Reader-Response Analysis: Literature as Transaction
Students seem surprised when I tell them that the most important reason to read literature is to learn about their own lives. Many think of literature as something lofty, something removed, something they have to dofor school. Instead literature should be engagingand thought-provoking. Literature should teach us something vital about ourselves. It should help us live better lives by giving us a richer understanding of the human condition.
Hence my favorite assignment in the English 101/107 sequence is the kind of analysis that stems from reader-response theory. In 1938 Louise M. Rosenblatt caused a paradigm shift when she wrote, “the literary experience must be phrased as a transaction between the reader and the text” (34-35). Theorists such as Wolfgang Iser and David Bleich elaborated on the related premise that since every reader brings a different background to a text, each reading of each text is necessarily different. There is no “right way” to read a poem; there is only the way the reader, based on everything that he or she has experienced or thought up to that point, interprets it.
Reader-response criticism is not an easy feat to perform. Writers must analyze not only the text, but also their reactions to it.For example, they must consider what they would have done in Hamlet’s shoes when given the chance to take revenge on Claudius and exactly why they would have acted that way. They have to think deeply about how they feel about certain topics or how they reacted under given circumstances. They have to face their biggest conundrums.To write their essays, they have to start with a deep understanding of the text and end up with a deeper understanding of themselves.
When I taught the reader-response essay last semester, my students wrote on a vast array of topics even though they were all working from the same set of stories that we had read in class. When I asked what they had gained from that process, Ainar’s response was indicative of the possible gains from such an assignment. “I started to understand myself better,” he wrote. “I opened my own internal world.” In his essay, he traced some of his father’s decisions and contrasted those to the lack of decisions made by characters in the story he had read. The longer he analyzed his father’s three-thousand journey to a new city where he could retrace his roots, receive the best education, and provide for his family, the more my student recognized the wisdom of his father’s actions and the extreme sacrifices accompanying them.
Ainar’s classmates wrote about similar journeys. Katherine compared the displacement of the Chinese villagers from the Three Gorges to the displacement of her grandmother, a Yumbo Indian, to a different part of Colombia. Other classmates wrote about difficulties they had encountered personally, such as times they had been betrayed or disappointedor times they had made painful choices. They wrote about humorous family situations and personal triumphs. Many finally realized why their parents had pressed them so hard to study and came to appreciate the mentoring they had received.
The best essays always combinedclose readings of the original text withdeep readings of the writers’ own experiences. The danger of a reader-response essay is that sometimes writers get caught up in plot. They write long stories about what happened but forget to include their analysis. I understand why this happens: writersoften fail to realize how much of a story is in their own heads. They know why an event was significant to them, but such information doesn’t transfer to readers automatically.Writers have to take deliberate steps to make sure their points come across.
There are many valuable ways to respond to literature, but the reader-response assignment is especially useful. It invites students to write about something that is personal, something that is important, and something they can learn from. I can think of no better way for writers to use their time in a composition classroom.
Work Cited
Rosenblatt, Louise. Literature as Exploration. 1938. 4th ed. New York: MLA, 1976.
For further reading:
Bleich, David. Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1975.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.
Rosenblatt, Louise. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University P, 1978.