Reader Response Theory

In the end of the day, it ends with the reader.

20 Oct, 20243 min read

Since the very first literary piece was created, humanity has also searched for ways to analyze, study and interpret it in unnumbered ways. Most of these methods mostly revolved around the author. The text was believed to have a clear and definite connection to the author in various ways. For psychoanalysts, this could be related to the subconscious or the childhood memories of the author. For those that were more concerned with politics and sociology like Marxists, this could be the economic and societal circumstances the author belonged to. For feminist critics it was gender, and for queer readers, it was sexual orientation. The life and views of the author mattered in one way or another. Only a select few completely disregarded these facts and focused solely on the literary text such as New Critics, formalists, and liberal humanists.

However, all of these approaches disregarded one key figure that was present since the dawn of literature, the reader. Up until postmodernism and poststructuralism, literary critics mostly chose to focus on either the text itself or the author. This is where the reader-response theory came into being. Compared to other literary theories, the reader response theory is relatively new and young. This theory came into being in the 1960's and 70's in Germany and USA. According to this theory, the key component of literary criticism is the reader. Literature, in a way, is an interaction or a transaction between the author, the text, and most importantly the reader. Although there are many authors that wrote without the intention of publishing their works, the literary text was created in order to be read by people. For this reason, the reader cannot be left out of the equation. So according to the reader-response theory, the initial meaning of the text lies not within the author or the text itself, but within the reader. The author can tailor their own texts to their own thoughts and imagination but have no say in how the reader interprets it. And since each reader carries an entirely different and unique world within themselves, the literary text is open to thousands of unthought ways of interpretation. Even the creator of the text may not be familiar with these understandings of the text and may came up from a very different point of view.

To understand this theory better we can take a look at Roland Barthes and his work 'The Death of the Author'. In his essay, he argues that by assigning the characteristics of a period, an author, a genre, or a literary movement to a text, we limit and constrain it. The text was not composed of a single layer, and therefore shouldn't be analyzed from a single perspective. The author may be the creative force and input, but ultimately, the author also lacked control over the text and language. Barthes also believed that the modern writer, or as he calls it 'the scripture', was not very original as well. The writer carried traces of all other writers that came before them and interacted with them in a way. This concept later came to be known as intertextuality. So, was there really an authorial figure to begin with? For Barthes, the author was long dead, and with this death, came the birth of the reader.