Tag: reader response

Reader Response as Adaptation

On By smundorfIn SpenceLeave a comment

The concept of Reader Response as a literary theory relies on personal interpretation of individual works. Rather than letting an already standing singular truth about a work dominate the reading of the work, reader response lets each reader bring their own vision of the work to a discussion, although it is made clear that vast departures from what is specified in the text are viewed as less credible or valued as an interpretation. This aspect of reader response sounds similar to productions of a literary text into some other medium. The idea of taking a novel and turning it into a play, musical or even movie seems to rely on reader response to keep the same story original across all mediums it put in as well as the different variation of those same mediums.

Taking a novel that has been adapted more than once such as It by Stephen King allows for wiggle room to be made in each interpretation of the same story. It was originally published in 1986 with a story following multiple characters across a large gap of time. In the original novel, as well as the television miniseries, the story jumps between the late 50s and early 80s for its setting. The recent film adaptation of the novel instead makes a clear two-part story, the first set in the late 80s with the later half set in the mid-2010s. While this change in setting is drastic as it pushes the events of the novel forward by roughly thirty years, the same basic story is told. Changing the setting proves to only be a stylistic choice made by the writer and director of the film for the sake of their own personal vision of the film as well as relatability to a modern-day audience.

Along with this the characters change slightly in appearance between the three versions of the story, for example Pennywise. In the original novel Pennywise is described more like a modern colorful clown that has been the norm for clowns throughout must of the last century. In the current film adaptation, he is seen in a more Victorian era outfit with muted colors and a large collar. The most color placed onto the character is on its head with red paint detailing on the face and bright orange hair. While this outward appearance is different from what Stephen King originally wrote, this again takes into account that reader response doesn’t rely on any one truth. The author only writes the book or work of literature and after that point it is up to each individual reader to make their own reality out of what is written, and it is expected to always have variation between readers. No one can limit the interpretations of each reader, or director of a film. No one person has a final say on what is “correct” for a work of literature, even if they are an instructor or even the author. The community as a whole can decide something is too far off from what is meant to be part of a story. This would be like if a film adaptation of It were to replace Pennywise or the actual Creature with more traditional killer with no cosmic horror qualities. This would sort of creative liberty would change the core of the story revolving around an intangible antagonist.

King, Stephen. It: a Novel. Scribner, 2019.

Authorial Intent and Affective Stylistics: The Philosophy of Manipulation

On By Meg WalshIn MeganLeave a comment

The critical concept I chose to focus on from this week’s reading was affective stylistics. Tyson writes that affective stylistics involves the piece of writing being “examined closely, often line by line…in order to understand how (stylistics) it affects (affective) the reader in the process of reading (167).  In order to experiment with applying reader response criticism to a text, I reread “The Philosophy of Composition” by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s essay examines his own writing of “The Raven”, a poem which he himself deems “most generally known” (1). Poe says about “The Raven” that “it is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem “ (Poe 1).  Poe talks in this essay about a “unity of effect” that he strives for in his poems. Reader response criticism values the reader’s interpretation of the text, but this seems to be inherently tied to authorial intent. For example, in “The Philosophy of Composition”, Edgar Allan Poe writes about his thought process in planning “The Raven” not only in order to draw appreciation to his genius in method. He also writes it in order to but also more acclaim to an already highly acclaimed poem. He explains and analyzes his own poem, highlighting the same affects that a reader might point out in order to play off the reader-response mindset to his benefit.

Poe attempts to manipulate the reader’s response to his essay through his critique of other writers and thorough analysis of his own text. This text serves to deliver more attention to writing methodology as well as to the product. I believe Poe would agree with those who practice the criticism of affective stylistics because they believe that “the text consists of the results it produces, and those results occur within the reader” (167). I attempted to apply affective stylistics to “The Philosophy of Composition”, thinking about this essay as “an event that occurs in time” (Tyson 167). I took a small portion to focus on specifically, hoping to follow Tyson’s advice in describing this style of criticism. I looked at the “textual cues” from Poe’s introduction (169). Poe writes, “I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would—that is to say, who could—detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say—but, perhaps, the autorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause” (Poe 1).

To examine this sentence from a reader response standpoint, I believe it is possible to see how a writer consciously thinks about and can attempt to manipulate reader response. Poe writes at first in the hypothetical: “How interesting a magazine paper might be written” (Poe 1). The irony in this statement lies in the fact that he is essentially calling his own paper interesting. Poe then implies that he is one of the only authors capable of attempting such a feat: “by any author who would—that is to say, who could—” Poe draws a (1). Poe’s language differentiates himself from other writers, giving the cause for the lack of papers like his own as “autorial vanity” (1). This is an ironic statement, given that Poe has been patting himself on the back for the last few sentences, but it shows the conscious effort on Poe’s part to manipulate the opinion of the public in his favor. The result that this text produces, to borrow Tyson’s phrasing, is an essay that builds up Poe’s reputation as a writer of both poetry and analysis. I believe that the limit of affective stylistics is that it does not give as much credit to authors who also think of the text from a reader-response standpoint.

Works Cited:

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 13 Oct. 2009, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69390/the-philosophy-of-composition.

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2015

Further Reading – Reader Response

On By lausou17In LaurenLeave a comment

Just a warning, domestic abuse is mentioned throughout this post.

While we were reading and discussing reader response theory, there was one poem that I continually thought about, which was My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke.  The reason I kept coming back to this particular poem was because of the drastically different responses I have seen people have after reading it for the first time.  The majority of people, after reading this, seem to think it is a cute poem about a father teaching his child how to dance.  Others interpret it as a child being physically abused by the father.  Since these are two very different interpretations, I think this poem could benefit from some reader response criticism.  Reader response criticism has many different subsections, all of which are useful, but the most useful here are transactional reader response theory and psychological reader response theory. 

Transactional response theory looks at both the text and how the reader reacts to it, which could explain how there are two different interpretations.  My Papa’s Waltz has a lot of “indeterminate meaning, or… ‘gaps’ in the text… which allow or even invite readers to create their own interpretation.”[1]  The images of the drunk father moving around while the child clings to them, the pots and pans falling in the kitchen, the frowning mother, and the father’s battered hand can either lend themselves to a picture of an abusive family or a father that is having fun with his child despite hard times.  This piece also has a lot of syntax that can be interpreted multiple ways.  The father “beats time on [the child’s] head / with a palm caked hard by dirt”.[2]  Beat, here, can be used to describe some sort of tapping or similar motion to keep time with the music they are dancing to, or to describe the father hitting the child.  “At every step you missed / My right ear scraped a buckle” can similarly be interpreted two ways.[3]  Either the child is being hit with a belt, or the child is so small that their ear only comes up to the father’s belt.  This poem leaves a lot of what is being shown up to the reader to interpret, which is what makes it a good candidate for reader response criticism.

Psychological response theory looks at how the reader’s motives and experiences influence how the reader interacts with the text, which could explain how the readers are coming to different responses.  Everyone brings their own experiences and biases with them when they go to read something.  In my experience, someone who has a less than good home life is more likely to read this poem through the domestic abuse lens than someone who has a great home life.  It could be that the reader is projecting their own experiences onto the poem or that their experiences just set them up to see it a certain way.  Either way, something psychological seems to be at play in reader interpretation of this poem.

[1] “Reader-Response Criticsim.” Critical Theory Today: a User-Friendly Guide, by Lois Tyson, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015, pp. 161–197.

[2] [3] Roethke, Theodore. “My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43330/my-papas-waltz.

Reader Response: Surprised by Syntax

On By Professor MeehanIn Professor MeehanLeave a comment

Finally, the reader. After working our way through New Criticism, structuralism, and the poststructuralist critical theory of deconstruction, we finally take up a key subject in the literary experience heretofore forgotten by analysis of “the text itself”: the reader. As we saw, in a variety of ways, all three previous theories and methods of literary interpretation–from Brooks to Barthes to Derrida–focus so thoroughly on the text as object and linguistic construct that the reader (and also the author, another kind of reader, an embodied subject) seemed to matter not in the least. Even to the point of the critic’s own unimportance in the end: the text, after all, deconstructs itself. If there is no outside the text, there’s also no reader separate from the text, waiting to take it up.

We have thus far considered the apparent loss of the reader and the author for its limitations and constraints. With reader response theory, we perhaps have a way to solve the problem of too much text. Here we still have a text, but the reader’s role in reading, in relating to, and perhaps even creating, the text is given prominence. The reader returns.

Tyson does good work in the chapter summarizing 5 different kinds or categories of reader response theory that are out there, or were out there at an earlier point in the study of English (roughly from the 1970s forward), and might be of use to you as you develop your ideas for a project and the most effective methods of interpretation you would bring to it.

  1. Transactional theory: Rosenblatt; the reader creates the “poem” out of the text.
  2. Affective Stylistics: a good example, Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin, his argument for “the reader in Paradise Lost.”
  3. Subjective reader response theory: the readers response are the text–about as far from New Criticism as one could get.
  4. Psychological reader response: the readers interpretations are based in their psychology (defenses, fantasies, etc.)
  5. Social reader response theory: Fish returns, focused here on the idea of an “interpretive community,” the ways that we all read based on assumptions given or expected by the institutions within which we work, read, think.

I’d like to give some further thought to Stanley Fish. We can apply and combine the two approaches he is known for to a broader discussion of how we can read and write the sort of critical thinking and rhetorical knowing we do in English, and will be developing throughout the seminar. In other words: argumentation, the work we do (read, research, write, revise) to put forth a “thesis.”

What is a thesis? It is a name for a dynamic structuring of an argument that has a very basic core, whether that argument is 2 pages or 200 pages. Discovering a good argument (the word I tend to use instead of “thesis”) is as simple (and as complex) as asking the question: what’s the difference if we understand things this way instead of that way, if we rethink the topic, or reread the text in a different way? In other words, an argument is a re-sponse, re-lating and re-vising what is known with what is new, thus developing new ideas by re-thinking existing ones. This is what Kenneth Burke has in mind with the parable of the parlor, and why Burke argues that all thinking, by which he means therefore all rhetoric, is by nature dramatic–or what he called dramatism. Here is a basic dramatic structure  for argumentation we will be using and practicing throughout the semester gets at the dynamics of response:

1.     Context/Topic/Given/Premise—what’s already known: the conventional view

2.     Problem or Question or Challenge to conventional view

3.     Response—how the author will resolve the issue or answer the question 

or in a variation of this structure (The Craft of Research refers to this as the “elevator speech” for any research project):

I am working on X [Topic, Author, Context]

To learn more about Y [a particular Problem, Question, Issue raised with regard to the topic]

So that my readers can better understand Z [What’s at stake, what’s the difference when we resolve the issue or question, and thus rethink X and understand it differently]

I would call this very basic structure and its variations a kind of Affective Stylistics that our interpretive community (in this department, English majors and English professors) expects to see and hear in an argument. The structure signals what’s at stake in an argument or critical reading. Why do we expect this “stake”? Because we know that this is an effective way to move our readers into and through our argument toward a level of persuasion and understanding we, as writers, want them to reach. It helps the reader understand why our thinking (and by hopeful extension, their thinking) matters, why they should care.

We can think of this combination of rhetorical knowledge and critical reading we bring to our writing in English as “effective stylistics.” We pay attention to the rhetorical matters of our style and syntax and organization not just because our interpretative community (faculty, editors, other readers in the field) expects this from us, but because we can also use this knowledge to move our readers.

Like Milton with Satan in Paradise Lost. To speak metonymically: We can surprise our readers out of  the syntax of their conventional views and suggest ways to rewrite and rethink our sentences.

Reader, what would you do with reader response theory in your critical reading and writing? We will continue to think about various projects and the critical theories that best illuminate their problems and issues and the questions we want to pursue. Reader response theory is yet another. But I am also suggesting that whenever we think about and work on our own critical writing, reflect on its effects and think about our audience of readers, we are inevitably engaging in some version of reader response.