This form of criticism happens to be my favorite of all of them. Reader Response criticism focuses on how readers respond to text, comprehend it, and what readers do while reading. This theory gives readers a sense of definition and it can be used a tool to be consistent and strengthen your reading. This helps us relate specific elements of the text to our lives and it creates a sense of relatedness with the characters, plot, and author. Lois Tyson presents multiple questions that could as asked when discussing RR criticism. How might we interpret a literary text to show that the reader’s response is analogous to the topic of the story? How does it address topics that are important in your life, society, or faith? What is our overall takeaways from the text?
People have many different ways of decoding and breaking down text and one’s takeaway be completely different than someone else’s and i find that fascinating. Re-reading a text at a different time also helps to discover many different aspects of the text that were not seen before with tired eyes and a different mood.
I think a great conversation to have with readers are the differences between efferent and aesthetic reading. Two different systems of ways to approach a text. “When we read in the efferent mode, we focus on the information contained in the text, as if it were a storehouse of facts and ideas that we could carry away with us,” said Tyson. The efferent mode gleams the texts importance. The aesthetic approach we experience personal relationships to the text that we can create emotional bonds to the characters and become engrossed with the text.
Two important theorists in this field is Stanley Fish and Louise Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt claims that you have to have the reader and the text to have consistent meaning and she talks about the importance of applying different annotating skills to become a better reader. She preaches to be an aesthetic reader because it allows the readers to interact with the text to become engrossed with the words and meanings. Stanley Fish’s work revolves around how the sentence moves the reader and what the sentence is actually saying.
