Reader response criticism and stylistics

Abstract

A famous philosophical question goes something like this: when a tree falls in the woods, if there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound? To understand the emphasis of reader response theory, one might analogously ask: does a text have any meaning if there’s no reader there to interpret it? This was the basic issue that originally motivated reader response theory in the 1970s, when theorists reacted to an earlier dominant paradigm that regarded texts as self-contained icons, and readers’ interpretations as irrelevant in critical analyses. In order to understand what inspired the turn to reader response criticism, let’s fi rst consider the paradigm that was dominant prior to the 1970s.