Reader response, which is closely allied with constructivism, has been widely touted as a model for teaching literary works. 1 Its proponents see it as facilitating student understanding by guiding reading and discussion so as to encourage engagement with the text and full class participation. In this model of literary works they read, presumably by relating these works to experiences and affects. According to the theory, this interaction leads to an active rather than a passive engagement with the literary work. Reader response assumes that “a piece of literature is successful for readers” when “they bring to the selection all that they are and have experienced,” so that “[a] merger, a mingling to reader and work occurs” (Small, 1992, p. 18).
Central to the reader- response position is the idea that the literary work comes into being as such only in the context of reading. According to L. Rosenblatt, whose book Literature as exploration supplies the basic tenets of this approach, “[t]he process of understanding a [literary] work implies a recreation of it, an attempt to grasp completely all the sensations and concepts through which the author seeks to convey the qualities of his sense of life. Each of use must make new synthesis of these elements with his own nature” (1983 [1938], p. 133). 2 Several factors therefore go into the invention of a reading of a literary text. Initially the production of an author, the text at one level exists as a ‘trace’ of the author’s “experience and imagination.” However, as soon as the text has been removed from the author’s immediate control through publication, the author “is outside the immediate, intimate reading circle. A body of words exists, the author’s intentions threaded within them, waiting for a reader to respond to them to enliven them. The words, in effect, have no symbolic meaning – are only marks on the page – until the reading event occurs” (Karolides, 1992, pp. 24-25). A reading of a text is “dynamic” in the sense that “[w]hat the reader makes of the verbal signs reflects shifts in the denotation and connotation of words as well as differences in the images called forth an in the social and psychological attitudes and behaviors of readers” (Karolides, 1992, p. 25). Reading then becomes an “event” controlled by the reader’s “past experiences and current circumstance, regional origins and upbringing, gender, age, past and present readings,” as well as by “the given moment – the situation, the mood, the pressures, and reasons (perhaps, teacher’s directions) for reading, the stance taken toward the reading” (Karolides, 1992, p. 23). In postulating the text as “something ... constructed by individuals through their interactions with each other and the world” (Gavelek & Raphael, 1996), then, this model of literature education serves to facilitate student understanding of the work, guiding individual readings via discussion and encouraging engagement and full class participation.
The reader-response approach to literature study first appeared in the late thirties as a reaction to the New Critical concept that the literary work was a self-contained object, somehow reflecting in its interiority its preservation of a long chain of masterpieces (to paraphrase Eliot), and seemingly not dependent on its perceptor for its significance, but rather holding its meaning within itself. Simultaneously, though, it counteracts the old Romanticist insistence that authorial intention provides the center of literary meaning, a point of view that too my knowledge received its most recent voicing in E.D. Hirsch’s The aims of interpretation (1976). 3 By decentering the work and the author as locus of meaning, reader response makes the experience of the individual central to the reading experience, while balancing that experience against classroom interactions that temper and shape individual interaction. Thus at a certain level reader response serves to validate the individuality of the reader – the student – by reinforcing his or her specific experience of reading, often by balancing it or altering it in accordance with the dominant classroom interpretation. Thus the meaning of a text can be said to emerge from “the personal and political currents of the setting in which it is read” (Shafer, 1997).
Reader response has been found to facilitate student engagement with literature, and to this end has had a positive effect in the classroom. But while this approach has its obvious advantages, I feel that is also conceals literary seductions that make it potentially limiting. One problem appears in what B. Martin, pursuing an idea broached by G.C. Spivak, calls the “personalist” dangers of reading, in which reading involves “seeing one’s identify reflected in ways that make it unassailable [except] by the cognitive and emotional pleasures of expanded knowledge and perspectives” (Martin, 1997, p. 15). Put another way, reading to find oneself reflected in the text increases the “cultural capital” of one’s experience through the identification one finds with what one understands, or the rejection of what one finds “boring,” “frustrating,” “not worth reading.”
At some point reading literary works, and especially works from times, cultures, and perspectives different from one’s own, requires that one face sensibilities that are in many ways fundamentally different from one’s own. I had this experience in teaching an upper-level course in American literature of the Colonial period at Northeastern Illinois University in 1995. I had little preparation in this field, having been offered the course late, and had to select texts based on second-hand descriptions of their content. In short, I made the class a learning experience at the same time that I taught it. My immersion, via sermons, spiritual biographies, polemics, and satires, into the Puritan sensibility (itself an eighteenth-century phrasing that would not fit the Puritan mind set) was quite a shock. I really had little idea of where these authors were coming from, and it took me weeks to adjust to what M. Foucault would call the “episteme” or “epistemological field” (Leitch, 1983, p. 144), of scriptural authority that dominated seventeenth-century New England, which often appears to us grandchildren of the Enlightenment as lacking scientific objectivity and empirical substance. 4
I consider my reading of the Puritans a positive learning experience, not because I agreed with their ideas or feelings, but because I entered, even if just a little, into a mind set that I consider entirely different from my own. To my way of thinking, in fact, one of the greatest values of literature teaching (and literature study) lies precisely in literature’s ability to introduce students to the cognitive perspective of the other, to let them see through the eyes of the other. This “meeting of the minds” differs from many interpretations of the “reader response” approach in that it acknowledges that the text makes sense, but that its sense might be fundamentally different from the sense the reader brings to it. Such reading involves a critical awareness of difference even as one engages with the text and quite possibly merges with its author in a moment of sympathetic understanding, an objective merging of sensibilities.
It might be noted that I have spoken primarily of my experience of teaching the literary works of the Puritans, not of my students’ experience of learning about these works. Is it not possible that the students’ experience, their direct response to the work, gave them similar insights into the Puritan mind? After all, reading in the reader response model is not ultimately a solitary activity; it involves “making meaning ... a shared endeavor moving on a continuum from an individual’s initial tentative construct to that of the group” (Sherrill, 1992, p. 76). Also, I have spoken of students somewhat beyond the age group where some of the key issues of reader-response are most strongly in play. As R. Probst points out, “[t]he adolescent, characteristically preoccupied with self, should be an ideal reader... Preoccupation with self should make students uniquely receptive to literature for literature invited their participation and judgment” (1988, pp. 4-5). 5 The issue in the exploration of literature, from the reader response point of view, often is not the recognition of difference from the other, but consolidation of the identity of the self – an identity that may be reinforced or re-evaluation according to the responses of others (students and teacher) to the work. The reader response literature teacher, then, should lets students respond to the literary work, for doing so allows them to formulate their own ideas. Insistence on a standardized “objective meaning that is distributed by the teacher – be that meaning determined by the author’s intention or by the objective, inviolable validity of the text – negates this laudable function of identity building and idea formation. In fact it feeds directly into what P. Freire (1970) calls the “banking system” of education, in which students are passive recipients of preordained knowledge rather than active creators of their own ideas (pp. 57-74). Freire’s comments on the dangers of the banking system should encourage fuller acceptance of reader response as an appropriate model for teaching.
But the teacher, I would suggest, has another responsibility beyond that of a facilitating personal textual exploration. While allowing personal response tempered by discussion, the teacher should also challenge students to face up to those elements in the work that they might not see or even might not wish to acknowledge – as could certainly be the case with works such as John Winthrop’s “A model of Christian charity,” aptly quoted by Ronald Reagan during his first inaugural address, which justifies poverty as God’s will and advocates the trickle down theory of social welfare. Such double-jointed reading (reading that is both inside and outside the text, inside and outside the reader) comes close to what I call aesthetic reading, reading for forms, 6 but it also permits the development of a critical consciousness that one can employ in revisioning texts that do approximate one’s sensibility – texts that give voice to the dominant or operative forces of one’s own culture and perspective.
One of the potential problems with reader-response teaching lies in the very fact that reader response tends to assume that the act of reading involves an immediately measurable, meaningful, and productive “event.” It becomes in some ways a recreation of the cultural capital of the society producing it, and so eschews any “construction of values” apart from those delineated by the society producing it. This point is addressed by S.R. Horton (1989) in a critical commentary on the “faddish” aspect of reader response cirticism, which has helped form the basis for the adaptation of the reader response strategy in schools:
<BLOCKQUOTE>[R]eader response criticism, which arrived in the early 1970s with a liberating “power to the people/readers” whiff about it, can in retrospect more easily be seen as a subtle version of consumerism. The inevitable result of the application of the Fish-ian question “What does that X do?” is not primarily a description or affirmation of some personal emotion or psychological response to a work of art so much as it is the enactment of one of the economic principles of a late-capitalist society: If it doesn’t do anything, it’s not worth anything. Or, to push a bit harder, “my” response becomes an enactment by one member of a privatized society carefully taught both inside and outside the academy that a private anything, including response, is the only kind of thing worth having (p. 281).</BLOCKQUOTE>
Several interesting conjectures can be made from Horton’s insightful comment. The first of these involves the comparison between literature and capital. Rather than Freire’s “banking” education, we get “consumerist education.” The value gained by literary reading becomes, as it were, a productive force, a privatized ownership, and something immediately viable. It is “me” reading. Horton points toward some of the consequences of this possibility in her essay. Metaphorically for Horton reader reponse becomes “intellectual ‘fast food’ easily digested and passed from hand to hand” (p. 281). We are thus confronted with a possible pragmatics of literature in which the literary work becomes an immediately effective (since affective) commodity. The ethos of reader response then seems to rely on the literary work’s immediate or near immediate ability to generate response in the audience it addresses. To develop another fiscal metaphor, response becomes a “share” in the “stock” of the work’s potential meanings that one can bargain with, exchange, and capitalize on in the production of measurably valued readings – evaluated perhaps by a grade or a teacher’s praise.
From this point of view, the literary work and the response the student “produces” to it through the “labor” of reading becomes cultural capital, reinforcing a view of literature as a productive force pragmatically applicable and “acquired” or “consumed” via reading and interpretation. It is important, though, to remember that in the context of the classroom, private reading is almost always closely monitored by classroom discussion and/or by the teacher’s evaluation of the student’s “interpretation” of the work or of the student’s “participation.” As we noted above, the interpretation of the literary work derives from “the personal and political currents of the setting in which it is read” (Shafer, 1997; my emphasis). The result can often be a carefully controlled monitoring of the available readings of a text – an effort that binds, as it were, the individualized and privatized readings of students within a socially or culturally determined “set” of potentially acceptable responses. I have elsewhere pointed out the difficulties this limiting factor might present in the case of multicultural literature (Johnston, 1999), and other scholars have addressed the implications of this control for diverse readers (Blake, 1998) and “oppositional audiences” (Richardson, 1997). Simply put, the danger is that any literary work becomes seen as “cultural capital” and so becomes acceptable – in fact, is made available – only if it can support the cultural values (here a potentially surprisingly conformist individuality determined by consumerism) that lie behind its incorporation into the classroom situation.
The limitations of reader response approaches are in fact well presented by the critical comments of Stanley Fish. In his famous essay “Is there a text in this class?,” Fish argues against the Romanticist position on meaning championed by Hirsch and Abrams in favor of the view that meanings exist in “institutional nesting” (Fish, 1986, p. 627). Using the seemingly clear phrase “The air is crisp” which Hirsch provides as an example of “the stable determinacy of meaning,” Fish suggests that, in a room full of musicians, “’The air is crisp’ would immediately be heard as a comment on the performance by an instrument or instruments of a musical air. Moreover, it would only be heard in that way...” (1986, pp. 628-29). Fish concludes from such examples as that that “only if there is a shared basis of agreement at once guiding interpretation and providing a mechanism for deciding between interpretations [can] total and debilitating relativism ... be avoided” (1986, p. 635). 7
Applied to the classroom, we can see that this position aims toward the standardization of acceptable meanings in literature, not because these meanings are inherent in the work (they may be), but because the works are approached in the institutionalized atmosphere of the school environment. Moreover, beyond individual works, literature itself, and the act of reading literature, come to have fixed (since institutionally imposed) significance: precisely that investment and consumption model discussed above. Put another way, reader response itself reflects the episteme of contemporary culture. To the extent that reading remains caught in this model, when we read we see nothing but ourselves.
Is the Iliad the story of a glorified gang war? This understanding of Homer’s epic seemed central to a high school class I observed in 1997. And in some sense it is glorified gang war. Yet if we stick only to this interpretation, how do we understand the profound impact this work of literature has had upon our culture (unless, as may be acceptable, we understand “culture” as a history of glorified gangs)? Homer as gangsta rap certainly offers a refreshing view of the classics. Yet it is clear that such a reading, previsely because it fixes itself within contemporary culture, bears potential limitations, again precisely because it reaches the reader through the contemporary world. That it does reach the reader is one of the primary merits of this type of application of reader-response, and to this extent the accomplishments of this approach should be saluted. But a solid basis in the classics also requires a knowledge of some fundamental differences between Homer’s world and our world. How many gang bangers make sacrifices to Apollo? How important is it to recognize the limits of one’s understanding? Is the reader always right, or are texts deconstructively “polysemic,” or does the ‘truth’ lie somewhere in between? Is it possible to emerge from one “personal and political” stream and (if nothing else) dip one’s toes in another?
I will not pretend that I can provide definitive answers to these questions. I will suggest, though, that aesthetic and critical distance, qualities that the study of literature should help promote, increase the possibility that students will learn to view the objects of their own culture from the perspective of the outsider looking into a system, “set,” or “episteme.” This ability to retain distance will, I believe, become increasingly important as our culture generates more and more sophisticated techniques for intersecting consciousness. It will help students gain the crucial ability to distinguish “what they are bringing to the text from their own experiences, biases, and emotions” from “what the text” – and, I may add, the culture – “is persuading them to feel or believe” (Pritchard, 1993). An ability to retain distance may lead to social activism; it may lead simply to a quietly articulated awareness of the extent of one’s manipulation by the mere presence of the present. (The “present” of the other, for instance that of the seventeenth-century New Englander or of the Greek foot soldier, may have seemed equally “stacked” to someone not fully immersed in its episteme, its gridlock of ideas). In this effort to create critical cultural distance, literary education can in fact help to increase the individuality of the individual, the separation of the subject from dominant imposed cultural identities that in fact many ways deny the existence of the self as a separate, important entity. The teacher of literature is in a position to foster critical awareness and a sense of beauty in students, and so (ideally) to help them become more fully autonomous beings.
Reader response offers clear inroads into the literary work. As a strategy for enhancing direct engagement with literature, it achieves the admirable end of bringing the student into the work, or the work into the student, and to the extent that it achieves this, it is one of the best teaching strategies we have got going. But it bears within it a potential cost. This type of reading can catch us up in ourselves, imprison us in a “personalist” reading in which makes “identity ... unassailable [except] by the cognitive and emotional pleasures of expanded knowledge and perspectives.” Put another way, it can ensnare us in our own values, the values of our culture, rather than giving us a perspective from which we can examine and criticize these values. To counterbalance these effects and increase the sophistication of developing readers, we should temper direct involvement with the text through reader response with aesthetic distance, both from the text and from the ideas it generates. Said another way, an increased variety of teaching strategies will enhance potentials for variety in response. Only when abstraction of and from meaning is approximated can one start to think of engaging more fully the oppositional, dialectic, or “polysemic” possibility of the text. And this capacity for abstracted intellectual engagement with ideas is one of the chief advantages to be gained from the study of literature.
1. A shorter version of this paper was delivered at the Midwest Philosophy of Education Society meeting, Chicago, Illinois, in November 1999. I would like to thank members of the audience for their insightful questions, which I have tried to address in some footnotes to this paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer of this text for his or her suggestions, which I have tried to incorporate in this version.
2. It is important to note, though, that for Rosenblatt, at least, "it is essential that [the reader] assimilate those elements of experience that the author has actually presented' (1983 [1938], p. 133).
3. It is possible to see the distinction between Romanticist authorial meaning and reader-based meaning as similar to the distinction Hirsch makes between meaning and significance. "Meaning" in this context can be understood as "something that is meant by am implied author or speaker who is not ourselves. Whenever we have posited another person's meaning, we have bracketed a region of our own experience as being that of another person" (Hirsch, 1976, p. 6). Though this "meaning" is "posited" within us, for Hirsch it is determinate: The important feature of meaning as distinct from significance is that meaning is the determinate representation of a text for an interpreter. An interpreted text is always taken to represent something, but that something can always be related to something else. Significance is meaning-as-related-to-something-else. If an interpreter did not conceive a text's meaning to be there as an occasion for contemplation or application, he would have nothing to think or talk about. Its thereness, its self-identity from one moment to the next allows it to be contemplated. Thus, while meaning is a principle of stability in an interpretation, significance embraces a principle of change. (Hirsch, 79-80). By this understanding we could see the interaction of reader and text, insofar as it involves the reader's response, as "significant" rather than "meaningful," since meaning, even if it exists in the mind of the reader, exists as agreement that that meaning reflects an external validity that can be characterized as reflecting an agreement as to the meaning of words in a biological, social, historical, and psychological context-that of the author, perhaps as structured by the author's previous interpreters. Hirsch's position in fact reflects Rosenblatt's understanding (see note 1), but is more traditional than the positions taken by some of the more radical interpreters of reader response, as for instance by Fish, mentioned below.
4. An example of the emipircal difficulties we face in reading the Puritans emerges in the cases of "spectral evidence" used in the Salem witch trails, in which testimony that one has been visited or plagued by a spirit became admissible in court. The insecure status of this evidence for the Puritans themselves, and the repercussions of its admission, point to the shifting from spiritual to scientific and rational authority that marks the transition from 17th to 18th century. For a brief discussion of this event, see Heimert and Delbanco (1985), pp. 337-39.
5. For a critical commentary on the assumption made here about the adolescent reader, as well as some discussion of approaches to engaging the nonreceptive student and class, see Hennenberg (1996).
6. The sense of "aesthetic" reading I am developing here differs from that attributed to Rosenblatt. According to Pritchard (1993), Rosenblatt distinguishes "efferent reading" that extracts information from "aesthetic reading" in which readers "'live through' the experience [of reading] and, in doing so, recreate the text." My sense of aesthetic reading assumes a certain disengagement from the object of experience that permits perception of its formal characteristics and moves toward critical analysis. This understanding of aesthetics may strike some as being disagreeably classicist; it parallels somewhat the famous description of aesthetic experience provided by Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's A portrait of the artist as a young man (1993, pp. 178-87).
7. This concern with "debilitating relativism" marks a key distinction between reader response theory as such and deconstruction. For an interesting discussion of the distinction between theoretical constructions centering on the reader (perceived as a central, stable datum) and on reading (perceived perhaps as a 'play of signifiers'), as well as a postulation of an oppositional reader as a critique of both positions, see Richardson (1997). The clearest way to make the distinction between reader response theory and deconstruction is to recall that reader-response as a teaching strategy is incorporated into a constructivist pedagogy - in the most clearly articulated approach, the reader constructs meaning, and by means of 'probing' involved in this construction the process somehow turns around and 'constructs' the reader. An opposite attitudinal approach emerges in deconstructivist understandings of the relation between text and reader. Here the assumption is that meanings as such create the reader. 'Self' is as much a textual/lingual construct as are all other forms of textual significance. Since the reader is created by meaning, potentially 'meaning construction' of the individual is 'controlled' by external forces, an imposing and potentially limiting intertextuality of all significance (the "violence of the letter"). The intention of desconstructive criticism is to "take apart" encoded or pre-coded meaning potentialities that impose themselves upon readers/selfs by predetermining potential categories of understanding. Deconstruction subverts the predisposition of meaning via its examination of "the play of signifiers"-the deliberate recognition of the extent to which meanings are already constructed and constructing.
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