Reader Response Theory

It is a literary theory which gained prominence in late 1960s. It focuses on the text reader reaction to a particular text more than the text itself. This theory can be linked with post-structuralism emphasis on the role of the reader in actively constructed text and finding meanings. Thus, this theory does not consider the reader as a passive consumer of the text. This theory works differently from the text based approaches such as new criticism which believed that some objective meaning is already present in the text and has to be examine and found out. The reader response theory argues that it takes has a meaning only after the reader experiences it by reading. It is the job of the reader response critic to examine the scope and variety of reader reactions and analyses the ways in which different readers make meaning out of both personal response and culturally conditions ways of readings. Some prominent names of this theory are Stanley Fish, David Blesh and Woolf Iser. 

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