No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
“Reader Response” in the Nineties
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
What has come to be called reader-response criticism and theory was ascendant within literary studies in the 1970s and eighties but seems to have waned in the nineties. Edited collections such as Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman's The Reader in the Text and Jane Tompkins's Reader-Response Criticism, both published in 1980, continue to be important references and are still cited frequently. Comparable edited collections published in the nineties, though, such as James Machor's Readers in History (1993) and Andrew Bennett's Readers and Reading (1995) have not received the attention of the earlier collections, and most of the essays in Readers and Reading are reprints of articles published in the eighties. Individuals associated with the reader-response movement such as Stanley Fish, David Bleich, Norman Holland, and Wolfgang Iser continue to publish books, although these books do not necessarily focus on reading. The journal that I co-edit, Reader, which originated as a newsletter in 1976 as a result of an MLA session on reading that attracted hundreds of people, continues. It remains, though, one of a small number of journals devoted to reading and readers aimed at a university-level audience.
- Type
- Review Essays
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998
References
WORKS CONSIDERED
Bleich, David. Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1975.Google Scholar
Bové, Paul. Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils,” trans. Porter, Catherine and Morris, Edward P.. Diacritics 12, no. 3 (1983): 3–20.Google Scholar
Feagan, Susan L. Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Flynn, Elizabeth A. and Schweickart, Patrocinio P., eds. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Machor, James L., ed. Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Nealon, Jeffrey T. Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London: Methuen, 1982; revised 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1929.Google Scholar
Rosenblatt, Louise. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978.Google Scholar
Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suleiman, Susan R. and Crosman, Inge., eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Tompkins, Jane, ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.CrossRefGoogle Scholar