what does the body of criticism published about a literary text suggest about the ctitics who interpreted that text and/or about the reading experience produced by that text

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what does the body of criticism published about a literary text suggest about the ctitics who interpreted that text and/or about the reading experience produced by that text​

abegaillabustro69 · Answer

Very popular in the 80s (but part of a long, long attention to readers, going back to ancient rhetoric), reader-response or "reception theory" argues against the text-centered criticism of formalism. Literature is not an object, but an experience, a text always in the making. As Leitch explains, "the meaning of the work, therefore, [is] to be encountered in the experience of it, not in the detritus left after the experience. Literature [is] process, not product." These premises should also remind us of Roland Barthes who observes that "a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations to dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost: a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." And Jane Tompkins explains it this way: "Reader-response critics would argue that a poem cannot be understood apart from its results. Its 'effects,' psychological and otherwise, are essential to any accurate description of its meaning, since that meaning has no effective existence outside its realization in the mind of a reader."There is a wide range of reader-oriented theories, for one could say that we could take many literary theories and focus on the reader's contribution. However, there are at least two key premises that help us group reader- response critics: First, the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature. Second, readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather, they actively make the meaning they find in literature.

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What Does The Body Of Criticism Published About A Literary Text Suggest Abo…

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