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C-A-N Conference 12 April 2008 King’s Manor, University of York

Postmodernism: An Opportunity for Christian Scholarship and Practice

Reader-Response Theory and Christian Spiritual Formation

Michael Van Jennings, PhD student School of Education, University of Leeds

Introductory Points: How do Bible readers actualize literary meaning, and how does this influence Christian spiritual formation? Comments towards a theoretical orientation:

1) I’m doing a qualitative research project on the relationship of Bible reading practices and the phenomenon of spiritual formation. The reconfiguration of the subject-object paradigm underwrites qualitative research. It is a contribution to learning practices to understand how people produce literary meaning from their transactions with the Bible and how these interpretations shape their spiritual lives. Reader-response theory and traditional Christian spirituality contributes to an understanding of some of these processes. A configuration of these elements includes literary meaning (an outcome of author-text-reader-context), lived experience, and a model of Biblical or Christian spirituality. Biblical or Christian spirituality is the “lived experience of the Christian faith” as accorded by the Trinity and in concert with the faith teaching and practices of orthodox church (Schneiders 2002:134).

2) The current artificial and hierarchical separation of Biblical interpretation from Christian spirituality in academy and church should be challenged. The compartmentalising of critically-derived textual meaning from ‘spiritual life application’ is related to the Cartesian paradigm. The isolation of spiritual formation from literary meaning is not a necessary outcome of exegesis. Schneiders (2002), who believes competent Biblical scholarship is a must, criticizes the orthodoxy of objectivity in academic Biblical studies that “require[s] the disengagement of the researcher from any personal involvement with the subject matter being studied” that results in “an implicit denial of any real or necessary connection between study of the text and its role in the life of faith” (p141). Formation is secondary to and a by-product of information. Typical treatments of theological hermeneutics hijack or bypass reader participation in order to promote the ideal of objective textual meaning.

3) Bible reading practice is affected by the rise of reading theories that emphasize contextually-derived interpretive conventions and strategies. Here, the concept of literary meaning shifts from one of a cognitive transmission across contexts to that of a linguistic production within a sociocultural context (Thiselton 1992:28). However, the conflation of Christian spirituality with the reader’s situated literary experience is theoretically and theologically problematic. Theoretically the conflation shrinks into a simple structuring process the complex processes operative in the multiple interactions of the reader, interpretive conventions and strategies and lived Christian spiritual experience. Theologically, the Bible reader’s production of literary meaning involves some theological critique derived from outside of her or his sociocultural context. The divine message is transcendent and immanent to one’s situated conventions and strategies of interpretation. Also, the reader’s literary experience including responses to textual evocations or poetic effects should culminate in some spiritual change in belief, attitude, and/or behaviour to qualify as Christian spiritual formation. Christian spirituality consists of more than the textual evocations or poetic effects a reader might experience when reading.

The Context: Bible reading is theoretically informed. What is reader-response theory?

1) Reflection on the underlying assumptions of the relation of Bible reading to spirituality is reasonable. Biblical spiritual formation is not immune from critical inquiry. Swinton and Mowat (2006) argue that by means of the process of critical inquiry of religious practices “we often discover that what we think we are doing is quite different from what we are actually doing” (pvi, authors’ italics). Heitink (1999) argues practice “always has an underlying theory” as “even the ‘simple faith’ that prefers to accept things without explanation is a form of theory”. It is “often ideologically determined”; even “ecclesiastical action in our society often reflects a middle-class mentality”. (pp151-152)

2) Reader-response theories (RRT) address the nature of the text, reader and context relationships in the production of literary meaning. Thiselton (1992) asserts that “with the impact of literary and semiotic theory the focus shifts to the processes that operate in the interaction and encounters between texts and readers” (p165). RRT describe a reader who collaborates with or constructs the text from within a sociocultural context to generate literary meaning. RRT criticism of the act of reading is that field of inquiry which “claims that the meaning of the text is the experience of the reader” (Culler 1997:63). The reader’s situated interpretive conventions and strategies impact her or his literary experience. The reader’s experience of textual evocations or poetic effects informs his or her production of literary meaning. Features of reader-response theories: Highlight the role of the reader’s experience in interpretation; there is a difference between the physical text of inscriptions and the literary work achieved by the reader; an emphasis on contextually-derived literary conventions in processes of interpretation (Ex., genre markers: ‘Once upon a time’).

3) Eagleton provides a brief three-stage history of modern literary theory (Eagleton 1996:64): Romanticism’s nineteenth century preoccupation with the author; American New Criticism’s (1930’s-1950’s) exclusive concern with the text; and the role of the reader in relation to literary meaning (last half of 20th Century). Tompkins tracks an “epistemological revolution” in the movement of dominant configurations of reading from the autonomy of the text to the autonomy of the reader and then to the autonomy of the reading context (Tompkins 1980:xxv). Vander Weele recognizes that even though reader-response theories share “no single philosophical starting point” they can be organized into “psychological, social, and intersubjective” categories. (Vander Weele 1991:132-141): Psychological models of understanding (Norman Holland and David Bleich); socially-historically informed reading conventions (Jonathan Culler and Stanley Fish); and intersubjective model of negotiation of literary meaning between the reader and literary convention (Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Umberto Eco). It is important to note within RRT certain dominant configurations of the controlling agencies of literary meaning which include either a reader as performer of the text’s script (Rosenblatt, and Eco recognize the text’s formal properties) or a reader as composer of the text’s script (Fish sees the text as written according to the formal properties of the reader’s interpretive community). The musical analogy of a performer and score is often observed as an apt description of reading activity.

Problems: What is missing in our conceptualizing of literary meaning is a philosophically and theologically viable middle way. There is a need for a ‘middle course.’ Thiselton argues that since “[w]e can no longer take for granted traditional assumptions about the nature of reading processes” (1992:15) we should seek to “steer between the Scylla of mechanical replication and the Charybdis of radical polyvalency and unconstrained textual indeterminacy” (Lundin et al., 1999:137).

1) Mechanical replication: Traditional Biblical hermeneutics has been concerned with the historical-theological extraction of the single, correct meaning of the linguistically stable and determinate Biblical text, regardless of genre and reader context. This is the separation of critical information from spiritual formation. Powell (2001) notes the differing answers to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” in the parable of the Good Samaritan: American’s tend to answer it with “Whoever needs my help”; Tanzanians tend to answer it with “Whoever helps me” (p21). The critical effort to objectify textual meaning often does not take into account the impact of sociocultural context and its interpretive conventions and strategies on textual genres.

2) Radical indeterminacy: Eager to collapse the subject-object paradigm, Stanley Fish revolutionizes literary meaning in his later work. Literary meaning exists in the interpretive act of the reader based upon certain interpretive strategies that have been authorized by the interpretive community of which s/he is a member. Interpretive strategies “are not put into execution after reading…they are the shape of reading, and because they are the shape of reading, they give texts their shape, making them rather than, as it is usually assumed, arising from them” (Fish in Tompkins 1980:180). Literary meaning is defined in terms of the reader writing the text according to a given interpretive strategy. Texts are not “fixed” but made by interpretation as authors give “readers the opportunity to make meanings (and texts) by inviting them to put into execution a set of strategies” (Fish in Tompkins 1980:183). What remains after the evaporation of the text as a repository of meaning is the structure of the reader’s experience. This is consistent with the conflation of literary experience with spirituality.

3) Does the text have formal properties or structural content that the reader actualizes or does the reader make the text according to the formal properties found in the literary conventions and interpretive strategies that structure his or her experience? The differing concepts of reader actualization versus reader composition of literary meaning have impacts on the theological viability of Christian spiritual formation. Certain RRT’s provide conceptual basis for a cooperative reader who actualizes literary meaning that may be considered theologically conducive to transcendent-immanent divine message in Bible reading as well as the phenomena of Christian spiritual formation.

'Friends': Who helps us to steer a middle course between the camps of a single, correct literary meaning and an indeterminacy of literary meanings?

1) Louise M. Rosenblatt: ‘Transaction’ theory of RR. Reading is “the dynamic interfusion of both reader and text” (Rosenblatt 1994:viii). The transaction is between the controls of the text’s inscriptions as understood by normative interpretive criteria and the reader’s responses to them. The meaning of a transaction is the reader’s shaping of the relevant “reverberations between what is brought to the text and what it activates” into a final synthesis that is the reader’s “poem” or “literary work of art” (1994:174; 12).

2) Umberto Eco: Cooperative readers actualize an author’s textual strategy which produces multiple responses and meanings given the activation of various textual levels within the constraints of an applied code system. (Eco 1984, 1979:10, 11, 39) The author’s text, or ‘open’ or ‘closed’ textual strategy, ‘activates’ its ‘Model Reader’ who is ‘strictly defined’ by its ‘syntactical organization’ (pp10-11). With a closed text the reader follows a fixed or programmed level of involvement to gain a sense of literary meaning. ‘Closed’ texts are aimed at “arousing a precise response” from the reader, as they “aim at pulling the reader along a predetermined path, carefully displaying their effects so as to arouse pity or fear, excitement or depression at the due place and at the right moment” in such a way that “[e]very step of the ‘story’ elicits just the expectation that its further course will satisfy” (p8). Superman comic strips and James Bond novels are examples. ‘Open’ texts consist of multiple levels that offer the reader interpretive choices which in turn generate differing paths of literary meaning. Open texts are organized to engender the cooperation of a competent Model Reader whose productive responses are both elicited and constrained by its structure: “an open text outlines a ‘closed’ project of its Model Reader as a component of its structural strategy”, the net effect of which is that “[y]ou cannot use the text as you want, but only as the texts wants you to use it. An ‘open’ text, however ‘open’ it be, cannot afford whatever interpretation” (p9). The reader’s collaboration with the text involves the adoption of an appropriate semiotic or interpretive system.

Possible Contribution:

1) There is a conceptual tension between the situated reader’s processes of the production of literary meaning and the existence of a divinely communicative act or message that addresses her or him. The question this tension asks is whether the situated reader’s interpretive context has the capacity to transmit content that lies beyond its conventions and strategies. Biblical spirituality assumes some structuring process by which subjective experience is deemed as lived Christian spirituality. It is assumed that this phenomenon is contingent upon certain theological and literary conditions; there is no Christian experience apart from an interpreted Bible. Schneiders highlights the importance of the Spirit’s interiorization of God’s Word and Bible reader’s self-implication in the Christian Story. Christian spirituality recognizes, she writes, that

“the subjectivity of the reader is transformed by the influence of the Word of God, which is mediated by the words of the text and, as Augustine said, made effective by the interior work of the Spirit. The process culminates in change (metanoia or conversion), the becoming ‘more’ (spiritual growth or progressive sanctification) that results from entering into, dwelling in, experiencing oneself within the ‘world’ (i.e., within the reality construction) of Christian discipleship.” (2002:136)

2) RRT makes an important contribution to an understanding of the fundamental relationship between interpretive conventions and strategies and reader responses and poetic effects in the production of literary meaning. It emphasizes how context affects or directs the reader’s connections of reading conventions and literary meaning. Rosenblatt’s and Eco’s theoretical descriptions maintain that a text’s formal properties constrain interpretation. They also maintain a distinction must be made between the potentiality of textual statements and structure as unrealized textual effects and the reader’s actualization of such as having a particular poetic effect that is more that what a text’s grammatical construction conveys (See display below). As a source of literary meaning, poetic effects tend to exceed the syntax of textual statements but do not tend to surpass the competency of the reader’s literary decisions. The situated reader’s interpretative conventions and strategies may serve as an indication of literary conditions by means of which Christian spirituality might become operational in Bible reading.

The reader reads along certain continuums that include a temporal sequence of choices of interpretive strategies (‘Closed’ or ‘Open’) and reading foci (‘Critical’ or ‘Aesthetic’). Diagram developed by Michael Jennings

References:

Culler, J. (1997). Literary theory : a very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Eco, U. (1984, 1979). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the semiotics of texts. London: Indiana University Press.

Eagleton, T. (1996). Literary Theory: An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.