Jonalyn Manalac Sheila Cocjin

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The ancient Greek orators and rhetoricians, with their concern for how to move and persuade an audience, called the literary ancestor`s of today`s reader response theorist

Plato and Aristotle were aware of the power of words to stir or convince people, though they did not hold the same opinions about the impact of doing so

Aristotle influenced : Longinus, Cicero, Quintillan and other rhetoricians , in making choices about organization and style.

Recent lineage of reader-response critics can be traced to the work of: I. A. Richards 1920s Louisse Rosenblatt in the 1930s.

Richards recognize the wide of interpretations of a group of readers is likely to have a single work. He backed away the from becoming a fully developed reader response theorist, because he categorized his students reactions according to their accuracy . That is, he ranked the reactions according to their closeness to or distance from what he deemed to be the correct interpretations.

Rosenblatt

Largely ignored by readers pursuing formalist principles of criticism when her first works were published, offered a transactional theory of reading. A given text is not always read in the same way. Instead, readings vary with the purpose, needs, experiences and concerns of the reader, who adopts a stance towards a text, an attitude that determines what signals to respond to, so that certain results can be achieved.

The two opposing stances are: Efferent Aesthetic According to her, a piece of literature comes into being when it receives an aesthetic reading, which is produced by a merging of reader and text.

The early works of Richard and Rosenblatt received a renewed appearance of: Walker Gibson Wayne Booth they raised questions about the roles readers play, around mid-twentieth century.

Gibson

mock reader , reintroduced reader

who becomes a participant in the creative act by playing the role the writer has designed for him or her.

Wolfgang Iser The Act of Reading 1978, the significance of the work, then, does not lie in the meaning sealed within the text, but in the fact that meaning brings out what had previously sealed within us. The result? When readers assumption that there is no one true interpretation, they discover rich, complex, diverse possibilities.

Rosenblatt
the

reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition.

Rosenblatt
the

reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition.

MAKING A READER`S RESPONSE

INTERACTING WITH THE TEXT
Rosenblatt`s Transactional analysis -- in the actual reading event the reader interprets the text (the reader acts on the text) or the text produces a response in the reader (the text acts on the reader).

THE TEXT ACTS ON THE READER

To examine a text by looking fro how it produces certain effects on a reader means to look at it in much the same way that the group of critics known as the structuralists. Jonathan Culler called a set of shared reading conventions wherein they recognized signals that they are accustomed to finding there and use those signals to make the expected interpretation. They use the familiar cues to make new interpretations. It entails examining the relationships among the parts in an effort to define the system------ known as grammar that governs them.

 Stanley

Fish, pointed out in SURPRISED by SIN 1998, a text can use predictable responses, such as the expectations typically evoked by particular genre, to cause readers to make interpretations that later prove to be wrong.

THE TEXT ACTS ON THE READER

To examine a text by looking fro how it produces certain effects on a reader means to look at it in much the same way that the group of critics known as the structuralists. Jonathan Culler called a set of shared reading conventions wherein they recognized signals that they are accustomed to finding there and use those signals to make the expected interpretation. They use the familiar cues to make new interpretations. It entails examining the relationships among the parts in an effort to define the system------ known as grammar that governs them.

THE READER ACTS ON THE TEXT

When the focus is turned directly on the reader as the chief source of interpretation, the thoughts, experiences, fantasies, and beliefs play a part in creating meaning. Norman Holland, make a given work serve highly personal, even idiosyncaratic ends. Who uses psychology to explain the process of reading, each of us receives a primary identity from our mother. An identity theme like a musical theme, can have variations even as it remains central to being, when we read, we play the identity theme by re-creating the text in our own image.

David Bleich bases his case for the reader`s importance o the denials of modern scientists, such as Thomas Kuhn, that an objective world of facts exists. There can be no knowledge except subjective knowledge.

Stanley Fish called his aproach:

Affective stylistics, argues that readers create a text as they read it --- word by word and sentence by sentence. He describes interpretation as the product of interpretative communities, or groups of informed , linguistically competent readers who read and make meaning based on assumptions and strategies that they hold in common.

THE TRANSACTIONAL MODEL

another way of explaining the interaction of reader and text was offered by Wolfgang Iser----- a German phenomenologist who argued that it is impossible to separate anything from the mind that knows it. A literary work, Iser said, is an intended act of the writer`s consciousness, an artistic effort that is then reexperienced in the consciousness of a reader, who engages in an aesthetic endeavor. It creates for itself an implied reader.

the Geneva Critics, try to enter the writer`s mental universe, experiencing his or her unique consciousness. J. Hillis Miller, All works of a single writer form aunity, a unity in which a thousand paths radiate from the same center.

That`s all!! Thank you !!! s