Reader-Response Criticism and The Constance School/ Reception Aesthetics / Reception Theory
Parallel developments in the 60s/70s
US Readers- Response Criticism
Germany: Constance School / Reception Aesthetics/ Reception Theory
disparate group influenced by structuralism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis
focus on the reader and the art of reading
Jonathan Culler, Stanley Fish, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., David Bleich, Norman Holland
Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser
Focus on the reader, the act of reading, and aesthetic experience
Theoretical influences
phenomenology (Husserl, Ingarden)
hermeneutics (Gadamer)
Russian Formalism and the question of literariness
cross-fertilization of disciplines
phenomenology of reading
questions of literariness
history - horizons of expectations
defamiliarization of the habitual
gaps of the unsaid in the act of reading
Hans Robert Jauss
The Horizon of Expectations
Influenced by Gadamer
the shared set of literary expectations readers bring to their readings of literary texts
Literary critics must objectify the horizon of expectation
horizons of expectations are transsubjective and historical
Classics are literary works that have contributed to the establishment of a new horizon of expectations
e.g. Stein violates the 20th c. horizon of expectations which call for form, coherence, unity, and decency
Wolfgang Iser
The Implied Reader
Formed from the notion of the 'implied author'
The readers constructed by the literary text; a position the literary text asks its empirical readers to adopt
The Process of Reading: Blanks/Gaps and Indeterminacy
meanings emerges out of an interaction between text and reader
the reader actualizes the text
interested in the effects of the reader on the meaning of the text as well as the effects of the text on the reader
Focuses on aesthetic experience
Borrows idea of 'schematized views' from Roman Ingarted
the successive and partial views that make up the literary work as a whole
blanks/ gaps open up between the schematized views
reader is called up to fill in the blanks
indeterminacy allows for the free play of interpretation within certain limits
gaps are created by...
multiple perspectives
multiple plot threads
serialized novels/tv series
abrupt alteration of stylistic devices
Like Shklovsky, Iser is intereted in literariness. For Shklovsky enstrangement makes literature literature, for Iser, it is the gaps/ indeterminacy
literary history as continual increase in indeterminacy
Early American: Little indeterminancy
Realism: Some Indeterminancy
Modernism: Much Indeterminancy
Stanley Fish (1938-)
Affective stylistics: meanings of the texts = the reader's affective experience
Interpretive communities: readers impose meanings on literary texts from within their system of beliefs
what do texts do to readers?
what do readers do to texts?
fiction does not represent/mirror reality
it creates a fictional reality of its own
fiction vs. reality
imaginary: the diffuse real of the imagination
real: empirical reality
fictive: mediates between the imaginary and the real; concretizes the imaginary and irrealizes the real
literary fictions signal their own fictionality
the anthropological function of fiction
fiction allows for a playful, imaginative transcendence of our limitations and thus allows us to experience, in our minds, other ways of being in the world