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Dec 5, 20221 min read

12 Facts About Reader-Response Criticism & Critics Associated With It



  1. It is a school of literary Theory that focuses on the reader and their experience of a literary work.

  2. It focuses primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.

  3. It focuses on the active response of the reader to a text.

  4. Reading is a dynamic interaction between the reader and the text.

  5. Here meaningful ideas arise for readers from their own thoughtful and creative interpretations.

  6. The reader creates the meaning of a text rather than discovering it.

  7. In 1961, C. S. Lewis published An Experiment in Criticism, analyzing readers' role in selecting literature.

  8. In 1967, Stanley Fish published Surprised by Sin, the first study of a significant literary work (Paradise Lost) that focused on its readers' experience.

  9. In 1968, Norman Holland drew on psychoanalytic psychology in The Dynamics of Literary Criticism to model the literary work.

  10. Wolfgang Iser exemplifies the German tendency to theorize the reader and posit a uniform response.

  11. Hans-Robert Jauss defined literature as a dialectic process of production and reception.

  12. Classic reader-response critics include:

    1. Norman Holland,

    2. Stanley Fish,

    3. Wolfgang Iser,

    4. Hans-Robert Jauss,

    5. Roland Barthes

    6. Louise Rosenblatt.

    7. Stuart Hall

    8. Harold BloomDavid Bleich

    9. M.H. Abrams



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