Reader-response criticism

Reader-response criticism is an approach to literature that makes readers’ experiences and interpretive activity central to literary meaning. It examines how meaning emerges through encounters between texts and readers.

Literary theory: The systematic study of literature’s nature, interpretation, and cultural functions. Reader-response criticism is one approach within this broader study.
Affective stylistics: A method of criticism that traces how a text’s language shapes a reader’s experience over time. Stanley Fish uses it to examine meaning as an unfolding reading process.
Louise Rosenblatt: An American literary theorist who developed a transactional account of reading. Her work describes literary meaning as arising through reader–text transactions.
New Criticism: A twentieth-century literary approach that treats the text as an autonomous structure for close analysis. Its emphasis on textual unity contrasts with reader-response accounts of meaning.
Interpretation (literature): The process of explaining how a literary work produces meaning. Reader-response criticism treats interpretation as an activity that helps constitute meaning.
Implied reader: The reader-role or set of competencies that a text presupposes or constructs. Wolfgang Iser’s concept describes how textual structures guide interpretation.
Wolfgang Iser: A German literary theorist known for analyzing the implied reader and textual indeterminacy. His account emphasizes how readers actualize possibilities structured by texts.
Intentional fallacy: The claim that an author’s intended meaning is not the proper standard for interpreting a literary work. Reader-response criticism likewise rejects authorial intention as the sole source of meaning.
Literary meaning: The significance a literary work conveys or acquires through its language, structure, and interpretation. The approach disputes that meaning resides wholly in the text before reading.
Interpretive community: A group whose shared assumptions and practices shape how its members interpret texts. Stanley Fish uses this concept to explain why readers produce socially patterned meanings.

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