not preclude the subjective and personal experience of the reader as a mode of orientation into the work. Cleanth Brooks similarly says that readers are not asked to give up their own meanings or beliefs, or to put to sleep all of their various interests as human beings, but to allow these interests to become subordinate to the total reading experience (as opposed to the text) (252-53). These views, then, account for the reader's personal context in shaping meaning, with the specific stipulation in Wimsatt and Beardsley, Richards, and Brooks that whatever is evoked in the reader is guided by the text. But this is not an indication that the text exercises complete control over literary experience, or that textual meaning is self-contained prior to the act of reading. The warning against the affective fallacy is not a reduction of literary experience to the words on the page, for in their own historical context, the New Critics aimed to redirect literary study away from positivistic research without sacrificing rigor in method, as any mention of the subjectivity of the reader and the role it plays in reading immediately prompts charges of solipsism from the objectivist camp. This is indeed the case regarding reader reception where theorists have addressed such charges, though perhaps defensively, and have more explicitly explained the role of the reader and how the text functions to guide reading.

Wolfgang Iser, for instance, indicates in The Act of Reading that acts of comprehension are guided by the structures in the text, but these structures do not exercise complete control. Although Iser states that this immediately triggers a fear of arbitrariness, he argues that the experience of a text is brought about by an interaction that cannot be designated as arbitrary (24). Acknowledging the importance of the text in the literary transaction, Iser emphasizes that the “transfer” of text to reader is not brought about solely by the former, but is initiated by it, and though it may incorporate the norms and values of its possible readers, its function is not to present this data, but to use it to secure its own uptake. He writes that the text only “offers guidance as to what is to be produced. … [T]he linguistic signs and structures of the text exhaust their function in triggering developing acts of comprehension” (Act of Reading 107-108; emphasis added).

Along similar lines, Michael Riffaterre, in postulating a theory of reading that leads readers to a system of intertextual references beyond the written text, emphatically points out that whatever equivalences are set up by the reader are done so in strict relation to the structural units in the text under consideration. The text, in Riffaterre's view, places narrow limitations on the reader's flights of fancy and is not regarded as a springboard for open-ended mental associations (10). Also addressing the guiding role of the text in literary experience, which, again, is not radically different from the New Critics, Inge Crosman Wimmers, in Poetics of Reading, indicates that her theory of reading is based on the predication that while texts are not finished products in themselves but anticipate further action on the part of the reader, they are also not blank pages to be filled out by the reader haphazardly (xvi-xvii).

Considering the affective fallacy from this point of view, and more broadly, the role of the text in reading, what can specifically be said about “close reading”? I am not so sure that viewing it simply as a prescriptive corrective to the affective fallacy includes all that the New Critics had to say about reading. W.K. Wimsatt, for instance, in a lesser known essay “The Concrete Universal,” argues that a poem embodies a complex and abstract universal, or concept, and an equally complex and concrete form, and that these mutually qualify each other so that a literary work is both concrete and universal; hence “[c]omplexity of form is sophistication of content” (82). John Crowe Ransom, in a similarly titled essay, disagrees with Wimsatt's simplistic notion that the concrete is supposed to be assimilated wholly to the universal (or the logical plan of the poem), and that the universal is to extend over the whole concretion. He insists instead that in all poems there is an intellectual, affective, and rhythmical language, and that we attend to each of these in the composite language of the text in our reading, though in different degrees of consciousness—but if we attend too carefully to the intellectual language in attempting to extrapolate an abstract concept (through paraphrase or explication, for example) we miss its import, because the concept is not in itself the poem as is its instance in concrete action (“The Concrete Universal” 282-83).

The concrete details or formal features of a text do more than merely embellish or develop an abstract concept. Elaborating on this point, Brooks indicates that a poem is not to be judged in terms of the truth or falsity of the idea it is thought to incorporate, but rather by its character as drama (256). Instead of embodying a pre-existing meaning as a final product in itself, texts initiate performances of meaning; what Ransom and Brooks are implying of the reader is not the recovery of a meaning held to be self-evident, but an awareness that the language of the text in all of its detail is inciting his or her active participation in an event or process that is beyond referential description. I think that Ransom's and Brooks's comments further raise for debate assertions that the New Critics were concerned solely with the formal features of the text.

Though the New Critics were quite vague in their description of reading as an event in time, Iser has described and refined this point further in his own theory of reading where he argues that readers feel as if they are involved in something real, not because texts denote an empirical reality, nor because they cater to all of the reader's possible dispositions, but because readers are continually involved in the process of feeding back reactions as they obtain new information—reading is both concrete as the result of each new attitude we are forced to adopt toward the text, and fluid because each new attitude bears the seeds of its own modifications (Act of Reading 67-68). But while Iser has more explicitly addressed reading as a meaning-making process, it is not accurate, I think, to assume, as Stanley Fish does, that the only making of sense that counts in a formalist or New Critical reading is the final one because the New Critics were not concerned (in his view) with the temporal flow of the reading process (3, 27).

In my discussion of close reading earlier, I mentioned Ransom's point that readers attend to the intellectual, affective, and rhythmical languages of texts in different degrees of consciousness. Although at the time I was comparing his notion of the concrete universal with that of Wimsatt's, I would now like to add that Ransom's theory accounts for a divergence of reading methods as he insists that readers have a right to choose which of the languages they like best (though they should be invited to see if others are not there as well) (“Concrete Universal” 282). Rather than being concerned with a final meaning, the important point being made by Ransom is that the reader's focus on a particular “language” of a poem is strategically guided during reading. As an example, Ransom later mentions how the difficulty of a poem may incite a reader to paraphrase it, thus translating its composite language into the exclusive language of the intellect (282-83). A focus such as this is not being prescribed, but instead Ransom is describing how readers construct meaning based on their needs and purposes for reading and the particular questions they wish to ask.

Similarly addressing this point, William Empson discusses the strategies readers use when they confront ambiguity. Although the deconstructionists would fault the notion of ambiguity as based on a metaphysical assumption that a symbiotic relation necessarily exists between signifier and signified, Empson does acknowledge that reference cannot be fixed in the poetic context though not with the sophistication of Derrida and de Man, who would additionally question the literary/non-literary distinction through insisting that the endless movement of signification is indicative of all language. But in any case, Empson does claim that readers select meanings that are useful to them and discard meanings they consider to be foolish (197). He later argues that readers continually make separate and faint judgments of probability in the process of interpretation and are ready with alternatives to take the place of these judgments if necessary, but that, as a rule, readers only recognize the one final association of meaning which seems sufficiently rewarding to be the answer (239-40). Empson acknowledges, then, that the language of the text does not embody a unitary meaning and indicates that readers play an active role in bringing about literary meaning through applying several alternatives to words or groups of words, though not indiscriminately, until they are satisfied.

Addressing and perhaps taking this strategy of “slotting-in” alternatives one step further, Iser has written in The Implied Reader that as the reader works out a consistent pattern in the text, his or her “interpretation” seems to be threatened by the presence of other possibilities so that new areas of indeterminacy arise (287). He writes:

[e]ven while the reader is seeking a consistent pattern in the text, he [or she] is also uncovering other impulses which cannot be immediately integrated or will even resist final integration. Thus the semantic possibilities of the text will always remain far richer than any configurative meaning formed while reading.

(The Implied Reader 285; brackets mine)

For Iser, then, it is questionable as to whether the reader will ever be satisfied; from here obvious connections can be made to deconstruction, but, in light of Empson's comments, we should also include the New Criticism in this line of thinking as well.

Similarly accounting for the dynamics of reading and a plurality of reading methods beyond fixed categories, Inge Crosman Wimmers argues for a poetics of reading that does not put us into a position where we have to choose one particular reading over another, reinscribing an either/or approach as I mentioned earlier, but enables us to see which readings are possible within certain frames of reference be they cultural, personal, intertextual, or historical so that we may be aware of the various contexts that shape the reading process. She warns that deciding beforehand what kind of freedom readers may have or what kind of control texts may exercise risks theoretical and analytical foreclosure (88, xvii). Her examination of the various frames of reference that come into play in the reading of such diverse French novels as Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Robbe-Grillet's Projet pour une révolution à New York does not attempt to prescribe a comprehensive reading of a particular novel, but argues for the illogicality of any claim that there is only one correct way to read. My point is that the plurality of readings and varied interpretive strategies for bringing them about were notions not completely alien to the New Criticism, nor are these the exclusive or original postulates of reader-oriented theory, though, admittedly, the New Critics did not develop and refine them as thoroughly as did work on reader reception.

I have tried to suggest that New Critical theories of close reading do not necessarily articulate the subjugation of the reader under the authority of the text, reducing the reader to a passive recipient. I have attempted to do this through a preliminary and rather general exploration of the continuities between theoretical assumptions of reading in the New Criticism and more recent work on reader reception. I am not attempting to reduce theories of reader reception to formalism, nor am I suggesting that work in reader reception theory has not furthered our understanding of reading, nor do I think that New Critical views of reading, or for that matter, reader-oriented theories of literature, are comprehensive or unproblematic in themselves.

Specifically, the New Critics, and most reader-oriented theorists, assume that the text and reader alone are sufficient to define the contexts for reading. But readers do not operate in a vacuum, indifferent to the social, political, historical, and cultural conditions surrounding their reading. What needs to be asked is what happens to meaning when the historical, social, political, and pragmatic conditions under which reading takes place change. How might the methods, strategies, and responses of readers under such changed conditions compare historically?

I do not intend to give reader reception theorists the final word either; for valorizing the role of the reader is not without its own particular set of problems and is not exempt from further theoretical questions. Furthermore, in arguing for a relationship of similarity rather than one of dualistic opposition between reader reception theory and the New Criticism concerning the act of reading, the New Criticism is also implicated in this critique. Mainstream reader-oriented theories (as well as the New Criticism), for the most part, have maintained a generalized, transcendent, romantic notion of the reader. Reader reception theory in particular has overvalued self-knowledge through the act of reading or as a consequence of reading. While Iser notes that the formation of a totality guided by the text but not limited to it also implies a formulation of ourselves (Act of Reading 158), I have argued elsewhere that this view of the reader as subject is polemically impoverished and is further evidence that we are caught up in the uncritical and largely unquestioned assumption that all experience, including reading, leads directly and unobtrusively to self-discovery and self-knowledge (“Theorizing Signifyin(g)” 737). I have further critiqued reader-oriented theory for its weak view of the subject, often constructed in these theories as the unified and centered locus through which the phenomenal world is constituted, where the reader is represented as the conscious and coherent designator of meanings without adequate attention paid to how subjectivity is socially situated and constituted by ideologies and discursive practices (Spurlin, “Questioning the Subject” 18). Moreover, neither reader-oriented theories nor the New Criticism has sufficiently interrogated the specific subject positions of gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation, and other positions which readers may occupy; as Henry Louis Gates reminds us, hermeneutic systems are not universal, color-blind, apolitical, or neutral, and that no critical theory escapes the specificity of value and ideology (27). What also needs to be asked in theorizing reading is not only how one's reading is affected by one's positionality, as this once again assumes a fully self-knowing reading subject without taking fully into account how readers may be multi-positioned and not necessarily fully conscious of the positions they occupy at a particular time, but how reading may be a site of political agency and, by implication, a site of resistance, that is, how the act of reading may enter into, affect, and potentially configure social, political, cultural, and institutional worlds as opposed to being merely a by-product or effect of these. Finally, theories of reading that address the reader have tremendous implications for the current canonical debates; regardless of the particular canon being defended, it seems to me that more weight is still given to the text in the arguments made for its value for literary and cultural study without consideration of how readers and specific acts of reading under particular circumstances, by individuals and by specific interpretive communities, may also play a role in helping us to debate and rethink canonical value.

For now, I think it is sufficient to say that the New Critics did begin to propose the possible strategies readers employ in reading and interpreting texts. Although their descriptions are by no means exhaustive, they have contributed to our current understandings of reading through attempting to describe how readers interact with texts. Theories of reader reception have not abandoned the New Criticism. Neither have they remained content with its precepts of reading; rather, they have built on them.

Notes

1. Elsewhere I have attempted to define a distinction between work on reader reception and reader response. See my article “Theorizing Signifyin(g) and the Role of the Reader: Possible Directions for African-American Literary Criticism” in College English 52 (Nov. 1990): 732-42. I wish to emphasize here that work on reader reception is largely related to and influenced by work on Rezeptionsästhetik, or the aesthetics of reception, that came out of the University of Konstanz in Germany, but is not limited to it.

2. Holland defines the text-active model as one in which the text dictates the response and is active while the reader is reactive. In the bi-active model, the text limits the reader's response but leaves gaps where the reader can freely imagine, and in the transactive model, it is the reader who controls the response while the text is reactive (Brain of RF 53, 116). I am taking issue with the transactive model, which, to me, seems a mere reversal of the text-active one. Also, Holland places reader reception theorists under the bi-active model. I disagree with his rather general assessment that these theorists assume a large part of the reader's response has its source in the text (Brain of RF 115-16) as Iser, Riffaterre, and others have emphatically pointed out that meaning does not lie in textual structures, but is actualized by the reader, as I shall discuss later. At the same time, I would like to credit Holland with not blaming the New Critics for the text-centered approach (though he still places them under the text-active model) as he acknowledges in 5 Readers Reading that we have been implicated in Western modes of thinking since the Enlightenment that meaning exists alone, independent of the perceiving self (250). I shall argue that the New Critics are not as caught up in this epistemology as we may have otherwise believed; I think Holland's statement is more relevant to what has been done with the New Criticism in such institutionalized practices as criticism and teaching.

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