Reader-response Theory Research Articles

Custody Battles: Reproducing Knowledge about Frankenstein

Custody Battles: Reproducing Knowledge about Frankenstein Ellen Cronan Rose (bio) The combined forces of deconstruction, reader-response theory, and publications from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University have dislodged forever the once firmly held view that the “meaning” of a text is fixed and transhistorically available to the (properly trained) reader. Save for the occasional unredeemed formalist, most scholars would agree with the editors of the British journal Literature and History that texts are “produced not just once, but time and again for each succeeding generation,” which makes “its own sense of the text for its own purposes.” 1 Indeed, one reason certain texts become “canonical” may be their plasticity, their capacity for adaptation to the complex, often bifurcated needs and sensibilities of successive generations of readers. Frankenstein is a case in point, as Paul O’Flinn observes: “Mary Shelley’s monster, having resisted his creator’s attempts to eliminate him in the book, is able to reproduce himself with the variety and fertility that Frankenstein had feared. Apart from steady sales in Penguin, Everyman and OUP editions, there have been over a hundred film adaptations and there have been the Charles Addams cartoons in the New Yorker . . . . in South Africa in 1955 the work was banned as indecent and objectionable.” 2 “There is no such thing as Frankenstein,” O’Flinn concludes; “there are only Frankensteins, as the text is ceaselessly rewritten, reproduced, refilmed and redesigned” (197). When O’Flinn asks how “alteration and realignment” of a text are effected throughout history, he proposes “the operations of criticism” and “the unfolding of history itself” as two distinct and separable agents of change (197). It is possible, however, to use recent criticism of Frankenstein to demonstrate that “the operations of criticism” are profoundly affected by “the unfolding of history.” O’Flinn refers to recent feminist criticism of Frankenstein as an example of the “operations of criticism” that contribute to historical [End Page 809] shifts in a text’s meaning, without asking why a criticism that demonstrates that Frankenstein “articulate[s] elements of woman’s experience of patriarchy, the family and the trauma of giving birth” should have appeared when it did and not before (197). I suggest that this meaning of Shelley’s text was not publishable before the emergence of a constellation of political, social, cultural, and institutional conditions in the mid-1970s. Specifically, a reading of the novel that focused on its implications for biological reproduction was unlikely until procreation had become an issue of concern to an increasingly numerous, articulate, and politically conscious body of women and until sufficient numbers of those women had entered the academy as feminist scholars. It was, not coincidentally, in the 1970s that Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, with its central yet critically silenced themes of the horrors of birthing and the costs of mothering, was “rediscovered”—by feminist scholars. Feminist criticism of Frankenstein has caused anxiety to some male critics. It has also revealed anxieties of its own. In this essay, I will be arguing that as recent criticism of Frankenstein by men and women, feminists and nonfeminists, contests the right to produce knowledge about a major text of English romanticism, it manifests anxieties that eerily reflect the text’s anxieties about gender and procreation. In order to develop this argument, I begin with a brief summary of what may be said to comprise the scholarly Establishment’s understanding of what “feminists” think about Frankenstein, based on a relatively select group of essays published in prestigious journals (Critical Inquiry, diacritics, New Literary History, and PMLA) that are cited repeatedly by other critics of the novel. 3 I then entertain some speculations about what this apparently academic affair has to do with white middle-class American women’s anxieties about biological reproduction. And I conclude by pondering the implications, for cultural history, of the most recent turn in feminist criticism of Frankenstein. I In 1965, Harold Bloom characterized Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a primer to the really significant literature of the period: “What makes Frankenstein an important book, though it is only a strong, flawed novel with frequent clumsiness in its narrative and characterization, is that it contains one...

Hermeneutics and Postmodernism: Can We Have a Radical Reader-Response Theory? Part II

The flaws in Fish's hermeneutics that were diagnosed in Part I (it is now argued) are consequences of his underlying epistemology. This is a version of anti-foundationalism which claims that facts are the product of interpretation; but a careful study of how this issue is handled by N. R. Hanson and Thomas Kuhn shows that Fish's epistemology is fundamentally unsound. An alternative account of the fact-interpretation relationship is then proposed, and the outline of an objectivist, readerindependent hermeneutics are sketched. This is further developed by showing how a common argument against objectivism (based on the historical situatedness of reason and knowledge) may be refuted.

Ṣedeq and Ṣedaqah in the Hebrew Bible (review)

Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 132 Reviews exegetical papers include: Johannes P. Floss on Exod 3:14; Klaus Baltzer on the vision in Amos 7:7-9 (with reference to an Akkadian Rtar hymn); Jorg Jeremias on Amos 8:4-7 as a commentary on Amos 2:6-7. Psalm studies, having little in common but poetic topics, include Pierfelice Tagliacarne on Psalm 1; Robert C. Culley on Psalm 3; Sigurdur O. Steingrimsson on Psalm 23 ("the priestly portion"); Norbert Lohfink on Psalm 25 and related psalms; Hubert Irsigler on Psalm 93 (as usual, Irsigler is representative of the most fascinating and the most exasperating features of the Richter school); and Gottfried Vanoni on the waw in Ps 149:6. In some cases the structural conclusions about later expansions and reworkings of the Psalms seem hardly to follow from the argument. Further exegetical studies include Harald Schweizer on Song of Songs 4; Armin Schmitt on Wisdom 1:16-2:24 and 4:20-5:23; and Odil Hannes Steck on wisdom and eschatology in Hellenistic texts including Tobit, Sirach, and (remarkably) Psalm 102. M. O'Connor Union Theological Seminary New York, NY 10027 SEDEQ AND SEDAQAH IN THE HEBREW BIBLE. By Ahuva Ho. American University Studies. Series VIT, Theology and Religion, Vol. 78. pp. 212. New York: Lang, 1991. Cloth, $36.95. As the title indicates, this volume is a word study of Pj~ and i1P'~ in the Bible. The author's methodology conforms to the scholarly practice of Hebrew philology that has become standard over the last 25 years. Following James Barr, J. F. A. Sawyer, and others, she considers context to be determinative for discerning the semantic sig~ificance of words. Comparative philology and etymology, covered briefly in chapters 1 and 2, help one understand the historical development of a word's meaning but do not usurp the authority of the context. Ho is not content with a purely synchronic study, nor with the conclusion of other scholars that Pj~ and i1P'''~ are synonyms with little or no difference in meaning (chapter 2). Her purpose is to trace the historical development of the two terms' distinct meanings within each of three main biblical genres: narrative, wisdom, and prophecy. Separate chapters for the two terms within each genre yield chapters 3-8, with an additional chapter Hebrew Studies 36 (1995) 133 Reviews (9) devoted to the phrase m,' n'P1¥ . Within each chapter, she examines the passages in chronological order. In the fmal chapter (10) she presents her conclusions. The choice of organization for categorizing a word's occurrences and meanings is perhaps the most difficult decision the author of a word study must make, and the optimal organization depends on the author's purpose. Ho works with two overlapping categories, genre and date; her goal is to remain sensitive to different historical developments within the different genres. Each of her three broad categories of genre naturally contains many others, but tracing historical development becomes impossible if the categories become too small. Ho does not directly discuss the theories of authorship and dating that underlie her arrangement of passages in chronological order. Sometimes she follows canonical order (e.g., chapter 3), but most of the time she seems to follow "classic" critical reconstructions proposed earlier this century . Another feature that may strike the post-modern reader as slightly anachronistic is her avowal to work "with no pre-assumptions" so as to avoid the situation where "the set of beliefs of the commentator influences his understanding of the text" (pp. 5. 7). In recent years reader-response theory has emphasized that every author (and reviewer) approaches the text from a perspective influenced by educational background and the community of readers to which he or she belongs. Certainly those factors can be expected to have greater impact on the interpretation of a pivotal theological term such as "righteousness." Throughout the work Ho does a good job of pointing out significant words in the contexts that help elucidate the meanings of the two terms under study. Ideally. a semantic study would compare and contrast all the words within a semantic field. However, that often requires a prohibitive amount of research, so Ho cannot...

2 Corinthians 2:14–4:6 and "New Covenant Hermeneutics" —A Response to Richard Hays

Abstract Does 2 Corinthians 3 provide a textual basis within the Pauline corpus for reader-response hermeneutics? This study engages that question by way of dialoguing with Richard B. Hays's monograph, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. Hays's work deals with the question of whether modern Christian readers can "read Scripture as Paul read Scripture." To that end Hays proposes numerous prescriptions and constraints, the most provocative of which is central to the major hermeneutical thesis of his work. He writes (191): "No reading of Scripture can be legitimate if it fails to shape the readers into a community that embodies the love of God as shown forth in Christ." This constraint not only resonates with so-called reader response theories, but is exegetically grounded in Hays's reading of 2 Corinthians 3. This study argues that Hays's community-focused reading of the text does not adequately account for the specifically apostolic and/or Pauline features of 2 Corinthians 2:14 to 4:6. Whatever the merits, on other grounds, of Hays's hermeneutical prescriptions for reading scripture as Paul read scripture, this study argues that a sound exegesis of 2 Corinthians 3 does not in itself provide the ground for the hermeneutical conclusions to which Hays finally comes. The difference between Paul the apostle and the Corinthians as readers of his letters (and us) cannot be so easily effaced.

2 Corinthians 2:14–4:6 and "New Covenant Hermeneutics" —A Response to Richard Hays

Abstract Does 2 Corinthians 3 provide a textual basis within the Pauline corpus for reader-response hermeneutics? This study engages that question by way of dialoguing with Richard B. Hays's monograph, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. Hays's work deals with the question of whether modern Christian readers can "read Scripture as Paul read Scripture." To that end Hays proposes numerous prescriptions and constraints, the most provocative of which is central to the major hermeneutical thesis of his work. He writes (191): "No reading of Scripture can be legitimate if it fails to shape the readers into a community that embodies the love of God as shown forth in Christ." This constraint not only resonates with so-called reader response theories, but is exegetically grounded in Hays's reading of 2 Corinthians 3. This study argues that Hays's community-focused reading of the text does not adequately account for the specifically apostolic and/or Pauline features of 2 Corinthians 2:14 to 4:6. Whatever the merits, on other grounds, of Hays's hermeneutical prescriptions for reading scripture as Paul read scripture, this study argues that a sound exegesis of 2 Corinthians 3 does not in itself provide the ground for the hermeneutical conclusions to which Hays finally comes. The difference between Paul the apostle and the Corinthians as readers of his letters (and us) cannot be so easily effaced.

The Bridge from Text to Mind: Adapting Reader-Response Theory to Consumer Research

Consumer research on advertising response has gradually separated the act of reading an ad from the acquisition of brand information. Because the advertising text is the pathway through which brand information is accessed, current models truncate the process that leads to response in a way that distorts our view of both advertising and the mind that reads it. This author proposes that reader-response theory would help researchers study the process of reading as an essential link between advertising text and consumer response. Reader-response theory is a movement within literary criticism that emphasizes the study of reading over formal textual analysis.

Teaching and Practice: Composing Texts, Composing Lives

In this article, Sondra Perl draws on the work of theorists in composition studies, reader response theory, critical pedagogy, and feminist studies to explicate a pedagogy that incorporates her own learning and development with that of her adult students. She emphasizes not only the importance of her students' responding critically to various literary texts, but also the importance of teachers' critically analyzing the texts of their teaching practice. Perl asserts that a classroom of adult learners has the potential to be a supportive milieu in which both students and teachers use writing as a way of brining their own experience to their interpretation of texts. In this way, Perl believes, students and teachers alike author their coming together, and the classroom becomes a site in which they compose not only texts, but also themselves.

Hermeneutics and Post-Modernism: Can We Have a Radical Reader-Response Theory? Part I

This paper argues that if Stanley Fish's postmodernist hermeneutics is correct then it has far-reaching consequences for Biblical Studies, because it licences radical reinterpretations that traditional approaches would consider inadmissible. The theory is then tested out by examining Fish's own attempts at radical reinterpretation. Following a methodological discussion of the criteria by which his exegesis should be assessed, a wide-ranging survey of Fish's examples shows that they consistently fail to support his claims, and that the nature of their failure suggests that his hermeneutical theory is seriously flawed. This is further proved by showing that Fish's theory entails an extreme form of solipsism.

Reflexive Matriarchal Art as Re-Vision of Nuclear Fear: Stephanie S. Tolan's Pride of the Peacock

Reflexive Matriarchal Art as Re-Vision of Nuclear Fear:Stephanie S. Tolan's Pride of the Peacock William J. Scheick (bio) Recently, books treating nuclear themes for young adults have been criticized as both unoriginal and escapist (Glazer); a more recent related article indicts these books further for failing to convey any depth of emotional deprivation and, especially, for failing to subvert the status quo through their structure and meaning (Bosmajian). Stephanie S. Tolan's Pride of the Peacock (1896) transcends these limitations. This novel concerns the profound emotional impact of Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth on fourteen-year-old Whitney, who has read this hardly escapist work for "a nonfiction book report" (75). Tolan's novel details Whitney's lonely awareness not only of her own nuclear fear but also of others' lack of concern over or their overt denial of the possibility of nuclear destruction. In a ruined garden, Whitney meets Theodora Bourke, a sculptor who is renovating the site as therapy in coping with the violent loss of her husband. Working with Theodora to restore the garden, this paradise lost as it were, Whitney begins to fashion a clearer sense of herself and specifically to sculpt a strategy for expressing her feelings. Tolan's novel, simultaneously activist propaganda and aesthetic achievement, reminds us once again that art and politics can be brilliantly integrated. The reflexivity of Pride of the Peacock provides one mechanism of this integration of art and politics. At a number of points, Tolan's novel alludes to several genres of young-adult fiction, and, accordingly, draws attention to its own relationship to these genres. It mentions the sort of fiction seemingly preferred by young female readers, such as Whitney's friend Allie, who is "forever reading romance novels" (9). Whitney's effort, on [End Page 171] one desperate occasion, "to immerse her brain so thoroughly in [the] mindless mush" of "a teen romance novel" that "she couldn't think" is an indicative failure (39). Through her protagonist and by the example of her own novel, Tolan critiques the girl-boy romance genre as well as all other "escapist fiction"—including spy thrillers, mysteries, and science fiction—urged upon Whitney by various male characters (26). In the process of its own narrative, Pride of the Peacock revises such fiction for young adults. Tolan particularly targets the comfortable closure conventionally provided by popular escapist fiction. Her own book, in contrast, withholds any simple solution to the question of nuclear fear. In this respect, Tolan's fictional art mimics Schell's documentary art, as described by Whitney: "She was sure at the end of the book there would be an answer, the thing that would save her and everybody else and the earth. But the author didn't have the answer. He didn't even say for sure there was one" (5). In Tolan's novel, a deep friendship is formed between two women, and a communal female aesthetic, as we shall see, is offered as one progressive response to the ruined garden of the status quo; however, nothing in Tolan's book amounts to a sure solution. Its reader is left only with a tentative hope that a matriarchal aesthetics might "push the darkness back a little" (182, emphasis added). Both Whitney's adjustment and the world's redemption remain uncertain. The implied reader, in short, cannot close Tolan's book with a comfortable mental resolution concerning Whitney's or the world's fate. This discomfort, the result of resisting the conventions of young-adult fiction, is one means Tolan employs to revise the expectations of her readers. In terms of reader-response theory, the provocation of dissatisfaction in a reader through managed absences can potentially lead to reflection that, in effect, invites "the reader to participate not only in the viewing but in the making of the novelistic universe" (Iser 111-12). Mental reflection is crucial if Tolan is to attain a new readership for her kind of book, a readership distinct from the passive consumers (such as Allie) of escapist fiction. This reflexivity in Tolan's work also instructs future authors on the need, as imaged in Theodora's ruined garden...

Reading patients--cautions and concerns.

Reading Patients— Cautions and Concerns Anne Hudson Jones Inaugural Address of the Harriet W. Sheridan Literature and Medicine Lectureship and Forum Brown University 6 April 1994 It's a great pleasure to be here today for this special occasion: the endowment of the Harriet W Sheridan Literature and Medicine Lectureship and Forum. I wish that I had known Harriet Sheridan. From all I have heard about her, she sounds like a wonderful teacher, scholar, colleague, and friend. It is an honor to give this year's lecture in her name and to help continue the work she started here. Dean Epstein has told me that the physician-writer John Stone spoke here last year and that plans are for this newly endowed lectureship to alternate between someone from medicine and someone from literature. Because I know how eloquent a writer and presenter John Stone is, I am sure that he got things off to a splendid start. No one likes to take the podium after John Stone—not even a year later. But a major theme of my lecture today is the importance of listening to different voices, of making our conversations about medicine and literature dialogic, and of honoring the patient's perspective and story. In the dialogic spirit, then, I add my voice to the literature-andmedicine conversation that John Stone initiated here last year and that—thanks to the endowment we celebrate today—others will carry on in the future. In the early years of the effort to secure a place for literature among the humanities disciplines in medical education, several of its advocates—Joanne Trautmann Banks, Stephen L. Daniel, James S. Terry and Edward L. Gogel, Rita Charon, Kathryn Montgomery Hunter, and myself, among others—tried to explain why it is important for medical students and physicians to read literature. One of the most persuasive claims we made is that learning to read and interpret literary texts Literature and Medicine 13, no. 2 (Fall 1994) 190-200 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Anne Hudson Jones 191 develops skills analogous to those physicians use in their clinical work, especially in making diagnoses. Joanne Trautmann argued, in 1979, that "to teach a student to read, in the fullest sense, is to help train him or her medically." She maintained that reading in the fullest sense would help students "to develop a tolerance for ambiguity and to learn how to come to conclusions when the data are incomplete or capable of being interpreted variously."1 In 1986, Stephen L. Daniel published an article titled "The Patient as Text," in which he proposed a hermeneutical model of the patient as text that may require four levels of interpretation, in accord with medieval schema: literal; diagnostic (allegorical); prognostic and therapeutic (moral); and change in life-world (analogical).2 That same year, in an article subtitled "The Physician as Textual Critic," Kathryn Montgomery Hunter argued that medicine is an interpretive activity in which doctors function as literary critics and theorists of patients, who are their texts.3 Thus, both in their titles and their arguments, these two articles made the analogy explicit: the patient as text; the physician as reader, interpreter, and critic. The next year, 1987, James S. Terry and Edward L. Gogel published a pair of articles—one in Literature and Medicine, the other in the Journal of Philosophy and Medicine—about physicians' interpreting patients as texts.4 In their article for Literature and Medicine, they discussed "skills development" as a justification for studying literature and medicine and then went on to compare in some detail the process of explicating poetry to the process of diagnosing patients. Also in 1987, I published the first article in which I characterized these claims as "the aesthetic approach" and contrasted them with what I call "the ethical approach" to the use of literature in medical education.5 In 1989, using ideas from reader-response theory, Rita Charon wrote about the doctor as reader, the patient as writer, and argued that the patient, not the illness, is the text.6 Perhaps the culmination of this line of development was Kathryn Montgomery Hunter's 1991 book, Doctors' Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical...

This Is Not a Book Review: On Historical Uses of LiteratureThe Family Romance of the French Revolution. Lynn Hunt

In terms of disciplinary interaction, Lynn Hunt's The Family Romance of the French Revolution represents genuine advance in an important area-namely, readiness to rely on existing literary studies where they seem to address matters of immediate interest to historical argument.' Too often such work has reflected an implicit asymmetry. Historians, even those working in the cultural field and drawing frequently on literary theory, have too often had no time for scholarship produced by literary specialists, sometimes in consequence setting out to discover de novo features of texts that had been well established in the critical literature. When Robert Damton launches into readers' responses to Rousseau's novel Julie, he mentions several critics who make use of reader-response theory and even four examples of work conceming Rousseau; but these are all lumped together into the first footnote, and that is the end of it. It is not enough to acknowledge in this way that literary studies exist; some use has to be made of them. The letters he cites from the Neuchatel archive are interesting enough, but the kind of reader reactions he purports to discover in them had long been well documented.2 The problem is not so much ill will as certain patronizing attitude toward research of literary nature, which, it is conceded, might be relevant but is not thought likely to be useful; it implies that while one must be scrupulous in consulting and citing historical scholarship, the same respect need not be accorded to work done elsewhere. This dialogue is presented in the spirit of what Pierre Bourdieu called a new genre, free scientific confrontation: objections are put forth, to which the author agrees to respond.3 It is hardly new genre if one remembers the kind of lengthy exchange that used to characterize joumals in the philological tradition, with give and take on particular points and much more detailed comment and debate than

Subjects without selves: transitional texts in modern fiction

Gabriele Schwab responds to the question of how aesthetic forms contribute to different kinds of cultural knowledge with an analysis of the nature of subjectivity in modernist fiction. Drawing on French and Anglo-American psychoanalysis as well as reader response theory, she explores the relationship between language and subjectivity and in so doing illuminates the cultural politics and psychological functions implicit in the aesthetic practices and literary forms of modernism and postmodernism. result of this exploration is a new understanding of the function of literature as a form of cultural knowledge. Schwab demonstrates how literature creates a space where the boundaries of language and subjectivity are continually shaped and reshaped on both an individual and a cultural level. Modern and postmodern experimental texts, in particular, fulfill this function through the multifarious exploration of the boundaries of poetic language and their opening to the unconscious. Undertaking what she terms a literary ethnography of the decentred subject, Schwab examines five novels: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Virginia Woolf's The Waves, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Schwab demonstrates how the aesthetic figurations of unconscious experience in these generate new forms of literary language and an aesthetic reception that is directly relevant to an increasingly global and hybridized culture. In her concluding chapter, which introduces the notion of textual ecologies, Schwab analyzes the literary subjectivity of transitional texts in light of such contemporary theories as systems theory, cybernetics, and the new physics. From this perspective, such not only reflect cultural practices but take part in shaping their change and innovation.

Rereading (review)

Reviewed by: Rereading Wallace Martin Matei Calinescu . Rereading. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. xvi + 327 pp. $30.00. During the past twenty-five years, reader-response theory and the aesthetics of reception have taught us a great deal about reading, but as Calinescu notes, they have not had much to say about rereading. The first is usually associated with a linear first reading (spurred by interest in knowing what happens next), and rereading with reflection on formal and thematic architectonics. But the two cannot be neatly separated: if we know other works by the writer or relevant intertexts, our first reading is already a double one. Exploration of this topic leads to consideration of the history of rereading, as it has evolved since Quintilian wrote that "we must return to what we have read and reconsider it with care." The first four chapters provide a survey of these issues and the ways they have been addressed by Ingarden, Iser, Jauss, and Barthes. Part Two of the book begins with an account of how, with the invention of printing and the spread of literacy, rereading (of the Bible) became the norm: "Luther made necessary what Gutenberg had made possible." But at the end of the eighteenth century, "a new kind of extensive reading became increasingly widespread," and in our own time, most of what is read is not reread. The act of reading involves a host of variables—the age and sex of the reader, the circumstances and purpose of the activity, the psychological states and kinds of attention involved—that make it difficult to develop a "poetics of reading" (the subject of the eighth chapter). Calinescu's main concern is rereading when undertaken for pleasure—which might serve as a heuristic description of what we do when engaged with "literature." He explores the creation and consumption of fictional texts as forms of play, in the multiple senses the word has acquired since Schiller. Readers absorb the conventions and "facts" that a text posits to establish its autonomy as a fictional world. Writers like Borges and Nabokov seem deliberately to challenge us in games of concealment and revelation, evoking other fictional worlds in their intertextual play. Opposed to the selfconscious rereading they elicit is the symbolic play found in children's games and what I call "rapt reading"—total absorption in, and identification with, a world of make-believe. These poles of playful and absorbed reading have non-literary analogues in social, psychological, and even zoological behavior, as Erving Goffman, Freud, Piaget, Bateson, and others have shown. [End Page 455] The fourth part of the book treats the ways that secrecy shapes writing and reading. Texts lead us on by exciting our curiosity, disclosing some things to all readers, yet sometimes seeming to hold revelations in reserve for the writer's fans, initiates of particular sects, or those able to unravel hidden messages and thus number themselves among the elect. The distinction between insiders and outsiders is crucial here, as is that between intentional and unintentional self- revelation. Discoveries readers make may be self-mystifications, as when an over-zealous hermeneutic of suspicion produces a projection of paranoia, or group-think. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Calinescu calls attention to relevant examples from non-literary domains (Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus ; the writings of Leo Strauss). Sections treating texts by Borges, Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, and Henry James provide revealing applications of the argument. On my own shelves, Rereading will be flanked by books on reader response and reception theory on one side, and, on the other, books such as Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot , Kermode's Genesis of Secrecy , Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe, and Pavel's Fictional Worlds. In its broadest implications, it is an anthropology (or even zoology) of fiction and a phenomenology of reading; at its narrowest, it proposes a pragmatic aesthetics that shows how domains of everyday life are selectively superimposed to produce the realm traditionally called literary. Wallace Martin University of Toledo Copyright © 1994 Purdue Research Foundation

GENDER SCHEMA AND READING

ABSTRACT The author's quirky reading of Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner is investigated in terms of reader response and gender schema theory. The connections between these two theories are exemplified. Researchers attest to the pervasiveness of the gender schema, and the effects of gender schema on memory are presented in summaries of empirical studies with subjects from four age groups (kindergartners, fifth graders, high school students, and college students). These studies suggest that people use stereotypes and gender‐based identification in encoding, retrieving, and making inferences from information. Qualitative research on differences in male and female responses to literary texts tentatively concludes that males are more likely to attend to the author “behind” a narrative, while females enter the experiential world of the narrative, in which the author is transparent. Also, men respond to disturbing narratives through several dominating and rejecting strategies rarely used by females,...

In the subjunctive mode: Epilepsy narratives in Turkey

Careful analysis of transcripts of interviews we conducted with a sample of persons identified as suffering epilepsy or seizure disorders in an epidemiological study in Turkey revealed not only that life stories of illness have an overall narrative structure but that the interviews were composed as a corpus of shorter stories. Analytic concepts from reader response theory bring attention to aspects of both the overall life story and the stories told about illness. In particular, we identify ‘subjunctivizing tactics’ present in the narrative representation of illness that allow sufferers and their families to justify continued care-seeking and to maintain hope for positive, even ‘miraculous,’ outcomes. In particular, these narratives maintain multiple perspectives and the potential for multiple readings, suggesting alternative plots about source and outcome of illness, and they represent potency and the possibilities for healing through stories of encounters with the mysterious.

Meaning in Henry James (review)

120 The Henry James Review authority that can determine meaning. But Chapman's book tends to cover up the strain of the ensuant writer-reader relationship, to hide James's will to power over readers and the world by evoking a mutuality of purpose. The book too easily highlights an already achieved collaboration, and too readily downplays the painful ambiguities of a world where authority is in question and raw materialism decides the fate of the arts. Chapman's resolution of the central ambiguities of James's stories has the advantage of producing eminently clear prose that would surely be a help to Jamesian neophytes; for better or worse, her prose has none of the densities of much poststructuralist analysis. Chapman's clarity seems to have been purchased, however, at the price of reducing James's work to some unexamined generalizations about the nature of art and power and of reader response, and of reducing James's painful ambiguities to a "convergence through the recognition of shared, mutually reinforcing intellectual and artistic ideals [that] creates the opportunity for human relations that are 'exquisitely personal,' as James describes them in 'The Great Good Place' " (54). Isn't it pretty to think we can have such relations? Donald Wolff Eastern Oregon State College Bell, Millicent. Meaning in Henry James. Harvard U P, 1991.384 pp. $45.00. Millicent Bell's Meaning in Henry James is a welcome addition to James scholarship. A substantial and well-researched book, it provides sensitive and thoughtprovoking interpretations of James's fictions. Meaning in Henry James explores the creation of meaning in James's writings, and employs close textual readings to support its author's attempt "to display how a story or novel of James's arouses expectations in us, stimulates us to hypotheses of its further course, and seems to propose and cancel meanings at successive moments" (10). Bell is a careful reader and her analysis of the varieties of ways in which James's texts achieve meaning is eloquent and persuasive. Bell's focus on the experience of reading James's fiction leads her to examine the ways in which meaning is constructed, re-constructed, and even deconstructed in James's texts. She contends that the process of decoding fiction is "open" (8) and that, ultimately, James's writings "resist summary and closure" (11). Bell's critical approach constitutes a blend of reader-response theory and New Critical technique, which enables her to trace the movement she discerns in James's prose, a movement that is "dictated by the author's language, which—like all language—brings not only immediate meanings to mind but expectations of future, more comprehensive frames of significance' ' (10). This is a laborious project and, in order to support her endeavor, the author examines the ways in which James's writings are "dynamically intertextual," by which she means that "they propose to the reader not one stable antecedent, but a sequence of possible relationships with cultural models of human experience, of character types and paradigmatic life histories, of literary genres and archetypal narratives, and even of specific literary models" (23). Meaning in Henry James supplies historical, biographical, and textual information on its subject. The author frequently draws parallels between James's readers and his characters, for, she contends, the Jamesian reader ' 'is encouraged to constantly renew efforts to integrate and interpret James's narratives, just as the fictional characters themselves B ook Reviews 121 struggle for self-definition" (42). Bell demonstrates how James's characters frequently engage in acts of reading much like the Jamesian reader, and she illustrates how both are engaged in efforts to construct meaning. Meaning in Henry James includes analyses of Daisy Miller, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Wings of the Dove, and The Ambassadors. While Bell devotes less attention to the early writings, her reading of Daisy Miller is particularly sensitive and allows her to explore the analogies that exist between James's and Winterbourne's attempts to typify Daisy. In so doing, she argues for the tale's topicality, since she believes that James's text manifests a parallel with contemporary readers' tendencies ' 'to place others in...

In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800-1940.

Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, and others have written much on the history of reading the Old Regime, but this is the first broad study of reading to focus on the period after 1800. How and why did people understand texts as they did modern France? In answering this question, James Allen moves easily from one framework to another and draws on a wide range of sources--novels, diaries, censor reports, critical reviews, artistic images, accounts of public and private readings, and the letters that readers sent to authors about their books. As he analyzes reading in the public eye, the author explores the formation of interpretive communities during the years when reading silently and alone gradually became more common than reading aloud a group. In the Public Eye discusses printing, publishing, literacy, schooling, criticism, and censorship, to study the social, cultural, economic, and political forces that shaped French practice. Examining the art and act of reading by different audiences, it discloses the mentalities of literate people for whom few other historical records exist. The book will be essential reading for those interested modern French history, post-structuralist literary theory and criticism, reader-response theory and criticism, and social and intellectual history general.Originally published 1991.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding 1905.

Reader-Response Theory as Antidote to Controversy: Teaching "The Bluest Eye"

The continual, if usually dormant, threat of censorship poses one of the most hair-raising problems for any high-school English teacher, not only because of the moral obligation to support freedom of speech as one of the tenets of our profession, but also because the more controversial (and therefore more likely to be censored) a work is, the more able its teacher must be to justify it in terms of its importance to a student's education. During the first four years that I taught, I had no particular difficulty in justifying either to myself, to students, or to parents, the value of any work I taught. In fact, I have seldom-if ever-even worried about the possibility of controversy associated with anything I was teaching. However, this year our highschool English department added Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye to the curriculum of the eleventhand twelfth-grade American Literature course I was teaching, and for the first time I was faced with the responsibility of teaching a work of literature which I knew was likely to arouse parental objection. Our department had been wanting to add to the curriculum a major work by an African American writer, and this particular one was recommended by our visiting committee during the North Central Association review. The committee's recommenda-

Reader Response Theory: Some Practical Applications for the High School Literature Classroom

Reader Response Theory: Some Practical Applications for the High School Literature Classroom

Foolscap Subjects: A Story of Reading Byron’s Don Juan

FOOLSCAP SUBJECTS: A STORY OF READING BYRON’S DON JUAN C A T H E R IN E A D D IS O N University of the Western Gape T he difference between oral and written communication, we are told bytheorists from Walter J. Ong to Jacques Derrida, is that in the oral situa­ tion the speaker enjoys the unique power to dominate the listener with his “presence.” Of course, a speaker cannot invariably count on wielding this power unsubverted, as all teachers will acknowledge; he can never be abso­ lutely confident of the listener’s attention, even when his audience is gazing at him with what appears to be rapt interest. Nevertheless, the theory is persuasive, because in an oral situation both speaker and listener are present at the same time, and this interval of shared present time is measured out by the cadences of the speaker’s voice. As in music, if there are pauses, these too form part of the measured temporal continuum. Thus, whoever happens to be speaking dominates whoever is listening, because the speaker imposes his own lived time on the listener’s. In written communication, sender and receiver are always divided by a temporal hiatus, unless the reader is actually reading over the writer’s shoul­ der. The writer writes, and the reader reads, in solitude. In the reader’s solitude her present is the present of the text. She may — and, with a long text, will have to — deform the text’s continuum by breaking off from read­ ing and returning to it; she may skip pages, read the last part first, or commit any atrocity on order and continuity that she chooses. (The worst offenders in this line are probably critics and literature students, who, in the process of writing a paper on a particular text, deform reading into an erratic process of flipping and scanning, marking up and collecting of sam­ ples.) Everything that seems to “live” in, for example, a fictional text, lives parasitically on the reader’s life; she is alone with a dead book by a dead author. The fictions generated by the reading are fictions — or figments — of the reader’s stimulated imagination. And yet these figments may take on a life that paradoxically makes hers seem passive and derivative. The phenomenologist Georges Poulet writes of a sense of “possession” that takes him as soon as he starts to read a book. He experiences a “strange invasion of [his] person by the thoughts of another.” He feels himself become one with the subject in the text to the extent that the that he pronounces signifies not himself but this speaker (56-57). E n g l i s h S t u d i e s in C a n a d a , 19, 3 , S e p t e m b e r 1993 Poulet’s lack of alienation may be unique, but his sense of domination by the subject, narrator, persona, or “author-function” while he reads is not. The attempts to liberate readers from domination by text and author that constitute much of reader-response theory have not been entirely successful, as Jonathan Culler notes in On Deconstruction. According to Culler, “stories of reading,” such as Stanley Fish’s, that set out to invest the reader with radical freedom invariably end up asserting the power of the text. He writes: The story of manipulation will always reassert itself, first because it is a much better story, full of dramatic encounters, moments of deception, and reversals of fortune, second, because it deals more easily and precisely with details of meaning, and third, because this sort of narrative confers value on the temporal experience of reading. A reader who creates everything learns nothing, but one who is continually encountering the unexpected can make momentous, unsettling findings. (72) Clearly, the manipulator in this kind of story is not always, as Culler sug­ gests, an inanimate text, but often, as in Poulet’s experience, a fictional person speaking through the text — perhaps because the story of the trick­ ster is a better story than that of the magically empowered object. This paper is an attempt to tell a...