Applying Reader-Response Analysis in Literature and Film Classes

Abstract

As skills courses such as Business German grow in enrollment, many of us find it increasingly difficult to attract today's practically-oriented undergraduates to study of literature and film. Despite our arguments that literature and film classes provide a language experience and insights into cultures of German-speaking countries, many students today tend to see study of literature (and even of film) as an essentially purposeless activity reserved for an aesthetically-inclined elite. Recent theories of response aesthetics and critical practice founded upon them fortunately offer us a teaching method that can restore a sense of purpose to literature and film classes. This method engages students in analysis of texts and develops their skills as readers-not only of of literary text and verbal and nonverbal signiflers of film text, but of ideas, points of view, realities and levels of meaning expressed through them. The advantage this approach offers lies in critical shift from an emphasis on text read (and more or less passively consumed) to an emphasis on in act of reading, actively producing meaning of a text. By focusing on reading as a reciprocal transaction between and text (rather than a one-way transaction in which information flows from text to reader), reader-response theory allows us to focus on student's active role in reading significance into a text. In a very real sense, then, student's role as reader is as much the subject of course as texts that are studied, and this role is analyzed along with texts. The aims, generally, are to make students aware of their own roles in producing meanings of a literary or film text; to get them to recognize how certain texts guide, control, or even manipulate and how others release and induce a variety of responses; and to make them cognizant of extent to which their interpretive responses are dependent on their own emotional/intellectual disposition and their experiences as readers. More often than not, this approach leads students to a new appreciation not only of literature and film but of critical process itself. For in recognizing openness of text to a variety of possible meanings, they are actually able-usually for first time-to grasp workings of critical interpretation and, in comparing their interpretive responses with authoritative interpretations, to recognize