Editing Reader-response criticism (section)

== Development ==
Although literary theory has long paid some attention to the reader's role in creating the meaning and experience of a literary work, modern reader-response criticism began in the 1960s and '70s, particularly in the US and Germany. This movement shifted the focus from the text to the reader<ref>{{Cite book|last=Das|first=Bijay Kumar|title=Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, Fifth Edition|publisher=Atlantic Publishers & Dist|year=2007|isbn=978-81-269-0457-0|location=New Delhi|pages=214}}</ref> and argues that affective response is a legitimate point for departure in criticism.<ref name=":2">{{Cite journal|last=Johnson|first=Nan|date=1988-03-01|title=Reader‐response and the pathos principle|url=https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198809359160|journal=Rhetoric Review|volume=6|issue=2|pages=152–166|doi=10.1080/07350198809359160|issn=0735-0198|url-access=subscription}}</ref> Its conceptualization of critical practice is distinguished from theories that favor textual autonomy (for example, [[Formalism (literature)|Formalism]] and [[New Criticism]]) as well as recent critical movements (for example, [[structuralism]], [[semiotics]], and [[deconstruction]]) due to its focus on the reader's interpretive activities.<ref name=":2" />

Classic reader-response critics include [[Norman Holland]], [[Stanley Fish]], [[Wolfgang Iser]], [[Hans-Robert Jauss]],<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|last=Bennett|first=Andrew|title=Readers and Reading|publisher=Routledge|year=1995|isbn=978-0-582-21290-9|location=Oxon|pages=32}}</ref> and [[Roland Barthes]].<ref>{{Cite book |title=Reader response criticism: from formalism to post-structuralism |date=1994 |publisher=Johns Hopkins Univ. Press |isbn=978-0-8018-2400-5 |editor-last=Tompkins |editor-first=Jane P. |edition=8. impr |location=Baltimore, Md.}}</ref> Important predecessors were [[I. A. Richards]], who in 1929 analyzed a group of [[Cambridge University|Cambridge]] undergraduates' misreadings; and [[Louise Rosenblatt]], who, in ''Literature as Exploration'' (1938), argued that it is important for the teacher to avoid imposing any "preconceived notions about the proper way to react to any work".

Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation.  Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates their own, possibly unique, text-related performance. The approach avoids subjectivity or essentialism in descriptions produced through its recognition that reading is determined by textual and also cultural constraints.<ref name=":0" /> It stands in total opposition to the theories of [[Formalism (literature)|formalism]] and the [[New Criticism]], in which the reader's role in re-creating literary works is ignored.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Fragoulaki |first=Maria |author-link=Maria Fragoulaki |title=Kinship in Thucydides: Intercommunal Ties and Historical Narrative |publisher=OUP Oxford |year=2013 |isbn=978-0-19-969777-9 |location=Oxford |pages=26}}</ref> New Criticism had emphasized that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text.  No appeal to the authority or [[authorial intentionality|intention of the author]], nor to the [[psychology]] of the reader, was allowed in the discussions of orthodox New Critics.