Reader-response Theory Research Articles

Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England by Stephen B. Dobranski (review)

REVIEWS 243 perception, the individual becomes its own authority (thus lessening the need to appeal to authorities such as Aristotle). In addition, “the very distinction between intuitive and abstractive becomes meaningless” (156). Denery asserts Nicholas recognizes appearances mark a limit of what we can know about the world (160), and thus speculates there is no connection between theory and truth. There is only a “hierarchy of intellects … in order to avoid a complete relativization of truth” (164). He concludes only scripture, and not other study, can lead to complete truth. Denery’s conclusion states that Nicholas’s argument returns Denery’s own book to where it began—with the Dominicans’ ambivalence toward the value of studying. Seeing and Being Seen in the Late Medieval World makes a strong case for the influence that perspectivist optics, theology, and religious practice had on the conception of the European medieval self, whether that self was a layperson, a preacher, or a theologian. While more technical and less accessible in the later chapters, this interdisciplinary study will prove valuable to medievalists examining the era from either a scientific, literary, or philosophical point-of-view. VALERIE CULLEN, English, UCLA Stephen B. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005) xiii + 226 pp., ill. Arguing from silence is probably the scholar’s most difficult task; nonetheless, Stephen Dobranski has set for himself the task of investigating silence in early modern English writings and arguing, not so much from it as about it. Neither does he seek to examine the metaphors of silence or absence in these writings, but actual missing bits from published pieces. As Dobranski notes, the fact that two of England’s greatest writers’ works (Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales and Spenser in The Faerie Queene) were published in incomplete texts “presumably provided sufficient precedent for later Renaissance stationers and writers who wanted to take incomplete works to press” (4). It is these deliberate lacunae and their roles in both readerly and authorial authority into which Dobranski seeks to delve. Reader response theory has, particularly since the last half of the twentieth century, sought to identify the reader’s role in creating meaning in a text, sometimes to the extent of denying any meaning-making power to the writer her or himself. Of course, few people would deny any authority to the author, but by shifting the emphasis to the reader, theorists evolved new theories of communication that rejected a simplistic transmission of meaning through a code, as it were, of words that must, inevitably, mean particular things. Not just the authors but the readers, we began to acknowledge, play distinct roles in creating the meaning of a text—and the meanings of the reader might well be just as or even more provocative and interesting than those of the author. This acknowledgement takes on particular potency when dealing with blank spaces in texts—whether left blank by intention, by loss of interest, or by the accident of death. Of course, the impulse of readers to fill in the blanks is nothing new, as Dobranski reminds us. Editions of “completed” Canterbury Tales were common , but we can note even further back the tendency of the medieval religious REVIEWS 244 establishment to create stories about the “lost years” of Jesus that are not in the scriptural canon. What is new in the early modern period, Dobranski suggests, is the combination of increased authority for the writer—indeed, much has been written on the writer’s increasing control over publication and ownership of a work. The tension, then, between the expanding authority of the writer and the ongoing willingness of the reader to make meaning provides the locus of Dobranski’s investigation. The deliberate publication of texts with omissions constitutes not only an openly acknowledged invitation to the reader’s authority to create meaning, but also, Dobranski argues, a tool by which the author inserts his or her own authority. He suggests that “both authors and readers gained considerable authority during the early modern period and … the two phenomena were reciprocal” (12). The first chapter, which provides a background to this argument, investigates the shifting role of the reader during the...

Leonora, Lydia et les autres: Etudes sur le (nouveau) roman anglais du XVIIIe siècle (Leonora, Lydia and the Others: Studies on the (new) Eighteenth-Century British Novel) by Alain Bony

298 flies Jorik [the protagonist] back to Budapest he is having a conversation with the stewardess: ‘If you need anything just ring the bell.’ . . . ‘I will, answered I.’ ‘I beg your pardon?—turned the beautiful reddish-blond to me and when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the stewardess’.’’ That is just plain wonderful. Melvyn New University of Florida ALAIN BONY. Leonora, Lydia et les autres: Etudes sur le (nouveau) roman anglais du XVIIIe siècle (Leonora, Lydia and the Others: Studies on the (new) EighteenthCentury British Novel). Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2004. Pp. 394. 25⫽ C. Mr. Bony has gathered some of his narratological writings from 1977 to 2000, those analyzing the links between formal statements made by authors and their fiction, in a splendid book that has been awarded the 2005 ‘‘prix de la recherche SAES/AFEA.’’ Authors are discussed chronologically to examine the developing perception of what Mr. Bony playfully calls ‘‘le (nouveau) roman anglais.’’ Under various guises in the spirited Prologue and Epilogue, the heroines of the title pop up from library scenes in order to reveal the tastes of the reading public: the Spectator’s Leonora reemerges in Joseph Andrews, Lydia appears in both Smollett and Sheridan, Lenox’s Arabella in The Female Quixote has a servant called Lucy just like the girl who gets books from circulating libraries for Lydia Melford. Romances and novels, serious works and trifles , worn-out books and wooden ones are jumbled in this ‘‘[r]ummage through the library’’ and in the final ‘‘The Eternal Return or the Insatiable Desire for Reading.’’ Exploring the relationship between ‘‘news,’’ ‘‘novel,’’ and ‘‘novelty’’ in the early periodical press, Mr. Bony argues that the way news was gradually fictionalized in the Tatler and the role given to readers from the beginning of the Spectator make Steele and Addison the initiators of reader-response theory. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift ‘‘deconstructed in advance the diverse forms’’ of the genre to come. Emphasizing Defoe’s narrative insouciance and ‘‘false starts,’’ Mr. Bony shows how Defoe laid the foundations of the adventure novel with Captain Singleton, the historical novel with Memoirs of a Cavalier, both the sentimental novel and the educational novel with Colonel Jack, the roman à thèse with Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders, and the roman noir with Roxana. The Preface to Joseph Andrews, considered ‘‘poetics of the (new) novel,’’ is a springboard for Mr. Bony to consider Fielding and Richardson as a ‘‘paradoxical pair.’’ While Richardson legitimized his text by ‘‘exalting’’ it like its heroine, Fielding imposed his through ‘‘generic engineering,’’ forcing it into the literary tradition and foregrounding literature as a matter of textual structures rather than moral lessons. The same text can be read as both romance and novel. ‘‘The ambivalences of sentimentalism’’ argues that the Lockean primacy of subjectivity contains the seeds of Sade and examines how sentimentalism delayed and often thwarted this evolution. A much earlier, partly Lacanian reading of Sterne’s texts on the intertwining of sexuality and textuality is followed by a chapter on the texture of Tristram Shandy, ‘‘a book which displays in its middle a reminder of its medium in- 299 stead of its message,’’ and the marbled page, a metaphor sustained by references to squirts, knots, hinges, and seams. Smollett’s definition of the novel in Ferdinand Count Fathom provides ‘‘a generic norm of which individual works can only give impure and bastard illustrations’’(Tom Jones is the unmentioned standard). In Humphry Clinker, the ‘‘epistolary polyphony’’ puts the reader in the position of the ‘‘principal personage,’’ endowed with the same kind of unifying power as the narrator of Tom Jones, which illustrates in advance Henry James’s conception of the ‘‘novel as a living thing.’’ The Epilogue reluctantly ranks Richardson and Sterne above Fielding for the novelty of the new novel. In order to spare the heroines the sad destiny of Victorian ‘‘angels in the house,’’ Mr. Bony closes the library, having illuminated the eighteenth-century novel in a series of diffracted studies. Sadly, the library of his mind was untimely closed when he passed away on March 19, 2006. He was Emeritus Professor of English Literature, at the Universite...

The Reception of Reader-Response Theory

This essay offers a historical explanation for the place of reader-response theory in English studies. Reader-response was a part of two movements: the (elitist) theory boom of the 1970s and the (populist) political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. If the theory boom was to remain elitist, it had to deauthorize reader-response. If reader-response was to remain populist, it had to consent to and participate in that deauthorization. In the 1980s reader-response was popular among compositionists, even as it began to lose currency among theorists. Later, however, compositionists professionalized themselves by deemphasizing, or even ignoring, reading. Now, as the profession again considers including explicit instruction in reading in the introductory writing course, the thinkers who could help us most have faded from the discussion.

The Aesthetics of Chaos: Nonlinear Thinking and Contemporary Literary Criticism (review)

Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Chaos: Nonlinear Thinking and Contemporary Literary Criticism Danielle Follett Michael Patrick Gillespie, The Aesthetics of Chaos: Nonlinear Thinking and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Gainsville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 2003. 140 pages. One of the fundamental ideas of chaos theory is the "butterfly effect," first proposed by Edward Lorenz in the 1960s: a single, small event may yield exponentially enlarged effects, just as the single flap of a butterfly's wings may produce vast, unpredictable ramifications in weather patterns far away. Theorists of literature and culture who derive their conceptual framework from chaos theory are now performing the butterfly effect: a few suggestions on the part of certain physicists and biologists have inspired an exponentially growing literature of metaphorical applications in faraway fields. The Aesthetics of Chaos makes the salutory attempt to restrain, summarize, and unify the multivarious aesthetic theories of chaos. What is offered is not only a series of readings of disparate texts analyzed through the concepts provided by chaos theory, as is the case with most "chaotics" or poetics of chaos, but a generalized theory of reading and textual meaning that hails an ongoing "paradigmatic shift" (110) from linear to nonlinear thinking, from "cause-and-effect logic" to unpredictability and the logic of catastrophes, from a "Cartesian" and "Newtonian" paradigm to one based in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, from restrictive univalence to "multiple interpretive potential" [End Page 1106] (18), and from interpretive exclusiveness to inclusiveness. Without limiting his material to postmodern narrative, which has been the most fertile ground for studies in "chaotics"—his analysis encompasses readings of Joyce, fairy tales, Beowulf, Job, and Wilde—and without falling into the trap of elaborating exact correspondences between scientific concepts and their literary applications, Gillespie uses the scientific framework to provide a broad and ambitious theorization of reading and of the nature of the literary text. It is a merit of The Aesthetics of Chaos to make explicit its own lineage through the history of literary theory and not only its derivation from nonlinear dynamics. In the first chapter, entitled "How Do We Talk About What We Read?", Gillespie simultaneously traces his descendence from Pater, Wilde, Barthes, and reader-response theorists, and indicts a wide range of twentieth-century critics for their "exclusionary linearity" (9) and general critical "determinism." Even Deconstruction, in presupposing the center it proposes to smash, succumbs to (traditional) binary thinking and employs the second law of thermodynamics "with a vengeance, pursu[ing] a relentlessly entropic approach to the nature of meaning" (11). According to Gillespie, "Deconstruction has never reconciled the clash between its impulse to read subjectively while speaking objectively. My study rests on the assertion that speaking subjectively is just as valid as perceiving subjectively" (11-12). Essentially a radical reader-response theory, this poetics of chaos criticizes all theories that "give primacy to a single perspective" (13) and finds even the ideas of Iser, Jauss, and Fish to be "too static, too bound to linearity, to acknowledge the freedom inherent in an individual's experience with literature" (12). Rather, "[v]iewing a literary work as a chaotic system disrupts the prescriptive, narrowing impulse of the conventional interpretive approach that continually tightens its focus as it moves toward a specific conclusion" (19). What makes Gillespie's reader-response theory radical is that he explicitly follows its logic to its necessary conclusion: "every interpretive effort changes the text under consideration so that every reading is literally of a different text" (108). Central to this line of thinking is a certain interpretation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Schrödinger's thought experiment about the fate of the cat, whose state as living or dead is objectively indeterminate until an observer looks in its box—that is, that the act of perception or subjective determination is solely responsible for the objective determination or identity of an object. Schrödinger devised his thought experiment to demonstrate the absurdity of this claim, which was subsequently rehabilitated positively by other scientists such as Niels Bohr; by applying this logic in broad strokes to textual studies, Gillespie returns a sense of absurdity both to the claim and to reader-response theory. In chaos theory, however, the...

Magic realism in children's literature: A narratological reading

This paper discusses the occurrence of magic realism in children's literature. It argues that the structure of such texts is a major factor in both determining the presence of magic realism and in allowing the merging of realism and fantasy found in such texts. Drawing on the theories of narratology and reader response, this paper examines the nature of the implied reader for such texts and demonstrates how existing criticism of magic realism can be employed when analysing children's literature texts. This paper concludes that magic realism in children's literature has its own discrete codes, which distinguish it from both existing magic realist texts and fantasy texts.

John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal (review)

Reviewed by: John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal Eamonn Wall John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal by Eamon Maher , pp 191. Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2003. Distributed by Dufour Editions, Chester Springs PA. $21.95 (paper). Under the general editorship of Eugene O' Brien, Contemporary Irish Writers and Film Makers is a new series from Liffey Press that provides substantial critical introductions to the work of notable contemporary Irish writers. Each volume in the series thus far serves as a perfect introduction to the work of the given author, including a chronological examination of the artist's development, and a detailed critical apparatus. Eamon Maher's discussion of McGahern's work is no exception: it is an impeccably researched, appreciative, and well-written. It is a critical study that in its attitude merges the best aspects of traditional literary scholarship with Reader-Response Theory: the result is a passionate and fluent explication of McGahern's work. In addition to Maher's critical narrative,the volume includes a chronological tracing of McGahern's career and an interview with his subject. Although his first novel, The Barracks, was published in 1963 to critical acclaim, McGahern's early work has been overwhelmed by the success of his recent novels, Amongst Women (1990) and That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002) published in the United States as By the Lake, and his first commercial success here. Since 1990, McGahern has been awarded important literary prizes, been the recipient of honorary degrees from Irish and French universities, and been appointed a member of the Arts Council. Maher notes that "there comes a stage in a writer's career where he or she is acknowledged as being capable of producing 'great literature'-this is now the case with McGahern. Only William Trevor among contemporary Irish writers enjoys a similar stature." His reputation is undeniable among fiction writers and carries with it, albeit quietly, the visionary and moral force of an artist who has always favored the resonant over the fashionable. Throughout his career, the locations of his novels and short-stories have remained constant to those parts of the West encompassed by counties [End Page 152] Roscommon, Leitrim, Sligo, and Dublin on occasion, though the capital is usually where a protagonist lives while his eyes are still cast westward to the family home. At the same time, McGahern's rural Ireland is purposely not well delineated for the reader. It is not always easy to know where one is exactly in his fiction, for the simple reason that the characters in his work know exactly where they are and have no need to describe their place to each other. In Amongst Women, for example, one does not really know if the departing Morans leave from the train station at Boyle, or Carrick-on-Shannon, or elsewhere; what is important is that they know where they are and that we as readers are allowed to enter into their world and lives. The center of Dublin, on the other hand, is a neutral territory and well-known to everyone. There is a similar constancy to be found in the characters that populate McGahern's fiction: his farmers, guards, forlorn lovers, stepmothers, and children appear and reappear throughout his work, sharing names, gestures, beliefs and profound measures of complexity. The world McGahern describes can be cruel, claustrophobic, and quite terrifying; however, it rings true to Irish experience, particularly in the West, in the decades of postcolonial confusion that lasted from the 1920s until the 1970s or so. Declan Kiberd has compared McGahern "to one of those painters of the Renaissance who tried to do one painting over and over until they got it near to perfection." As both Kiberd and Maher point out, McGahern gives voice to an Ireland that is fading from view, writing both its tangled narrative and its joyful requiem. Until the appearance of That They May Face the Rising Son, his novels are dominated by disappointed and disillusioned fathers who—because they cannot control the movement of the world outside the home—rule the home by means of fury and silence. In many of his novels, the farms or houses...

Crossing cultures: creating identity in Chinese and Jewish American literature

In this important new study, Judith Oster looks at the literature of Chinese Americans and Jewish Americans in relation to each other. Examining what is most at issue for both groups as they live between two cultures, languages, and environments, Oster focuses on the struggles of protagonists to form identities that are necessarily bicultural and always in process. Oster contends that the writers of these works are attempting to construct, through their texts, some sort of wholeness and to answer at least partially the questions Who am I? and Where do I belong? Among the figures Oster considers are writers of autobiographical works like Maxine Hong Kingston and Eva Hoffman and writers of fiction: Amy Tan, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Lan Samantha Chang, and Frank Chin. In explicating their work, Oster uses Lacan's idea of the mirror stage, research in language acquisition and bilingualism, the reader-response theories of Iser and Wimmers, and the identity theories of Charles Taylor, Emile Benveniste, and others. Oster provides detailed analyses of mirrors and doubling in bicultural texts; the relationships between language and identity and between language and culture; and code-switching and interlanguage (English expressed in a foreign syntax). She discusses food and hunger as metaphors that express the urgent need to hear and tell stories. She also shows how American schooling can undermine the home culture's deepest values, exacerbating children's conflicts within their families and within themselves. In a chapter on theories of autobiography, Oster looks at the act of writing and how the page becomes a home that bicultural writers create for themselves. This engaging, readable work is a valuable contribution to multicultural literary criticism.

An emerging framework for human becoming criticism.

This column presents a new framework for researchers to consider as a guide when participating in the process of scholarly critique. The framework is aligned with the philosophical view of Gadamerian hermeneutics. The emerging framework, consistent with the human becoming school of thought, builds on ideas from literary theory, specifically reception or reader-response theory, and the human becoming hermeneutic method. Three processes- sketching the horizon of expectation, illuminating artistic disclosure, and enhancing the original with artform-guide reviewers to bring forth the contributions of the researcher and to enhance the researcher's contribution with artform. The emerging framework will enable researchers to participate in interpretive discourse and to advance the understanding of a scholarly community.

The Paradox of Native American Indian Intellectualism and Literature

The indian is ironic, to be sure, and a conveyance of manifest manners. Natives must overturn the simulations of the indian and leave the treasons of that slave name to the arbiters of colonial authenticity. --Gerald Vizenor, 'Visionary Sovereignty Postindian Conversations In 1855, on this site, Issac Stevens negotiated the Hellgate Treaty between the U.S. government and the Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d'Orielle Indians to create the Flathead Reservation. Bring a sandwich and enjoy this day-use-only park for reflection on these historical events. --Website for Montana State Parks www.fwp.state.mt.us/parks I. Introduction Native Indians are often accused of stoicism. Creek literary critic and writer Craig Womack puts it well: Non-Natives are often unable to connect comedy with people because of the complex over Indians and the oft-embraced tragic view of the vanishing American (Womack 136). Yet, if you ask a Native person whether or not Indians are stoic, he or she will probably laugh. What this contradiction of affect does suggest is that some Indians may display a different emotional character from mainstream norms. In postcolonial studies, it is imperative to ask how cultures instill emotional frames within the personalities of their culture-bearers (admitting a range, of course, of personalities, within given culture, and recognizing that the idea of any given requires, at the least, thick description to make sense at all). (1) Simply put, what makes people of one group laugh, while people of another group do not laugh at the same thing; cry or not cry? What is involved in a people's determination of funniness--something more than the proverbial inside joke? What of other emotions, such as hopefulness or fearfulness? Along with that, how do the predominant emotional forces within a culture change in the face of cross-cultural contact and oppression as happens in colonial situations? Questions about the relationship between emotions and culture could lead a scholar into anthropological study, reader-response theory, qualitative sociological studies, cognitive psychology, or down many other methodological paths, but I'm far less of a social scientist than a philosopher, so my focus becomes rhetorical, rather than teleological. (2) I'm also more interested in what Chadwick Allen terms, the types of power that disenfranchised peoples like indigenous minorities need to possess (2). Indians need to possess the practical skills for negotiating within a matrix of institutional powers and multiple ethnicities in order to take care of their families and communities on a day-to-day basis and to intersect with future planning that affects their being recognized, legally and culturally, as peoples, however slippery the definitions of those realities may be. concur with Homi Bhabha when he espouses his belief in the centrality of affect to the of community. Bhabha writes, I do think that in our contemporary moment, the of difference, the of community, the of communities of interest have such a and strong affective that we now have to start to understand the part that emotions, affects, play in the construction of community politics (34). Getting at the deep and strong affective charge calls for analysis that feels beneath the surface of mainstream cultural ideas and images as well as academic theories to the historical imprint on the palimpsest. In this essay, by way of exploring intersections between mainstream cultural emotional frames and realities, review the trope of the Vanishing Indian first, and then set the stage for discussing white guilt as it has recently been theorized by Shelby Steele and extending the implications of his argument to Native Americans. …

One Moment in the History of Reading: Midnight, 18 June 1816

On Wednesday, 3 August 1814, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, in the journal that he shared with his lover, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a characteristically prescient and lucid precis of what we would now call reader-response theory: 'Mary read to me some passages from Ld Byron's poems. I was not before so clearly aware [of] how much of the colouring our own feelings throw upon the liveliest delineations of other minds. Our own perceptions are the world to us' (lMS, p. 9). Two years later, he gave a spectacular demonstration of how our minds can colour what we read (or hear read). The occasion was another reading aloud, an activity which, as Lucy Newlyn has shown, was important during the Romantic period, both for the consolidation of literary coteries (pp. 19-23) and for the promotion of literary works (pp. 61-66). On the evening of Tuesday, 18 June 1816, five English travellers were gathered in the Villa Diodati, a country house outside Geneva rented for the summer by George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron: Byron himself (or Albe, as his friends sometimes called him); John William Polidori, Byron's personal physician; Bysshe; Mary (by then already addressed as 'Mrs Shelley', although Harriet Shelley was still alive); and Mary's stepsister, and Albe's lover, Mary Jane Clairmont (who called herself Claire). 1 Albe recited part of Coleridge's 'Christabel', which he had recently persuaded his own publisher, John Murray, to publish. According to John William's diary:

Romantic Shakespeare: From Stage to Page

This book examines how British Romantics such as Lamb, Coleridge, and Hazlitt put their idea of reading a play into practice in their criticism of Shakespeare, and how their concept of reading is related to the reader-response theory of the twentieth century. It provides a rightful assessment of the validity and modernity of British Romanticism by looking into a set of shared assumptions and procedures that exist between Romantic and contemporary theories of the relation of the text to the reader.

Oral Traditional Approaches to Old English Verse

Oral Traditional Approaches to Old English Verse Heather Maring (bio) Since the publication of Francis P. Magoun’s (1953) seminal article on the formula in Anglo-Saxon narrative verse, oral traditional approaches in the field of Old English have undergone a number of transitions, in the process growing more sophisticated and varied in technique and application. Early excitement over the aptness of Parry-Lord “formulas” and “themes” has evolved in definition and purpose: not being content with spotting a formula or theme for its own sake, scholars now interpret and evaluate the highly nuanced oral-aesthetic strategies embodied in the “traditional phraseology” and “type-scenes” of Old English verse (see Renoir 1988; Foley 1991). Early misguided attempts to pour Old English poetry into a mold generated by the study of Homeric and South Slavic poetics have given way to oral-formulaic technique rooted in the specifics of a Germanic language and its idiosyncratic prosody (see Foley 1990). Furthermore, heated debate over oral versus literate provenance has subsided in favor of a more modulated conception of an oral-literate continuum or, to use a slightly different image, of genre- and poem-specific meshings of oral Germanic and literate Latin-Christian rhetorical devices and subject matter (see Renoir 1988; O’Keeffe 1990). From the contemporary reader’s viewpoint one result of these studies is that passages of poems that once seemed either confusing or pleasantly mysterious have grown in coherence and power: optimally, with the filter of oral traditional interpretation these texts seem to flip from a slightly warped 2-D image to a high-tech 3-D surround-sound experience. In addition to oral-formulaic theory, Old English scholars are drawing upon such approaches as Reader-Response theory, Ethnography of Speaking, Ethnopoetics, Performance theory, and Immanent Art in search of ways to interpret and respect the aesthetic vitality of the extant corpus of verse (see, for instance, Howe 1993 and Doane 1994). Recently, John Miles Foley (2002) has called attention to the promising application of ethnopoetic approaches developed along different lines by Dennis Tedlock (1972) and Dell Hymes (1981). Ethnopoetics may be summarized as the textual [End Page 219] preservation of both words and the meaning-rich formal and paralinguistic features employed in the performance of a poem, whether that performance is live or has already been encoded in a literary medium. In a field such as Old English, where the only available “performances” must be reconstrued from vellum “scripts,” Hymes’ structural approach is more applicable. Drawing on ethnopoetics, oral-formulaic theory, and immanent art, Foley creates a modern-English structural translation of Beowulf’s opening lines, making apparent such aesthetically loaded features as half-lines, the prologue, an inset story, proverbs, and the sea voyage/ship burial scene. Hopefully this precedent will encourage similar attempts. Imagine the entire poetic corpus ethnopoetically reconfigured and retranslated to the best of our abilities! Such a project would no doubt graphically and acoustically wed many insights into the aesthetic resources being tapped by a poem’s manipulation of traditional patterns and foster further research and debates. At minimum, two paths employing ethnopoetics are forseeable: one would involve the creation of original-language editions referencing significant oral traditional cues, the other ethnopoetic translations into modern English. For example, a structural translation (or perhaps even better, structural translations) of the so-called “elegies” (The Seafarer, The Wanderer, The Wife’sLament, Deor, and others) would inevitably shed light on their unique synthesis of features from native Germanic genres and those derived from Christian-Latin influences. 1 Due to confusion over issues such as genre, rhetorical purpose, number of speakers, and a poem’s “back-story,” the majority of the poems falling into the category of “elegy” have a wide variety of conflicting interpretations. Perhaps modern English translations foregrounding such oral-traditional strategies as riddling diction, proverbs, and the typical scenes of Exile, Beasts of Battle, and Joy in the Hall would not only contribute to richer and more cogent expositions, but also make more apparent the cognitive filters or interpretations that a specific scholar-translator applies to the Old English, whether at the micro-level of morphemes or at the macro-level of narrative. I can imagine...

No Fixed Address: Pascal, Cervantes, and the Changing Function of Literary Communication in Early Modern Europe

In recent years, literary criticism has focused ever more systematically on the historical development of the relationship between literary forms of communication and the cultural and political knowledge formations in which they are embedded. As a contribution to this greater trend, this essay attempts to situate the historical origins of a modern concept of literature in early modern Europe and to define its specific function in an epistemological perspective. Pascal's Pensées provide a contemporary heuristic with which the new function of fiction is analyzed, using Cervantes' Don Quijote as a paradigmatic example. Combining key elements from the social history of knowledge, systems theory, and reader-response theory, the essay discusses the methodological problems of conceiving fictionality in ahistoric terms and of attributing a system status to literature. As an alternative to these approaches, it proposes a model of discursive virtualization to describe the changing function of literary communication around 1600.

Multicultural literature for children and young adults: reflections on critical issues

Preface Issues Related to the Concept of Multicultural Literature Defining Multicultural Literature Classifying Multicultural Literature Issues Related to the Creation and Critique of Multicultural Literature Imagination, Ethnicity, and Cultural Authenticity Reader Response Theory and the Author Role in Multicultural Literature Stereotyping and the Politics of Representation Culturally Correct and the Evaluation of Multicultural Literature Issues Related to the Use of Multicultural Literature in Education Crossing Cultural Borders From Informing to Empowering Investigating Reader Responses to Multicultural Literature Appendix: Web Sites Related to Multicultural Literature Index

Users' Creative Responses and Designers' Roles

April 01 2003 Users' Creative Responses and Designers' Roles Kin Wai Michael Siu Kin Wai Michael Siu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Kin Wai Michael Siu Online Issn: 1531-4790 Print Issn: 0747-9360 © 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2003 Design Issues (2003) 19 (2): 64–73. https://doi.org/10.1162/074793603765201424 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share MailTo Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Kin Wai Michael Siu; Users' Creative Responses and Designers' Roles. Design Issues 2003; 19 (2): 64–73. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/074793603765201424 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsDesign Issues Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Bible and the Reader's Response

Reader response theory, the broad range of literary perspectives which place emphasis upon the role of readers and their responses to texts, has contributed important insights to biblical hermeneutics and to pedagogy in literature education. Yet reader response theory does not appear, as yet, to have had as significant an influence as it might upon the way we teach individuals to read and respond to that most important of texts, the Bible. It is proposed in this article that Rosenblatt's transactional theory of the literary work offers valuable insights that can be applied to both the reading of the Bible and also how it can be taught in a range of contexts, in Christian and state schools, as well as in churches. Consequently, pedagogy informed by Rosenblatt's reader response theory may offer us a biblical use of the Bible as it can foster the spiritual development of readers by enabling them to engage with Scripture at a deeply personal level. It is suggested that Bible teaching must be responsive to the individual and to society but must, most of all, be responsive to the Holy Spirit.

Formalist criticism and reader-response theory

Formalist criticism and reader-response theory

El público femenino del Modernismo: la recepción imitativa y crítica de sus lectoras especializadas

Despite the importance of female readers for the development of Spanish Modernism, scholars have practically overlooked their existence and have rather focussed on other areas of Modernist readership, such as the mutual readings by Modernist poets and the reactions from official literary critics. To describe and analyze that female readership is a pending task since this one was perhaps the most faithful public of this movement. There are several ways to recreate that scenario, such as the study of rhetoricism specifically intended for female readers, or the analysis of female readers appearing as characters in those works. In this article, I use testimonies from historical female readers to show the real importance of that audience as well as those moments in which authors and readers interact and generate some of the better known characteristics of Modernist literature. Following reader-response theories, I classify those readers in two main groups ("specialized" and "naive"), list the names of some of those readers, show how they relate to Modernist authors and, finally, attempt to proof that these readers were also important agents for the dissemination of that literature.

Reading Qualitative Studies

In this article, the authors hope to shift the debate in the practice disciplines concerning quality in qualitative research from a preoccupation with epistemic criteria toward consideration of aesthetic and rhetorical concerns. They see epistemic criteria as inevitably including aesthetic and rhetorical concerns. The authors argue here for a reconceptualization of the research report as a literary technology that mediates between researcher/writer and reviewer/reader. The evaluation of these reports should thus be treated as occasions in which readers seek to make texts meaningful, rather than for the rigid application of standards and criteria. The authors draw from reader-response theories, literature on rhetoric and representation in science, and findings from an on-going methodological research project involving the appraisal of a set of qualitative studies.

Recent Scholarship on Robert Penn Warren

It has long been said that literary criticism is a salvage opera tion, but just as garbage has become recycled goods, so salvaging has be come more than effecting the rescue of reputation or renown. Some years ago, in his far-reaching essays on Hawthorne, Coleridge, and oth ers, the American poet Robert Penn Warren took pains to point out to us what was really going on in certain texts by these men, but his aim was the good old-fashioned one of making us appreciate them more by ac quainting us further with their genius. With the entrance and, now, pre eminence of theory in literary studies, the texts of deceased authors are primarily salvageable as cogs in the theory machine. Thus Richard Wright's work is deconstructed to reveal inadvertent misogyny as well as advertent racism in Native Son. Does this argument make Wright a more important writer? Hardly. But does it eject his work from the canon? Not so long as his novel proves useful for the intersection of feminist, Marx ist, and reader-response theory. Lovers of Wright, then, do well to fo