Guide to Week 10: Tuesday

        In the web page hyperlinked to this week's reading in Tyson, I have abstracted key terms and theoretical principles that identify various authors who helped create this critical theory and its interpretive methods.  After you have read Tyson, review the terms and principles, and make sure you understand them.  The first portion of our discussion will be a review of Tyson, and then we will look at some broader issues like those below.

        Reader-Response criticism had to fight for its scholarly life against the New Critics' banishment of readers' experiences based on the arguments in Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Affective Fallacy."  You might want to revisit some of their main points to remind yourself what that argument was all about.  Based on Tyson's summary of R-R theory and methods, what limitations do R-R critics accept on their practices?  Notice that, although scholarly convention has named the theory in the singular (i.e., "reader"), most of the R-R critics do not argue for the scholarly importance of idiosyncratic, non-reproducible reactions of individual readers to what they are reading.  Look at each critic's definition of "reader" and "reading" to detect what constraints s/he will impose on the evidence to make sure it is relevant and can be predictably observed by all competent scholars.  Those strategies are their theoretical acknowledgement of the New Critics' point that serious study of literature must be based on evidence that can be shared by all investigators, and that methods of study must be systematically explained and defended.

        Although the oldest Reader-Response critics, Rosenberg and Booth, fought their battles against New Criticism, dissatisfaction with Structuralism is the more immediate motive driving the second wave of Reader-Response critics after Structuralist and Deconstructionist critics began to replace New Critics as the dominant voices in the field of literary analysis.  An old Systems Theory maxim states that "complex systems in competition with each other grow to resemble each other."  (Complex systems are those in which human beings participate, vs. simple systems, which are completely mechanical and do not direct their own growth.)  What evidence can you see in second-wave R-R theory and methods that would reflect the R-R theoreticians' focus on their opposition to Structuralism's temporary "hegemony" in scholarship during the 1970s and '80s?  Can you see any ways their construction of "the reader" or "response" might be improved now that we are not fighting off a world-wide army of Structuralists?  Think about the difference between the evidence gathered by "synchronic" reading (taking the work as a whole, reading "vertically") vs. that gathered by "diachronic" reading (taking the work as it happens, stage by stage, even sentence by sentence, as in Barthes' S/Z).

        Reader-Response critics are especially interested in "how the trick of literature is performed."  For that reason, it might be a good idea to remember Jim Steinmeyer's observations on how professional magicians turn their audience's expectations into belief in magic.