SOURCE: Weele, Michael Vander. “Reader-Response Theories.” In Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Appraisal, edited by Clarence Walhout and Leland Ryken, pp. 125-48. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991.

[In the following essay, Weele presents an analysis of reader-response theories, tracing the beginnings of this critical approach to the earliest interpretations of scripture.]

Literary criticism has always involved three inescapable elements: the author, the work, and the reader. Reader-response criticism regards the third of these elements as the most crucial for criticism, for criticism always begins in the first instance with reading. The current interest in reader-response theory derives not only from this fact, however; it also comes from contemporary skepticism about our knowledge of authors' intentions, from philosophical problems with the formalist view of the autonomy of artworks, and from the diversity of interpretations that cluster around individual works. If the meaning of a work cannot be grounded in reliable knowledge of intentions or texts, then the role of the reader becomes a more crucial issue in literary criticism. Although reader-response theories differ among themselves, they all emphasize the centrality of the reader in the literary experience.

To distinguish the concerns of reader-response theories from those of other theories of literature, Raman Selden (3) refers to the diagram of linguistic communication that Roman Jakobson developed in the late 1950s:

	CONTEXT
ADDRESSER	MESSAGE	ADDRESSEE
	CONTACT
	CODE

The first four factors on this diagram will seem familiar to most readers. Jakobson described the final two this way: “A CODE [is] fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee … and … a CONTACT [is] a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication” (357). Although “code” usually refers to a lexical range, it could also refer to the larger requirements of genre, which are shared, at least in part, by addresser and addressee.

Selden relates the concerns of reader-response criticism to the right-hand side of the diagram (Addressee), opposite the Romantic emphasis on genius (Addresser), with Marxist, formalist, and structuralist criticism located between. Although the diagram is usually read from left to right, reader-response critics argue that it must be read from right to left: the addressee hypothesizes about the addresser by interpreting the context, message, and code of the work. This heuristic scheme helps us to see the radical shift in direction of reader-response criticism. The first part of this chapter will also show its relationship to a long-standing tradition of interest in the reader as one element in the enterprise of criticism. Positioning reader-response criticism historically as well as analytically will help us evaluate its development within three main categories: psychological, social, and intersubjective theories of reader response.

A LONG HISTORY OF ATTENTION TO RESPONSE

Rhetoric, which emphasizes communication and audience, has a much longer tradition than aesthetics, which after the Romantics emphasized the work and its author. Rhetoric has always emphasized the effectiveness of speech or writing when used for specific occasions. Accordingly, it has been keenly interested in the effects of speech and writing on listeners and readers. This was especially so in the Christian tradition, for after Augustine's discussion of classical rhetoric in On Christian Doctrine, purpose and audience became more important than matching style to subject (Kennedy 157).

An early instance of the attention given to reader response within the Christian rhetorical tradition can be found in Book XII of Augustine's Confessions. Augustine states that he would rather have a reader respond to the truth the reader found in his writing than have the reader be able to duplicate his understanding of that truth. This generous view of truth developed out of a view of Scripture that allowed for multiple and historically developing meanings. Augustine describes Scripture, for example, as “a spring which is all the more copious because it flows in a confined space. … From the words of Moses, uttered in all brevity but destined to serve a host of preachers, there gush clear streams of truth from which each of us … may derive a true explanation of the creation as best he is able, some choosing one and some another interpretation” (XII.27). To the simple, Augustine adds, Scripture is like a fledgling's nest; but to others, who are like birds already reared, “the words of Scripture are no longer a nest but a leafy orchard, where they see the hidden fruit. They fly about it in joy, breaking into song as they gaze at the fruit and feed upon it” (XII.28). Scripture, in short, will speak to the various needs and capabilities of individual Christian readers.

Such a view of Scripture endured at least until the seventeenth century. One finds it enunciated, for example, in the meditations and expostulations of John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). In Expostulation 19 Donne writes, “Oh, what words but thine can express the inexpressible texture and composition of thy word; in which, to one man, that argument that binds his faith to believe that to be the word of God is the reverent simplicity of the word, and to another, the majesty of the word; and in which two men, equally pious, may meet and one wonder that all should not understand it, and the other as much that any man should.” The multiple capacities of Scripture were not forgotten in reading others or, as in Augustine's case, in imagining how others might read you. What was important, however, was not so much multiplicity as the direction of interpretation, not so much accuracy as the incorporation of reading into one's life.

If we turn our attention from Scripture to nonscriptural texts, our best example of the view of readers' responses comes from Dante, who was greatly influenced by Augustine and who greatly influenced Donne. The risks of reading can be seen in the Divine Comedy, in Paolo and Francesca's literal identification with Arthurian romance and the eternal restlessness of their roused desire (Inferno 5)—and, on the other hand, in Statius's misreading of the fourth eclogue of Virgil, which begins his journey to God (Purgatory 22). The attempt to defuse reading by separating it from the rest of life is just as filled with risk. If we don't read with our lives, we share the plight of Dante's “neutral angels” in Inferno 3 (Freccero 110-18) and Dante's “neutral authors” in Purgatory 24 (Mazzotta 207-17), a plight likely suggested to Dante by John's description in Revelation 3 of the lukewarm Laodiceans.

For Augustine and Dante, language is always linked to desire. In the Confessions the infant is the one who reaches out in desire of something. In that reaching out, language is born as the cry of both lack and desire. Since that desire is never satisfied within the boundaries of language and human existence, the human soul on earth is always restless. But this restlessness may have a positive function, according to Augustine, since he believes that the human soul is permeable by the language of others, whether of God or of friends. In fact, Augustine describes God both as the Word and as the end of all desire, which establishes the deep connection between language and desire. The same link between language and desire can be seen in Dante. To return to the examples of Francesca and Statius just mentioned, both the seductive reading of Arthurian romance and the efficacious reading of Virgil are described as “kindling” the reader. Reading is never neutral; the erotic (including a theological eros) and the poetic are always related in this Augustinian tradition.

The rhetorical tradition that had emphasized teaching (Bruns), both of the will and of the intellect, had placed great emphasis on the reader's response. In poetry this response focused on pleasure, the handmaiden of instruction, and on desire, which moved the will to seek understanding. However, after belief in the interrelatedness of all aspects of creation began to fade, and the new science shifted its focus from purpose to function—movements Donne struggled to understand in the early seventeenth century—the refinement of objective representation on the one hand and subjective feelings on the other hand began to replace teaching as the primary goal of interpretation.

In the eighteenth century, the shift away from rhetoric was evident in the rise of the new “science” of aesthetics. Alexander Baumgarten, who first used the term aesthetics for his philosophy of the fine arts, still held the spectator (or reader) as a proper focus of his study, though he was more interested in understanding the arts in relation to one another. Aesthetics quickly turned to the question of genius, however, and then to formal properties of the artwork that called for disinterested contemplation. In terms of Jakobson's diagram given at the beginning of this chapter, attention shifted from the addressee to the addresser and the work. One still finds in Kant and Schiller considerable attention paid to the partaker, as well as to the creator, of art. Schiller, for example, emphasized the way an aesthetic education prepared one for a time that needed but did not encourage change. This emphasis, however, was directed toward the sensibility more than to the social and moral education of the reader, which had been emphasized in the much longer tradition of rhetoric.

Cicero's influence on the reception of classical rhetoric in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance assured its continuance as a civic art. But by the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reading was considered a private matter. The science of aesthetics respected that privacy and increasingly focused on the formal elements of the literary work, elements which, it was hoped, everyone could agree upon.

CHANGING VIEWS OF CONVENTION AND NATURE

The New Criticism of the 1940s and 1950s seemed to continue the tradition of aesthetics. Its practitioners hoped to achieve an objective criticism by separating study of the work from the intention of the addresser or the affect on the addressee (Beardsley and Wimsatt). But by the 1960s the “objective” study of the “separated” work appeared to be more an exclusionary act of the will than the intellect's guarantor of objectivity.

Today's reader-response criticism, more a movement than a school, follows a heightened awareness of the separation between custom and nature, between social conventions and a natural order of reality. In Convention: 1500-1750, Lawrence Manley has detailed the history of Western views of convention. According to Manley, the roots of a separation between custom and nature go back at least to the late Renaissance recognition of difficulties in adapting “the supposedly natural norms of classical technique to the special rhetorical demands of the European setting” (12) and to the late seventeenth-century insistence on the relativity of non-scientific knowledge (13). These developments began to divide cultural values and poetic precedent on the one hand from nature on the other. Convention lost any sense of bipolar tension between the objective and the social. It came to be “contrasted as a social phenomenon to what is more objectively either universal or unique.” Thus neoclassical authors could challenge convention because it was not universal, while Romantics could argue against convention because it was not unique. In either case, convention came to be seen as a social construction whose development was more arbitrary than natural. As a result of the widening split between the objective and the social, we see “a disintegration of the essentially harmonious relationships among readers, nature, and precedents” (2-3).

Using the terms of Manley's summary, we can describe the New Criticism as an attempt to rule out both the conventional and the idiosyncratic, the historical and the personal, in literary criticism. Reader-response theories rule both back into the interpretive process, but no longer with confidence in their “essentially harmonious relationships.” While the New Critics wished to transcend conventions (viewed only as social phenomena), reader-response critics wish to expose conventions, especially those conventions that had seemed as natural as “the organic unity of the poem.” The New Critics had used this (unrecognized) convention to oppose other conventions that seemed more dangerous to them. The rallying cry that had seemed natural and objective to the New Critics came to be seen as a harmful convention by many critics writing after 1959.

Contemporary criticism thrives on the suspicion that conventional readings are not natural readings and, indeed, that readings which pretend to be natural or objective must be denaturalized through psychological or sociopolitical analysis. Even before the work of modern semiotics, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx had raised questions about the existence of natural laws or natural understanding in the human sciences. Today semiotics shares the same goal: to expose the process whereby cultural codes arrogate to themselves the status of the natural.

In late structuralist theory, the suspicion of “natural” or “objective” readings was accompanied by an emphasis on the links between one work of literature and all other written works. In this view, the meaning of a particular text could not be governed by that text alone, for the meaning of one work would depend upon the reader's associations with other literary and non-literary texts. The content of these associations was unpredictable. Intertextual meaning depended upon the reader's re-combining activity as much as it depended upon the writer's combining activity. That re-combining activity is viewed in different ways by different reader-response critics. Some of those ways emphasize the reader's subjectivity; others emphasize anonymous social forces that impinge upon and partly determine the reader.

THE SPECTRUM OF READER-RESPONSE THEORIES

Although reader-response theories have no single philosophical starting point, they can be grouped into three categories: psychological, social, and intersubjective. These quite diverse approaches all commonly resist the clear separation of reader and text. They would all challenge, for example, the opening paragraph of Beardsley and Wimsatt's classical essay on “The Affective Fallacy”:

We believe ourselves to be exploring two roads [i.e., the intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy] which have seemed to offer convenient detours around the acknowledged and usually feared obstacles to objective criticism. … The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does), a special case of epistemological skepticism, though usually advanced as if it had far stronger claims than the overall forms of skepticism. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. The outcome … is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.

(my italics)

More than any other essay, this one focused the debate between reader-response critics and the New Critics, the defenders of objectivity.

The terms of debate that Beardsley and Wimsatt set up in this introduction include “objective criticism,” “relativism,” “psychological” effects (which we might also call “subjectivism”), and a strong division between existence and action (“is” and “does,” “poem” and “results”). These terms would be challenged by all three kinds of reader-response criticism.

Norman Holland and David Bleich, for example, who have developed psychological models of understanding, question whether there is a difference between the poem and its results. They call into question the independence of the poem and argue that the reader creates the poem in the process of interpreting it. Unlike the New Criticism, which is interested in the ideal reader, Holland and Bleich are interested in actual readers with differing backgrounds that make for different readings. As for the possibility of an objective criticism, Holland and Bleich would respond that there is no objective text, no origin of voice independent of the reader for the reader to listen to. Instead, all reading and all criticism are subjective. To suppose otherwise is to accommodate the rhetoric of literary criticism to a scientific ideology. Holland and Bleich would also discredit the work of an “objective criticism” that did not give the same careful attention which they give to actual readers and their reading processes. In their view, the text is a set of conventions that has no meaning apart from the unique individual reading it. Meaning is tied not to these conventions but to the identity of the individual. Nature rests in the unique individual; the text by itself is lifeless convention. Any literary approach that desires to be at all objective would have to study the construction of meaning by individual readers.

Finally, Holland and Bleich might well admit that criticism is relative and impressionistic, insofar as readers always begin with motivations. In Holland's terms, those motivations consist of defenses, expectations, fantasies, and transformations: “One can think of these four separate principles as emphases on one aspect or another of a single transaction: shaping an experience to fit one's identity and in doing so, … avoiding anxiety, … gratifying unconscious wishes, … absorbing the event as part of a sequence of events, and … shaping it with that sequence into a meaningful totality” (342).

Relativism and impressionism can also be related to the nature of the reading process as analyzed by Bleich. He emphasizes three key elements in this process: perception, affect, and association. As a professor, Bleich assigns and collects “response statements” from students who answer these three questions after reading a poem or a story: (1) What do you make of this? (perception); (2) What did you feel when reading it? (affect); and (3) What personal associations did you make while reading it? (association). (The three questions correspond to Beardsley and Wimsatt's charges of relativism, impressionism, and the confusion of the poem with its results.) Bleich uses the response statements in later discussion as the “motivational substrate” of the subsequent interpretive judgment, a judgment whose connection to personal response and motivation remains explicit. Thus both Holland and Bleich believe that the individuality of the reader directs the reading process. Accordingly, they argue, teachers and critics ought to give more attention to that individuality.

We should ask at least three questions about the psychological approach to criticism—questions about the relationship of literature to desire, to society, and to the classroom.

First, we have seen the close link between desire and language/reading in Dante and Augustine. But what happens to this relationship if, as Erich Auerbach claimed in his study of Madame Bovary (488-92), desire in the modern world is free-floating, not linked to specific objects and events, nor defined politically, historically, or religiously? Might our readings become more indistinct—that is, merely personal—even as their differences multiply? This seems to be true of Raymond Carver's characters in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) when they try to interpret their own and others' speech. Carver suggests even in his title that his characters' speech is our own, but then he positions his readers so that they are dissatisfied with this inadequate language of desire. But whereas Carver's fiction, especially his later fiction, confronts its readers with questions of judgment and value, psychological criticism has neither measure nor place for correctives. Further, one can ask whether the reader's self-knowledge is the goal of literary study, as the psychological approach to reader-response criticism assumes, or whether the psychological approach short-circuits some other kinds of knowledge we think important to literary study. For a Christian these might include the relation of literature to community and the influence of religious practices, both liturgical and social, on literature.

Second, are literary works isolated or social? If they are social, then does the socialization of the reader occur during the reading experience or after it? Similarly, if the individual is primary and consensus follows individual perception, how can we account for agreement between individuals? These questions would not have occurred to most authors and readers outside of the Western tradition or prior to the last two hundred years, as a quick consideration of Cicero and Augustine, Chaucer and the Gawain poet, and Dryden and Pope would make clear. To them, separating perception and socialization would not have been imaginable. Nor, perhaps, should it be for us.

Third, how does the instructor conduct his or her class after the response statements to a literary work are shared? One might talk about the class discussion itself and the dynamics behind it, but this seems to move too quickly to a metacritical activity. Or one might emphasize the self-knowledge gained in exchange with other students, but this seems an inadequate goal for literary study. Neither strategy resolves the difficulty of moving from individual to communal response—or at least of accounting for that movement according to the psychological model of reading.

The social model of reader-response criticism, in contrast to the psychological model, emphasizes reading conventions that the reader participates in and can exert control over once they are brought to consciousness. Both Jonathan Culler and Stanley Fish emphasize literary competence rather than individualized reading, competence that comes from participation in and understanding of a cultural tradition of reading. Faced with Beardsley and Wimsatt's “Affective Fallacy,” they too would deny a split between the poem and its effects and would, like Holland and Bleich, emphasize the poem as experience. Unlike Holland and Bleich, however, Culler and Fish would study the systems that govern the production of textual meaning. Within such systems the individual reader and the constraining text lose their independent status.

Culler and Fish would give up the claim of “objective criticism” less easily than those following a psychological approach would. They emphasize historically qualified but shared reading conventions that enable one to gain competence as a reader. This establishes a field of scientific inquiry for literary study; however, that inquiry is limited to relational structures rather than content. One can infer from Culler's Structuralist Poetics (174) that description of relational structures may be historically objective, and that description of the most basic models for relational structures may even be universally objective, but that interpretations of the content of individual poems are not objective but relative to the structural conventions of one's society. Accordingly, interpretations are not the proper subject matter for criticism. Culler would oppose blanket charges of relativism and impressionism and would search for the common interpretive strategies or conventions that underlie a multiplicity of meanings.

We should ask at least two questions about the social model of reader-response theory sketched here. First, does it adequately deal with the importance of specific interpretations of literature? How would the teacher, for example, direct class discussion after shared reading conventions had been isolated and identified? Raman Selden states that there is “something narrow about a theory which treats interpretative moves as substantial and the content of the moves as immaterial” (121). This is especially true for those literary works like The Divine Comedy which make strong claims for their didactic value. Furthermore, are not shifts in reading strategies at least in part explained by the interpretations readers make of the content of literary works? The second major question to ask is this: Even if self-knowledge is not the only or even the primary goal of reading literature, should it not be at least part of that enterprise? And does that not require a way to talk about personal judgments, however socially informed?

The social and the psychological models provide two poles for reader-response theories. The intersubjective model—associated with European phenomenologists like Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss but also with the American critic Louise Marie Rosenblatt—emphasizes neither the unique individual nor shared conventions but the negotiation between the two.

Iser emphasizes the temporal process of reading whereby we constantly adjust our expectations and fill in gaps in the text. These interpretive adjustments are more important to reading (and to teaching) than is a fixed meaning that can be read back into the text at every point. For Iser, a novel such as Tom Jones represents not objects whose prior reality is faithfully represented in the text but elements that are partly determined by the text and partly left to the reader's construction. The interplay of what is determined and what is constructed puts into play the norms, value systems, or worldviews of the author (who creates the work in a particular historical and cultural context) and of the reader (who reads in a different context). For Iser, therefore, the reading process involves the interaction of text, social reality, and reader. The contest between the viewpoints of the extra-literary world can be played out only through the reader's experience of the text: “The reader's existing consciousness will have to make certain internal adjustments in order to receive and process the alien viewpoints which the text presents as reading takes place. This situation produces the possibility that the reader's own ‘world-view’ may be modified as a result of internalising, negotiating and realising the partially indeterminate elements of the text” (Selden 114). The reader tries to resolve the tensions between various viewpoints by combining those viewpoints into “a consistent gestalt.” Moving through the reading process, the reader is guided by the text but is also constantly interpreting and constructing the meaning of the text. Thus the text has no objective reality apart from the reading of it. Iser writes that “the perspective [the reader] assumes at any one moment becomes the ‘theme’ that is read against the ‘horizon’ of the previous perspectives in which he [or she] had been situated” (97).

Steven Mailloux, a former student of Stanley Fish, praises Iser's interest in “the anthropological side of literary criticism,” but he doubts that Iser moves us far enough away from American text-centered criticism: “The emphasis on textual constraints and the prestructuring of effect, combined with the lack of examples of differing interpretations and significant changes in readers, will make it quite easy for Iser's theory to be grafted onto the American critical tradition without really affecting the text-centered, often a-rhetorical criticism and theory that tradition fosters” (Interpretive Conventions 56). This assessment notwithstanding, Iser's theory does call attention to socio-historical realities that situate the text and the reader, and it does give as much attention to the world as to the view implied in “worldview.”

Hans Robert Jauss extends the influence of reader-response theories from literary criticism to literary history. In his “reception aesthetics,” Jauss argues that both intrinsic and extrinsic approaches to literary history—approaches that treat literature as art or literature as a reflection of history—are built on a production model of literature that emphasizes various influences on the construction of a text but ignores the various influences on literary reception. Both approaches to the history of literary productions occlude the influences that help books gain a reading. Jauss urges his readers to supplement or displace literary history based on a production model with literary history based on a reception model.

In the past literary critics have searched for influences on reception that would account for shifts in the popularity of such poets as Donne, Herbert, Blake, Smart, and Browning, or for developments such as the rise of the novel. Like Iser, Jauss makes use of the phenomenological notion of a “horizon of expectations” and looks at both intra-literary and extra-literary expectations. Study of intra-literary expectations could include the development of a literary genre at any historical moment—of tragedy, for example, at the time of Death of a Salesman. It could also include expectations established by other works of the author or by other contemporary authors. But one could study not only the horizon of literary expectations but also the extra-literary horizon of social and political experience. For Death of a Salesman these might include post-World War II views of business, of women, and of American ideals such as progress and individualism that were sometimes in conflict with each other.

Jauss's call for attention to the history of reception is a worthwhile challenge to Christian students of literature. It might mean, for example, comparative study of extra-literary practices and the reception of a literary text—something J. A. Burrow undertakes when he relates the experience of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to late medieval practices of penance. Such an approach mediates the relationship of literature to doctrine by giving attention to specific religious practices, both those familiar to the author's contemporary readers and those familiar to the author's subsequent readers.

The history of reception might require looking behind intertextual influences to the social practices that support them. One might ask why Pilgrim's Progress, Part I (the narrative of the solitary Christian), became a powerful influence on the novel, while Part II (the narrative of Christiana, who gathers to herself a community of children and fellow pilgrims) has much less force in both confessional and secular literature. Why was the reception of these two works such that the first remains a strong influence on the novel even into the nineteenth century (Jane Eyre is one example), while the second, more Chaucerian narrative has never attained the status of a model for later fiction? Such questions cannot be addressed if literary influence is isolated from social practice. If one adopts Jauss's view, the historical emphasis of the teacher of literature points toward a better understanding of the present. Teacher and class have to allow the literary work to call into question the present horizon of expectations as formed by literary and extra-literary practices.

Jauss, even more than Iser, is able to show the cooperation of text, reader, and the particular historical situation in which they meet. He spends less time than other reader-response theorists speculating about the relationship of text to reader. Instead, he describes that relationship at a particular time and how it changes over time, making the issue not an epistemological one but a social and historical problem.

Louise Marie Rosenblatt's work similarly broadens the context of communication in literature. Her early work, Literature as Exploration, was published in 1938, at about the same time as the early work of the New Critics. In it, she argued that a literary work is best understood as an event or transaction between the reader and the text. Both the reader and the text have social pasts (and social futures) that organize the transaction between them, which we call a literary work. While Literature as Exploration had some influence in the schools, the New Critics won the approval of those doing English studies at colleges and universities, who gave Rosenblatt little attention until after the New Criticism seemed in the 1960s to have run its course. Since that time three editions of her seminal work have been published under the sponsorship of the Modern Language Association. Although the new reader-response criticism of the 1960s and 1970s was in general associated with the work of Rosenblatt, in The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978) she distances herself from the psychological model of reader-response criticism. She also opposes structuralist and deconstructionist theories of reading. Her work derives from William James, who influenced Edmund Husserl and, through Husserl's student Roman Ingarden, the work of both Iser and Jauss.

In “The Literary Transaction,” Rosenblatt argues against deconstructionists, who, because they are “unable to believe in an absolute unmediated reality … see an extreme relativism as the only alternative” (70). To counter deconstruction, she points to John Dewey's effort to “counteract the dualism that spoke, for example, of an ‘interaction’ with the environment, implying separate, self-contained entities acting on one another” (70). Dewey introduced the term “transaction” to designate a reciprocal relationship between humans and nature as aspects of a total situation (71), a view reinforced, according to Rosenblatt, by modern ecology and philosophy of science as well as by her own efforts to describe the transaction between reader and text as more than “separate, self-contained entities acting on one another.”

Rosenblatt also opposes the view, stemming from Ferdinand de Saussure, that language is a self-regulating system of signifiers and signifieds detached from any notion of reference, since such a view encourages one to think of language “simply as an ungrounded code, an abstract, arbitrary system” (71). Again she returns to the American tradition of pragmatism, this time to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, in order to provide a “triadic formulation” of language: sign, object, and interpretant. “A sign,” Peirce wrote, “is in a conjoint relation to the thing denoted and to the mind. … The sign is related to its object only in consequence of a mental association, and depends upon a habit” (3:360; cited by Rosenblatt in “The Literary Transaction” 71). According to Rosenblatt, this triadic model, with its emphasis on human habit, re-opens the study of interpretation to personal responses and social forces. It helps us describe literature as communication, not as an isolated aesthetic product. Rosenblatt argues that a transactional theory emphasizes neither autonomous text nor unbounded subjectivism: “[It] saves us, on the one hand, from the deconstructionist's focus on the text as an autonomous semiotic entity of unbounded potentialities and, on the other hand, from the subjectivism that concentrates on the reader's response [alone]” (79). Rosenblatt believes that habit, shaped by personal and social forces, holds text and reader in relationship to each other from the beginning and guarantees that they remain interdependent.

THE USES OF READER-RESPONSE THEORIES

The practical implications of reader-response theories are diverse and sometimes contradictory. While the New Critics championed modernist and seventeenth-century poetry, and the American deconstructionists return again and again to re-readings of the Romantics, the work of reader-response theorists does not cluster around a particular set of texts. Hans Robert Jauss is a German medievalist. Wolfgang Iser studies the eighteenth-century British novel. Stanley Fish claims seventeenth-century poetry as his special province. Jonathan Culler is a leading interpreter of Flaubert, though he has moved away from individual interpretations. Even a development such as “spectator aesthetics” in Shakespearean criticism is related to reader-response criticism. This is one sign of the strength of recent emphases on readers' responses. Another is attention to reader response in fields such as American studies and women's studies, where such attention has often joined forces with feminist criticism or the New Historicism.

The great strength of the psychological model for reader-response theories is pedagogical—its involvement of individual readers. “Response statements” such as those used by David Bleich can help students clarify their responses to a novel or poem. Response statements can enrich and deepen the reading experience, especially if they interrupt that experience rather than follow it. Examining such statements allows the teacher to emphasize the process of reading, just as we have learned to emphasize the process of writing. What is dangerous about a psychological model is its suggestion that literary communication is a private matter. Such an approach typically emphasizes the autonomous freedom of the student but then has to take a laissez-faire approach to social, political, and religious issues.

The social model of reader response emphasizes power more than autonomy. According to this view, strong social forces surround us, shape us, and are inseparable from us—whether we know it or not. We gain some measure of control over these forces when we become conscious of them. So, too, we gain some measure of control over our own reading and writing when we become aware of how shared strategies are used for better or for worse. Such knowledge helps us see how the world of public discourse works and might help us find a place in that world. This attention to social convention is at least as important as attention to the individual process of reading. However, it too easily slights attention to content and to personal response.

The reader-response movement has also expanded our sense of literary history, not only by emphasizing particular readers at particular times and places but also by attending to both literary and extra-literary expectations. Two images are especially helpful. The first is that of the “horizon.” It suggests the dual significance of past and present contexts for reading as well as the testing that goes on within the reading experience (Jauss's sense that historical emphasis helps us judge present expectations). The other image sometimes associated with the historical and social side of the reader-response movement is that of a “cultural conversation.” This term is an adaptation of Kenneth Burke's description in The Philosophy of Literary Form of the “unending conversation” that we are born into:

Where does the drama get its materials? From the “unending conversation” that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

(110-11)

Steven Mailloux (“Rhetorical Hermeneutics” 637) changes Burke's “unending conversation” to “cultural conversation” to emphasize the social character of our effort to understand the situation that we were born into and that we try to shape. Teaching literature and composition should mean, in the first instance, helping our students find a voice within the conversation that surrounds them.

EVALUATION AND NEW DIRECTIONS

The description of the rhetorical tradition—particularly the Christian rhetorical tradition—at the beginning of this chapter and the later description of the spectrum of reader-response theories should make it evident that attention to reader response can be personal or social, constructive or skeptical, ahistorical or historical. To end this chapter, I will try to project where the reader-response movement is going and what Christians can learn from it, offering these judgments in hopes of furthering discussion rather than concluding it.

The energy of the reader-response movement today lies in efforts to make it more socially and historically responsible and less of an epistemological puzzle. As reader-response criticism becomes more interested in social and historical questions, its concerns are being assimilated by a wide range of critics—so much so that the reader-response movement is losing its identity. This is a sign not of its weakness but of its strength. Its concerns are affirmed, for example, in the work of the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who argues convincingly that the ability to view a Quattrocento painting or to hear a contemporary Moroccan poem is as much a cultural artifact as the elements that go into the composition of such works. In addition, critics are increasingly dissatisfied with the dyadic model of linguistics (the model limited to signs and signifieds) that Ferdinand de Saussure proposed and that structuralism and deconstruction adopted. Feminists and Marxists and minority critics who cannot give up the question of reference are more likely to give Louise Marie Rosenblatt a sympathetic hearing. Contemporary fiction (e.g., that of Italo Calvino, John Barth, John Fowles) and contemporary poetry (e.g., that of Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Norman Dubie) have also taken a more rhetorical turn that brings to the fore the act of enunciation and the audience's role in that act. This, too, gives credence to the reader-response argument that reader and text cannot be viewed as separate entities interacting with each other but are entities already in relation to each other through a larger, historical and linguistic environment.

The question that reader-response theorists face today is whether they adequately consider the act of enunciation. Can they, for instance, comment adequately on the concrete social situation of the act of enunciation (cf. M. M. Bakhtin)? And what can they say about the status or nature of the enunciator, the producer of literary language as a social product (cf. Michel Foucault)? Linda Hutcheon described the challenge to reader-response theory this way: “When the locus of meaning shifts from Romantic author to formalist text to the reader and, at last, to the whole act of enunciation and its ‘situating’ in discursive practice, then we have finally moved beyond formalism and even beyond reader-response theory per se” (42).

Christians can accept this challenge. Too often a formalist paradigm of literature, modified by historical and theological concerns, has seemed our only hedge against subjectivism. But desire and interest cannot be screened out of the act of reading, as the early Christian tradition understood very well. A more pressing matter might be the nature of desire today. Today, when desire has fewer constraints, it is also less daring and less definite. The relationship of individual desire to politics and history—a relationship Dante thought clear enough—has become unclear. One can no longer assume an overarching relation between nature, society, author, reader, and precedent. That relationship has become a theoretical and, even more, a practical matter, a task for Christians to undertake.

This task requires our effort, imagination, and faith. Help can come from several sources—two of which I will mention here. First, the rich tradition of Christian thought can help us, though it must be appropriated critically, with questions of sign theory, intentionality, the relationship of literature to society, and other central issues of literary debate. The notion of “horizon” may serve as a reminder of our relation to that tradition. A horizon distinguishes without separating. It always suggests a dual function, so that a questioning of a text or tradition is also a questioning of our own understanding. The image of a “cultural conversation” is a second source of help. It reminds us that textual meaning is always interpreted and has significance in a particular cultural situation, the cultural situation that we were placed in to understand and to shape. It emphasizes sympathetic listening and participation rather than detachment and isolation. Christians need both to listen to others and to make their voice heard by others—not any voice that can get a hearing, not a private voice, and certainly not a pre-established voice, but one whose speech attends to God and to the communities he has placed us within.

Reader-response theory does not aim for uniformity of interpretation, nor does it assume that uniformity is possible; it does, however, help to account for the diversity of interpretations and to encourage participation in a community of interpreters. Such a goal is a worthy one for Christians, who wish to stand both within their own traditions and within culture at large.

Works Cited

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard Trask. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin, 1961.

———. On Christian Doctrine. Trans. D. W. Robertson. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958.

Beardsley, Monroe C., and W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. “The Affective Fallacy.” Sewanee Review 57 (1949): 31-55.

Bruns, Gerald L. “The Problem of Figuration in Antiquity.” In Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1941.

Burrow, J. A. A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966.

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.

Donne, John. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Ed. Anthony Raspa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Freccero, John. Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. Ed. Rachel Jacoff. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Geertz, Clifford. “Art as a Cultural System.” MLN 91 (1976): 1473-99.

Holland, Norman. “Transactive Criticism: Re-Creation through Identity.” Criticism 18 (1976).

Hutcheon, Linda. “A Poetics of Postmodernism?” Diacritics 13 (Winter 1983): 33-42.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960.

Kennedy, George. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Mailloux, Steven. Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.

———. “Rhetorical Hermeneutics.” Critical Inquiry 11 (June 1985): 620-41.

Manley, Lawrence. Convention: 1500-1740. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Mazzotta, Giuseppe. Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Vols. 3-4. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. “The Literary Transaction.” In The Creating Word, ed. Patricia Demers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

———. Literature as Exploration. 4th ed. New York: MLA, 1983.

———. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978.

Selden, Raman. A Readers' Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985.

Suggested Reading

In addition to the works listed in Works Cited, the following books would be helpful for further study of reader-response theories:

Freund, Elizabeth. The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Holub, Robert C. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Methuen, 1984.

Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.

Suleiman, Susan, and Inge Crosman, eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Tompkins, Jane, ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.