Reader Response Theory

Reader Response Theory Dale Sullivan dale.sullivan@ndsu.edu

There are no determinate meanings . . . the stability of the text is an illusion. Stanley A. Fish

I always control the text, not vice versa. Norman N. Holland

Norman Holland We theorists of literature used to think that a given story or poem evoked some "correct" or at least widely shared response. When, however, I began . . . to test this idea, I rather ruefully found a much subtler and a more complex process at work. Each person who reads a story, poem, or even a single word construes it differently. These differences evidently stem from personality. Reading and Identity

Norman Holland on Reading and Identity For instance, these three [students] read this clause in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" describing Colonel Saratoris: "he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron." Sandra adjusted the phrase to just the amount of strength she could identify with: "It's a great little touch of ironic humor, I think [of] the voice in the story as meaning it that way . . . Using these heroic terms to describe such a petty and obvious extension of bigotry . . . It was such a perfect undercutting of the heroic Colonel Sartoris."

Sebastian discovered an aristocratic, sexualized master-slave relationship: "I react to the term `fathered' the edict . . . Fathering the edict seems to in some way be fathering the women, to be fathering that state of affairs. So it implied for me the sexual - well [he laughed] - intercourse that took place between whites and Negroes." Saul, however, had to reduce the force and cruelty of the original: "`Fathered' . . . is the word you're asking about, I suspect . . . It means practically the same as `sponsored,' I think. I don't know. Although I suppose you could talk about paternalism . . . No one should appear on the streets without an apron. That's just identifying the servants . . . . That's a social thing."

Norman Holland’s Comments on Sandra’s Reading I see Sandra bringing to this sentence both the general expectations I think she has toward any other (that it will nurture or protect) and also specific expectations toward Faulkner or the South or short stories. She also brings to bear on the text what I regard as her characteristic pattern of defensive and adaptive strategies ("defenses," for short) so as to shape the text until, to the degree she needs that certainty, it is a setting in which she can gratify her wishes and defeat her fears about closeness and distance: "a great little touch." Sandra also endows the text with what I take to be her characteristic fantasies, that is, her habitual wishes for some strong person who will balance closeness, nuture, and strength, here, "the voice in the story" which undercuts the bigot. Finally, as a social, moral, and intellectual being, she gives the text a coherence and significance that confirm her whole transaction of the clause. She reads it ethically.

Holland on DEFTing: These four terms, defense, expectation, fantasy, and transformation (DEFT, for short) connect to more than clinical experience. One can understand expectation as putting the literary work in the sequence of a person's wishes in time, while transformation endows the work with a meaning beyond time. Similarly, I learn of defenses as they shape what the individual lets in from outside, while fantasies are what I see the individual putting out from herself into the outside world. Thus these four terms let me place a person's DEFTing at the intersection of the axes of human experience, between time and timelessness, between inner and outer reality.

A paraphrase of Holland’s theory: In brief, Holland’s “transactive model of response” holds that an individual’s reading experience is a reflection of her own identity, for the reader (1) perceives the work in terms of her own private expectations, (2) filters the text through those expectations defensively, (3) imbues the text with clusters of wishes or fantasies, and (4) transforms the text and the fantasies into a coherent, self-identity theme.

Louise M. Rosenblatt The Reader, The Text,The Poem Efferent & Aesthetic Readings

Louise Rosenblatt: “. . . only a reader in aesthetic transaction with the text can synthesize the parts into a ‘whole’ or structure which is a work of art. The reader draws on his own reservoir or past life experience; he has notions of what to expect of a novel or poem or satire. But he has to use whatever he brings to the text and build out of his responses to the patterned verbal cues a unifying principle. The structure of the work of art corresponds ultimately to what he perceives as the relationships that he has woven among the various elements or parts of his lived-through experience. Instead of thinking of the structure of the work of art as something statically inherent in the text, we need to recognize the dynamic situation in which the reader, in the give-and-take with the text, senses or organizes a relationship among the various parts of his lived-through experience.”

. . . the theories of the theory boom took the power of meaning making away from the author (exclusively), but only reader-response gave that power to any old reader. At its most radical, for instance in the work of Bleich and Holland, reader-response offered no principle for ruling any reading out. Patricia Harkin “The Reception of Reader- Response Theory”

Reader Response Theory