7. Reading Critical Theory

Abstract

The cartoon on the cover of Reader-Response Criticism shows two people reading over the shoulders of a third person. Each reader is responding differently to the text-one onlooker is laughing, the other crying, and the holder of the book seems absorbed but otherwise unexpressive. This cartoon nicely captures a central problem addressed by reader-response critics: How can we explain different responses to the same literary work? I will return to this question below, but I would first like to re-use the cartoon as an emblem for my own comments on Reader-Response Criticism. The three pictured responses to one book suggest that a text can offer several readings to its interpreters. In what follows I will discuss the three ways Reader-Response Criticism asks to be read: as an introduction to a new critical approach; as a metacritical description of that approach; and as a critique of the approach and the critical tradition out of which it emerges. Jane Tompkins' excellent collection is above all a useful introduction to current talk about readers in literary theory, talk that supports a new focus on readers reading in practical criticism. Within the Anglo-American tradition, twentieth-century intrinsic criticism successfully displaced a reader-oriented emphasis in favor of exclusive attention to the autonomous literary text. Though I. A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, Louise Rosenblatt, and D. W. Harding kept the reader from completely disappearing during the hegemony of New Critical formalism, the prohibition against the Affective Fallacy did suppress talk about readers in both critical theory and practice. Tompkins' anthology shows how the reader appeared prominently once again in critical discourse. She reprints