Reader-response Approaches Research Articles

Uchronie as a Literary Genre and Narrative of an Alternative History: İzmihlâl

Ükronya, olgu ve olaylarıyla gerçek olduğu bilinen tarihin akışında bir kırılma noktası yaratarak yeni bir tarihî akış sunan anlatıları tanımlamak için kullanılan bir terimdir. Bu çalışma, Kutlu Altay Kocaova’nın İzmihlâl (2021) romanından yola çıkarak türün Türk edebiyatındaki görünümünün incelenmesi hakkındadır. Böylece ükronya anlatıları hakkında genel bir çerçeve çizmek ve bunların nasıl inceleneceği üzerine bir bakış açısı önermek amaçlanmaktadır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda söz konusu anlatıların neleri içerdiği ve hangi türlerle bağlantılı olduğu tartışılmıştır. Ardından İzmihlâl romanının neden bir ükronya örneği olduğu sorgulanmış ve romandan yola çıkılarak bu anlatıların temel özellikleri ortaya konulmuştur. Bu doğrultuda özellikle yazar ve okur merkezli yaklaşımların bu türün anlamlandırılması açısından kullanışlı araçlar sunduğu ileri sürülmüştür. Ükronya anlatıları ilk bakışta, tarihî roman, bilimkurgu ve fantastik altında ele alınabilecek bir tür olduğu izlenimini verir. Ne var ki anlatıların yapısı, onun farklı türler içinde farklı biçimlerde yer alabileceğini gösterir. İzmihlâl örneğinde ükronya anlatılarının tarihî anlatı/romanın alt türü olabileceği görülmüş, türler arasındaki benzerlik ve farklılıklara değinilmiştir. Son olarak, tek bir örnek çerçevesinde yapılan değerlendirme ve tespitler genellenebilir olmadığından, türün sınırlarının belirginleştirilmesi adına ileriki çalışmalar için bir yol haritası önerilmiştir.

Healing the female body

Using narrative, reader-response and social feminist approaches, the study takes a discourse analysis of looking into representations of female bodies within the Jewish-Christian healthcare and Greek Hippocratic healthcare and how such surface in the representation of female bodies in Mark’s healing stories. The study finishes by looking into comparable biases found in some African communities. The gospel of Mark contains some of the early Christian memory concerning Jesus as folk healer and this study selects narratives in the gospel of Mark whereby Jesus dealt with illness pertaining female patients. Instead of dealing with all narratives whereby Jesus healed a female patient, the focus will be on the story concerning the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law and the story concerning the haemorrhaging woman. The underlying question is – what were the socio-cultural ideas concerning the female body and how do such ideas surface in the healing stories? The study hypothesises that, besides being stories that reveal Jesus’ Christological powers or power as folk healer, the healing stories are site to investigate social cultural frameworks concerning illness and gender.

Digital Literacy via Readers’ Responses towards Humor Presented in “9GAG Memes”

Language education by using digital literacy via reader response approaches towards humor presented in social media will attract the student attention during learning process. The purpose of this research is to analyze the text produced by learners in order to explain how they provide responses towards humorous, fearing, annoying, pitiful, and confusing memes.This research is a qualitative research. The approach of the research is descriptive approach. This research was a readers response analysis focusing on descriptive qualitative. The data collecting done by observation, documentation and questionnaires. The subject of the study are students of SMA Negeri 1 Pecangaan Jepara. The method applied in this research is General Theory of Verbal Humor and Reader ‘s Response Theory as the approach in which the researcher related the contexts of the data to the data analyzed in order to make replicable and valid inferences from data to its context. The result of the research shows digital literacy skill of the XII grade of SMA Negeri 1 Pecangaan Jepara students is quite good. The reader accepts the aspects of humor through their current contribution on their response inside their peer group.

Racism and dehumanisation inHeart of Darknessand its Italian translations: A reader response analysis

This article presents the results of a reader response study of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and two of its Italian translations. Specifically, data from an online questionnaire are used to test whether English and Italian readers respond differently to the potential racist implications of the fictional representation of the African natives. Whereas one translator removes completely all occurrences of nigger( s) and negro, the other adds additional uses of the slurs which are not present in the original. We explore with empirical methods whether these translational alterations have an effect on the readers’ perception of dehumanisation, discrimination and racism in the text, comparing responses to each translation with responses to the original. Our findings not only show evidence of significant differences in the responses between one translation and the original but also suggest that other linguistic and extra-linguistic factors could be influencing readers’ response. With this article, we aim to contribute to the under-researched application of reader response approaches to translation studies.

A READER RESPONSE APPROACH IN COLLABORATIVE READING PROJECTS TO FOSTER CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS

Reading has become a major concern of EFL educators. Reading does not only help students learn foreign languages, but it is also believed that it has a strong link with critical thinking skills. A reader response approach in collaborative works, adapted from literary theory, is believed to be beneficial for the students. Therefore, this study aims at investigating the answers to these two questions: (1) how are the collaborative reader responses implemented in Critical Reading and Writing II? and (2) To what extent does reader response approaches promote students critical thinking skills? With these questions in mind, the researchers collect the data by involving 24 participants from CRW II (Critical Reading and Writing) class. The data gathered from classroom observations, online archives and students reflections are analyzed descriptively, using qualitative case study method. It is hoped that the implementation of this approach can be useful not only to improve students reading skills, but also to provide more opportunity for students to exercise their critical thinking skills.

Why history matters: The place of historical consciousness in a multidimensional approach towards biblical interpretation

Since the linguistic turn of New Criticism and the advent of reader-response approaches in the previous century, the category of history has come under pressure in biblical interpretation. New developments in general historiography have also emphasised that the past is forever past, and that only constructions of the past remain. These developments bring many to the conclusion that the past offers no assistance in the interpretation process. In my paper I would like to re-emphasise that �historical consciousness� does not mean an anachronistic clinging to something which no longer exists, but rather refers to the ability to sense the multidimensionality of interpretation, particularly in the case of ancient biblical texts.

Review of Coleman A. Baker, Peter, Paul, and Recategorization in the Book of Acts: Memory and Narrative in Early Christianity. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2011.

In Identity, Memory and Narrative in Early Christianity, Coleman Baker argues that “the narrative of Acts attempts the recategorization of Judean and non-Judean Christ followers … into a common ingroup by presenting Peter and Paul as prototypical of a common superordinate Christian identity in the midst of diversity and conflict within the Christ movement in the last decade of the first century CE” (p. xv). This recategorization is intended to establish the boundaries by which it can be seen who, from the Judean and Greco-Roman cultural groupings, is included in the Christian community and who is excluded from it. Drawing on narrative and reader-response approaches— especially Paul Ricoeur’s “three-fold process of narrative interaction” (p. 71)—Baker moves away from the quest for the “historical” Peter and Paul, past the “literary” Peter and Paul, and on to what Baker calls “an identity-forming Peter and Paul” (p. xvi). Baker proposes that such an approach builds on the vital but essentially incomplete social-scientific and literary approaches. The aim is to establish “a model for reading biblical texts as identity-forming documents within their historical and cultural context” (p xvii). In this work, Baker uses Acts as the test case for his theory. In chapter one Baker argues for his methodology, which he names the narrative-identity model. This is a fusion of the Social Identity Approach and Narrative Theory. Baker argues that this is “a helpful model for understanding the identity-forming interaction between text and audience” (p. 1). The name is not new, having been used by Ricoeur in Time and Narrative. Ricoeur, however, uses it primarily in connection with the reader’s interaction with the text, whereas Baker argues for the inclusion of social identity and memory. Much of this chapter is taken up with literature reviews of the Social Identity Approach and Narrative Theory. These are two large and diverse fields, and Baker does an admirable job of summing up the key works in each field, what he regards as deficient in each field, and how his fusion of the two resolves those deficiencies. Thus social identity and social memory are vital for understanding how prototypical figures are used by ingroup members to “re-interpret the past, present, and future of the group to make its identity more compatible with new situations and future directions” (p. 16). Narrative theory is needed, however, to understand how the interaction between text and reader creates identity formation, both personal and communal. Baker thus agrees with Ricoeur that “identity is formed in the interaction between text and audience” (p. 23). Having established the importance of Social Identity and Narrative Theory, Baker introduces the Narrative Identity model, which he argues “is chiefly interested in the way that identity is shaped through the interaction between the narrative and the audience” (p. 30). By this Baker means Peter Rabinowitz’s “contextualized ‘implied reader’” (p. 39) 1 of the text, so chapter two proceeds to identify both the historical context and the narrative world of Luke and Acts. Baker argues that “Luke” was “a Judean Christ-follower … from Western Asia Minor who had received a relatively high level of Hellenistic education” (p. 35), who did not personally know any of the main characters in his works (Jesus, Peter, Paul), but who, for community identity-forming purposes, writes as though he were present for at least some of the events he records. The authorial audience was a mix of Judean and non-Judean Christians in the very late first century CE, who had “varying opinions of Paul and

Scaffolding Middle School Students’ Comprehension and Response to Short Stories

Teaching narrative text selections is an important part of the middle grades English curriculum. As middle grades educators search for ways to best support their students’ reading, it is important to consider carefully the effects of various approaches to teaching literature. This study focused on the two most popular approaches to teaching literature, the cognitive-oriented and reader-response approaches, and compared the effects each approach has on students’ comprehension and response to a narrative text.Specifically, the study examined the results on 85 sixth grade students’ comprehension and response to literature when they were taught stories using a reader-response approach and when using a more cognitive-oriented approach. To compare the two methods, each was operationalized in a Scaffolded Reading Experience (SRE), an instructional framework designed to foster students’ understanding and engagement with individual texts. Results showed that using a reader-response approach resulted in students’ achievement of reader-response tasks but not of cognitive-oriented tasks and that using a more cognitive-oriented approach produced the opposite result. Overall, the study suggests that teaching literature with a particular approach does affect students’ comprehension and response to text, and, thus, teachers should match their teaching approach with the outcome desired.

Cin(E)-Poetry: Engaging the Digital Generation in 21st Century Response

There is a need to integrate into classroom learning the out-of-school technologies that students interact with every day. We know that reader response approaches to the study of literature engage learners, and we also know that both students and teachers have mixed attitudes about the study of poetry. In this article, a response activity with poetry integrates technology and engages the 21st-century digital learner. Middle level preservice teachers collaborated to develop Cin(E)-Poetry, and in the process, they not only negotiated meanings of poems but had a change of attitude about teaching and learning poetry. Both process and product are presented for developing this engaging genre of new literacies.

LITERARY PRACTICES AND THE SOCIAL LIFE OF TEXTS

Throughout the twentieth century, as literary texts circulated through high-school and college classrooms, reading became a specialized skill. Especially with the dominance of the “new criticism” in the 1930s, literature acquired an autonomous life as “text,” demanding intensive “close reading” of its verbal complexity and formal coherence as an aesthetic object. Beginning in the 1970s, with the proliferation of programs devoted to African-American culture, gender studies, sexuality studies, and ethnic studies programs, the literary canon became more diverse. In the mid-1980s new historicism helped push aesthetic formalism further from the agenda of literary education in the university, promoting new interest in historical contexts even as psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and reader-response approaches continued to fetishize “textuality” as their primary object of inquiry. Whatever the vagaries of theory, method, and subdisciplinary turf battles through which scholars have wandered over the last few decades, we have remained in our professional practices of reading and teaching committed to a hermeneutics of interpretation. Even as scholars developed arguments about history or culture, the teaching and criticism of literature has continued to rely on the institutional and psychological isolation of reading, as an individual exercise in mastery of the text fostered by silence and solitude.

Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction Jennifer Phegley (bio) Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction, by Catherine J. Golden; pp. xi + 287. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003, $55.00. Catherine J. Golden'sbookexamines representations of women as readers in nineteenth- century novels and illustrations from England and the United States. The purpose of her study is to "examine concurrent competing visions of the woman reader" in order to "spark further scrutiny of the complexities of our own reading habits as well as those of the Victorians" (14). This book clearly owes much to Kate Flint's The Woman Reader, 1837– 1914 (1993). Like Flint, Golden contends that the woman reader is a "recurrent and multifaceted theme in fiction and book illustration," one that is constantly shifting and impossible to pin down (4). In expressing the need to consider the figure of the woman reader not simply for her reading practices but for her significance as a cultural phenomenon, Flint and Golden intend to move beyond the reader-response approaches of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984), Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart's Gender and Reading (1986), and Sarah Mills's Gendering the Reader (1994), all of which focus on the ways readers respond to texts rather than on the ways readers are constructed within them at a particular historical moment. Building on Flint's approach, [End Page 171] which studies representations of women in periodicals, scientific treatises, novels, and paintings, Golden seeks to provide a transatlantic context for the phenomena of the woman reader. Golden's book is divided into three parts: a historical overview of women's reading in a transatlantic context; analyses of fictional representations of women's reading, particularly women as model readers, prophetic readers, intellectual readers, and corruptible readers; and an exploration of the role book illustrations play in constructing various "types" of women readers—isolated, interrupted, social, and dutifully domestic. Golden frames her book with an overview of the intense anxiety surrounding "the reading habit," particularly for women. She rightly identifies the debate over women readers as a transatlantic phenomenon that was spurred by advances in printing technologies, the expansion of the reading public, the wider availability of educational institutions for women, and the rise of women's reading clubs and literary societies. Golden outlines a variety of arguments for and against women's reading. These include claims that women should read for educational purposes, socialization, and individual enrichment; it was also argued that biological and medical factors affecting women could lead to potentially dangerous side effects of reading, including over-consumption of fiction, addiction, immoral behavior, and increased sexual appetite. Golden claims that "The polar ideologies that fueled the reading debate form a collage of women readers. Dire images of girls consuming novels in secret and dying with diseased minds appear alongside inspiring pictures of women reading independently, in clubs, or in the family parlour, gaining confidence and valuable life lessons" (42). Golden examines such contradictory representations of women readers in fictional works including Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife (1864), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus (1894), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and in illustrations for books such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1864), Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1850), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), and William Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848). Golden focuses as much on the books women characters read as she does on their reading bodies and minds. Her analysis thus charts an interesting but sometimes unsatisfying genealogy of the books with which the characters are engaged. We learn, for example, about the history and resonances of Jane Eyre's idiosyncratic reading of Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds (1804), Jo March's use of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678) as a touchstone, and Maggie Tulliver's interpretation of Daniel Defoe's The History of the Devil (rev. 1819...

Everything Under Control: A Child’s Eye View of Advertising

Research on children’s response to advertising is dominated by positivistic and' quantitative approaches and often addresses children’s failure to understand advertising in an adult manner. This paper suggests that reliance on Piaget’s theory of child development has restricted research on children and advertising, and calls for more attention to be given , to theorists such as Erikson who offer broader accounts incorporating social and cultural issues. The paper builds. a case for viewing children as active, socially and culturally situated consumers of advertising by reviewing meaning-based, reader-response and literacy approaches to advertising. It reports on a qualitative study (using photo diaries, individual interviews and small friendship group discussions) which sought a child’s eye view of advertising experiences among 10–12 year-aIds. The children shared a drive to obtain and demonstrate power in their everyday lives, and this led them to seek mastery, control and critical distance in their dealings with advertising. The study’s implications are considered for advertising practitioners, researchers and public policy makers.

Reader Response Approaches and the Growth of Readers

Outlines what reader response might look like in the classroom. Presents four basic assumptions of reader response theory. Discusses ways reader response approaches to literature help students grow both in the depth and breadth of their responses to literature, and as strategic readers.

Beyond Communication: Reading Comprehension and Criticism

Beyond Communication is a collection of essays by well-known scholars and teachers in reading comprehension theory and literary criticism, particularly reader-response approaches. These two fields have traditionally been divided by their respective appeals to elementary and secondary education people. In creating this book the editors have sought to repair this unwarranted split. The book presents a rationale for teaching reading comprehension with literary texts that integrates the two pedagogical approaches. It encourages teachers to include literature and reader-response approaches in daily sessions with students regardless of grade level. It provides teachers with alternatives for meeting new language arts curriculum requirements. And it gives an overview of this field from both Canadian and American perspectives.

Re-Creating the Literary Text: Practice and Theory

English teachers at all levels have discovered the value of reader-response approaches to teaching literature. (See EnglishJournal Jan. 1988 for various examples.) Like many other teachers, I have sought ways of motivating students to become, in Roland Barthes' terms, producers rather than consumers of the literary texts they read (1974, 4). I have found that one of the most effective ways in which teachers can help their students become producers and in so doing transform the reading and study of literature into a more creative and meaningful experience is through certain focused writing assignments that challenge students to become vital agents in the construction of textual meaning. The assignments I would like to share with you draw especially upon Wolfgang Iser's (1980, 1978) theory that reading is a dynamic process of making connections, or of failing to, through which each individual reader becomes actively and uniquely a co-creator of the text.