INTRODUCTION:

The business of literary criticism is interpretation. It means analysis and judgment of a literary or artistic work. But the definition of criticism is changed since Eliot declared in 1923 in his essay entitled, "The Function of Criticism" that the business of criticism is ‘elucidation of work of art and the correction of taste’ (Eliot 24). Now we do not talk of literary text as primary and the criticism of the text as secondary. Literary work is no longer accepted as host and criticism as parasite. ‘Text’ is not what the author makes it to be but it is as the reader takes it to be. ‘Text’ and the ‘reader’ not only act upon one another but there are many reversible reactions between them.

Reader-Response School of Criticism is of recent origin. The main works of reception theory were published between 1969 and 1978. It takes off from the middle position intellectual climate succeeded by the formalist structuralism system, The Prague school and the New criticism. As Gurubhagat Singh has rightly pointed out that:

in these schools, the text was thought to be a ‘being’ or a structure with its own rules, yet it was thought to be a ‘code’ or a sign system, that the reader shared and that he had to decipher for the text’s adequate understanding (Singh 51).

Reader-Response Criticism owes an important debt to phenomenology and the Geneva School, particularly in the person of the German critic Wolfgang Iser.

Iser’s essay "The Reading Process': A Phenomenological Approach", is a good example of the creative development of a number of aspects of phenomenology and, too, of the way in which phenomenology leads naturally to some of the preoccupations of reader-response critics. Take for example, the first sentence of the essay: the phenomenological theory of art lays full stress on the idea that, in considering a literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text (Iser 1).

Iser then moves on to discuss Ingarden’s theory of artistic concretization, and concludes that the literary work has two poles : the artistic pole (the text created by the authors) and aesthetic pole (the realization by the readers). Iser stresses in particular the work’s virtuality: like the text of a play which can be produced in innumerable ways, a literary work can lead to innumerable reading experience. He also makes use of Husserl’s argument that consciousness is intentional, that it is directed aid goal- seeking rather than random and all-absorbing. So far as reading of literature is concerned, this allows Iser to place a high premium not just upon the reader’s ‘pre-intentions’ what he or she goes to the text with but also upon the ‘Intentions’ awakened by the reading process itself, Reading brings the subjectivity of the reader and the objectivity of the text together. The written text almost being the same for everyone the unwritten text varies from reader to reader depending on the individual imagination. Iser gives one analogy to make his point clear :

two people gazing at the night sky may both be looking at the same collection of stars, but one will see the image of a plough and the other will make out a dipper (Iser 3).

One of the best-known of Iser’s arguments involves the literary work’s ‘gaps’. According to him, no literary work is complete: all have gaps which have to be filled in by the reader and all readers and readings will fill these in differently. Thus Iser says: meaning is not something hidden in a text, it is the result of a very subtle interaction between the text and the reader (Iser 126).

According to David Bleich literary criticism is totally subjective and the objectivity about the text is an illusion. He distinguishes between response and interpretation by saying that the former is symbolization and the later resymbolization. Response and interpretation both are subjective. According to Bleich though in interpretation there emerge some kind of consensus, the reading experience varies from reader to reader.

Jonathan Culler argues for an objective base for Reader-Response criticism. Because the ‘text’, in the printed page was there before the reader came to it and it will be there after the reader leaves it: The ‘text’ is unalterable and a thousand reader could not alter a single word in a text. Thus though the individual reader’s response is subjective, it has an objective base depending upon form and conventions. According to Culler:

Meaning is not an individual creation but the result of applying to the text operations and conventions which constitute the institutions of literature (Culler 127).

He believes that a change in the system will change the meaning of a work.

Norman N. Holland and Stanley Fish believe that though the reader’s response is subjective, there is room for interaction between the text and the reader. Holland subscribes to the view that a work of literature is not an artifact, but an experience.

According to Holland:

Meaning do not in here in the words on the page but like beauty, in the eye of the beholder (Holland 98).

To Holland the reader is a maker and he places him on the same level as the writer. He believes that what the writer offers to the reader is an artifact but not a finished product. Hence, the reader recreates his work of art out of the material supplied by the writer. Since the readers deal with the same text and text sets a limit on the reader’s response there is bound to be some consensus among the readers. Hence, criticism for Holland is a kind of equation between the personal and impersonal.

In summation, it can be said that from the above discussion it is clear that there are various opinions about the aspects of reader-response criticism. It swings from pure subjective criticism enunciated by Bleich to a kind of objective criticism advocated by Jonathan Culler and Wolfgang Iser. Like any good criticism, reader-response criticism is a combination of both personal and impersonal. My conclusion is that this school of criticism though valid to a great extent is not absolute because while it highlights the text and the reader on the one hand, it eclipses the author on the other. The reader has overtaken the author and it is a serious loss.

REFERENCE:

1. Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs. Ithaca: N.Y. Cothell University Press, 1981. Print.

2. Eliot, T.S. "Function of Criticism", Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1932. Print.

3. Fish, Stanley "Self Consuming Artifacts." California: Berkley University of California Press, 1974. Print.

4. Holland, Norman. N. Poems in Persons. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975. Print.

5. Iser, Wolfgang. “Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction”, Aspects of Narrative : Selected papers from English Institute, Ed. J. Hills Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971. Print.

6. Singh, Gurubhaghat. “The Identity of the Literary Text: Problem and Reliability of Reader Response : An inquiry into theoretical positions”, The Literary Criterion, Vol. XXI, No. 4, 1986. Print.

Received on 21.07.2013 Modified on 01.08.2013

Int. J. Rev. & Res. Social Sci. 1(1): July –Sept. 2013; Page 09-10