Reader Response Theory

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million--a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. Iser states that there are three types of contemporary reader --the one real and historical, drawn from existing documents, and the other two hypothetical: the first constructed from social and historical knowledge of the time, and the second extrapolated from the readers role laid down in the text. An ideal reader would have to have an identical code to that of the author; authors, however, generally recodify prevailing codes in their texts, and so the ideal reader would also have to share the intentions underlying this process. Thus, there will be a communication that which is not already share by sender and receiver. The ideal reader, unlike the contemporary reader, is a purely fictional being; he has no basis in reality, and it is this very fact that makes him so useful; as a fictional being, he can close the gaps that constantly appear in any analysis of literary effects and responses He can be endowed with a variety of qualities in accordance with whatever problem he is called upon to help solve. If we are to try and understand the effects caused and the responses elicited by literary works, we must allow for the readers presence without in any way predetermining his character or his historical situation. We may call him, for want of a better term, the implied reader. He embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect-predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside reality, but by the text itself. Consequently, the implied reader as a concept has his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text. This concept of the implied reader designates a network of response-inviting structures, which impel the reader to grasp the text. There are two basic, interrelated aspects to this concept: the readers role as a textual structure, and the readers role as a structured act. Since the literary work constructs a world of its own out of the material available to it, the text is bound to have variable degrees of unfamiliarity for its possible readers, they must be placed in a position which enables them to actualise the new view, and this position is not part of fictional world. The text must therefore bring about a standpoint for which the reader will be able to view things that would never have come into focus as long as his own habitual

dispositions were determining his orientation. There are there are four main perspectives in the literary noevl: those of the narrator, the characters, the plot, and the fictitious reader. The meaning of the text is in the meeting place of these persectives. The readers role is prestructured by three basic components: the different perspectives represented in the text, the vantage point from which he joins them together, and the meeting place where they meet. This pattern simultaneously reveals that the readers role is not identical to the fictitious reader portrayed in the text. The latter is merely one component part of the readers role, by which the author exposes the disposition of an assumed reader to interaction with the other perspectives, in order to bring about modifications. So far we have outlined the readers role as a textual structure, which, however, will be fully implemented only when it induces structured acts in the reader. The reason for this is that although the textual perspectives themselves are given, their gradual convergence and final meeting place are not linguistically formulated and so have to be imagined. This is the point where the textual structure of his role begins to affect the reader. The instructions provided stimulate mental images, which animate what is linguistically implied, though not said. A sequence of mental images is bound to arise during the reading process, as new instructions have continually to be accommodated, resulting not only in the replacement of images formed but also in a shifting position of the vantage point, which differentiates the attitudes to be adopted in the process of image-building. Thus the vantage point of the reader and the meeting place of perspectives become interrelated during the ideational activity and so draw the reader inescapably into the world of the text. Therefore; t extual structure and structured act are, in the concept of the implied reader, joined together in the dynamic process. To sum up, then, the concept of the implied reader is a transcendental model which makes it possible for the structured effects of literary texts to be described. It denotes the role of the reader, which is definable in terms of textual structure and structured acts. By bringing about a standpoint for the reader, the textual structure follows a basic rule of human perception, as our views of the world are always of a perspective nature. The observing subject and the represented object have a particular relationship one to the other; the subject-object relationship merges into the perspective way of representation. It also merges into the observers way of seeing; for just as the

artist organizes his representation according to the standpoint of an observer, the observer--because of this very technique of representation--finds himself directed toward a particular view which more or less obliges him to search for the one and only standpoint that will correspond to that view. By virtue of this standpoint, the reader is situated in such a position that he can assemble the meaning toward which the perspectives of the text have guided him. But since this meaning is neither a given external reality nor a copy of an intended readers own world, it is something that has to be ideated by the mind of the reader. A reality that has no existence of its own can only come into being by way of ideation, and so the structure of the text sets off a sequence of mental images which lead to the text translating itself into the readers consciousness. The actual content of these mental images will be coloured by the readers existing stock of experience, which acts as a referential background against which the unfamiliar can be conceived and processed. The concept of the implied reader offers a means of describing the process whereby textual structures are transmuted through ideational activities into personal experiences. Based on the work of Wolfgang Iser , critics can speak of a culture being constructed in peoples minds as a series of schemata or predictable patterns of arrangement of things (walls on the side, ceiling above, floor below, naturally, unless youre a nomad or an astronaut!). These schemata (plural of schema) are part of textual strategies which operate because people within the culture share a common set of understandings about whats possible, probable, impossible, etc., their horizon of expectations. Widdowson states that the written text, as similar to a spoken text, is a discourse between two participants. The writer enacts a discourse with a projected reader who may be very different from the actual readers who derive their own discourse from the course. The writer makes choices on different words and sentences on the basis of their effect. Even if the writer does not think of a reader, he is himself a reader of his own work and try to find the effect of his work. Here the textual record of the literary text is always necessarly one-sided. The actual reader has to interpret this text, i.e. to realize a discourse from it. The discourse which the writer intends the text to record as output is, in these circumanstance, always likely to be different from the discourse which the

reader drives from it, i.e. what a writer means by a text is not the same as what a text means to a reader. So, interpretation is not simply a matter of what the auther was about when he produced the text, it is also what the reader is about when processing it. Consequently, the stylistician bases his observation on two different kinds: the relation within the language (grammar and vocabulary), and the relation between the language and the relevent features of the reader's material, social and ideologiacl environment. In a structuralist mode Jonathan Culler argues that readers bring a specific competence to the process of reading specific genres of literature. Readers who are not competent in the rules of reading a novel, for example, could mistake a novel for a history or a biography, just as a reader not competent in colloquial speech will misunderstand such expressions as Hold your horses and Dont go off the deep end. For Culler, as a structuralist, then, the goal of structuralist interpretation, or structuralist poetics, is not to interpret an individual literary text but instead to describe the competence that readers depend on and expect for any particular genre, from sonnets to film, from stage comedies to high school movies or detective novels. He points to three reasons for the importance of proposing poetics or novel as procedure of reading. First, as the literary work differs from nonliterary work and there are different genres of literatary work, the mode of reading changes to offers evidence of the convention operative in different period. Second, by studing reader's mode of interperting literary works, one gain in self-awarence and awarenace of the nature of literature as institution, and one can attain more easily a sense of the work's specifity, particularity, and differenec. Third, a willingness to think of literature as an institution composed of a varaity of interperative operation makes one more open to the most challenging and innovatory text, that are difficult to receive modes of understanding. Finally, the structuralism's reversal of perspective can lead to a mode of interpertation based on the poetics itself, where the work is read against the conventions of discourse and where one's interperatation is an account of the ways in which the work compiles with or undermines our procedur efor making sense of things. Bibiography

Culler, J. (1980). " Literary Competence". In Jane P. Tompikins (ed.) ReaderResponse Criticism: From Formalist to Post Structuralism. USA: The John Hopkins University Press. Iser, W. (1978). The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press Widdowson, H. G. (2004). Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.