The Reader Response Theory

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The Reader Response Theory Latasha Parker Linguistically & Culturally Diverse Learners ELL240 Prof. Heather Clark December 21, 2011 As we travel through our grade school years we become more knowledgeable the older we get. The years fly by and before we know it we are using complete sentences, reading, and writing. We learn a lot of the things that we know over the years by reading literary pieces, but we very rarely take the time to try and actually figure out how we make meaning of what we read, and this is exactly what literary critics attempt to do. This is where theories come into play and attempt to provide the answer as to why we understand the things we do when we are taught literature. The Reader Response was a theory that was developed in the twentieth century and whose main goal was to focus all attention on the reader (Batstone, 2009). Reader response theory argued a point that makes so much sense which was that the individual reading the literature played a very important role in making some kind of meaning of what was read. Even though you may find people at time with similar opinions, there are no two people exactly alike so therefore, there also would not be a single correct meaning of a text. The Reader Response theory implies that an individual, or the “actual-reader”, can understand or make meaning of literature through a connection to a real life experience (McManus, 1998). The first reader-response theorists, I. A. Richards and Louise Rosenblatt, predated its contrasting viewpoints known as the New Criticism and came after the contrast with the emphasis on biographical and historical background (Batstone, 2009). The New Criticism insisted that only the content within the literature held any true meaning and not what the reader thought it to be. New Criticism felt that neither the author nor the reader had much influence on
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