 Hello and welcome back to the national program on Technology Enhanced Learning NPTEL a joint venture of Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institute of Science. As you are aware this lectures are for students in IIT's and other engineering colleges and the role of humanities and social sciences is quite significant in the curriculum of engineering students. I am Krishna Barua, I teach English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Guwahati. We are presently in the lecture series literature and language and this module 5 of the series is titled literary criticism. We are today in lecture 5 of this module titled reader response. Let us go into the intention of what literary criticism is. Let us enjoy history of literary criticism a journey we are about to undertake in this module and it is not only to revisit some of the profound sources of history of literary criticism. As we know that literature is of it tells a narration of experience human experience with all its depth with all its variety with all its wide ranging subjects, but to understand literature sometimes we have to locate the history within the context of the main currents of Western thoughts. And then the text opens up and a poem opens up and a drama opens up. Literary theory is in a strict sense or literary criticism the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature how we read the text, what is literature what is the text. As a consequence the word theory has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading text informed by various strengths of philosophy and sociology. So, we go into the interdisciplinary arenas of philosophy psychology and sociology in understanding literature. Literary theory is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. It is a description of the underlying principles one might say the tools by which we attempt to understand literature. So, it is not only that we read a poem or a drama by itself or a novel we have to understand the way the text has to be read. This leads to a heightened sense of appreciation and our own responses to literature. If literary theory that it is a literary theory or literary criticism that formulates the relationship between the author and his work and it develops the significance of race, class, gender for literary study. Well, so when we look at the preliminary inventory of basic critical questions which all literary criticism feels. It may be ontological what is the literary works nature and mode of existence. It may be epistemological how can we know what is the knowledge that comes out in the process or it may be theological what is the function and purpose of the work or archaeological or descriptive where we include semiotic the meaning the stylistic and rhetorical analysis or it may be interpretive like the hermeneutics of the work. What can be said about the extrinsic relations of the work to the real work. It can be performative how can the critic re-enact or perform the work in his richest sense and in the normative process the act of judging an individual work can also implicate normative issues such as the authority of artistic canons, traditions, hierarchies of genres and so on. It may be also historical we can look it from the lens of his history how can the work as an event be related to other events whether it is artistic or otherwise which can be divided to be analytic organic or dialectical or narrative the construction of a coherent story or cultural and which is related question of history and so much of recent currency psychological the different ways mind is being probed feelings ideas of sessions repressions myth etcetera or it can be genetic how the group minds operate or effective how does the mind of the reader or the audience respond to the work and contribute to the completion. So, literary criticism are more or less interpretive tools that help us to think more deeply and insightfully about the literature that we read over time different schools of literary criticism have developed each with its own approaches to the act of theory already we had done in the previous lectures starting from the classics theory so called is vast and complex historical and contradictory at root modern theory is not intelligible without philosophical context that go to the pre so critics and the classical schools literary criticism therefore well. So, every cap of the first lecture classical theory what was done in the first lecture of this module we had gone back to classical age of the Greeks Aristotle and Plato and thus Aristotle thought that a good tragedy has a noble hero with a tragic flaw creates some emotional catharsis in the audience and considers the conventions that make up a particular literary type. So, we were doing more or less what was mimetic theory how the imitation or mimesis laid the foundations of western philosophy and Plato specially was instrumental in bringing the criticism in the dialectical method and as Andrea Nightingale had said while we had done classical criticism that Plato set forth a number of ideas that have proved central to the discipline of literary criticism. The artistic representation has a different status from the people objects and events in the ordinary world and when we look go into the poetics of Aristotle we had seen how we had modified the mimetic theory and for Aristotle imitation is not a servile copy as it was stated in Plato, but it is a copy of an even if it is a copy it is a creative process in itself. In lecture 2 we had done liberal humanism where there was the concentration on the text as a whole the totality of the text and also of the way that we see the text as timeless and it can be regarded as a grand narrative which emphasizes upon the progress and liberation of humanity from a socialistic purpose. Great literature must possess the power to transcend the barrier of time and place. So, this are some of the fundamental premises that we had done in lecture 2 good literature is of timeless significance the literary text contains its own meaning within itself. So, the close study of the text in its entirety and it can speak to the inner truths of each of us because of our individuality of our self the meaning of the this interested self comes in the objective self comes in here and the text becomes an objective area to be explored. And in liberal humanism we have seen how form and content was fused together and they become organic parts of each other and therefore, the sincerity the authenticity of the text is being explored and what critics do is interpret the text on so that the reader can get more out of the reading. Well in lecture 3 we had done Marxism which champions the downtrodden of socio-economic class and this championing task that support the common man in this century the Frankfurt school's attacks on pop culture is a dehumanizing, aligning prop for the capitalist state have been influential. In lecture 4 we had done feminism which champions the downtrodden of the war of the sexes critiquing the patriarchal texts and championing neglected pro-oman literary works more gender oriented reading even thinking which may be essentialist seeing sex or gender socially conditioned and linguistically constructed. Well so now we are in lecture 5 of which is titled reader response while this opposition between theory and practice can be traced back to ancient philosophy the modern emphasis on theory arises from a cluster of circumstances. This is the theory boom that has taken place in the 20th century the lilies and the angry young men of new left hand little income and if you go into new criticism we see that they did not have much in common, but they did share the view that literature philosophy and politics were all too serious to be left to academic amateurs. Therefore, levy side criticism was non theoretical in that it did not share the concern of Russian formalism or its structuralist progeny, but its deep seriousness helped to create the modern definition of English literature and same the English department in which theory still continues to flourish this is what David Messi had written in his book. The theory boom which has changed English study in such a way as to follow for and celebrate idiosyncratic readings as against a force to discover authorial intention or describe organic form. So, sometime in the recent past there was this emphasis upon theory to such an extent that people forgot about the actual text which we were trying to interpret and were more concentrating on the theoretical aspects. In other words all of the theories of the theory boom took the power of meaning making away from the author exclusively, but only reader response gave the power to any old reader. So, now we come to another criticism reader response where the shift is not to the text neither to the author, but to the reader. So, it can be not the death of the author, death of the text and the death and the birth of the reader. Well, going back if we look to new criticism where it was Wimpsett and Bardsley T. S. Eliot argued that authorial intent is irrelevant to understanding a work of literature. We have to see where the text was of importance where the author even if we forgot the author the text was of not secondary importance as in reader response. So, let us see how some of these standards have come into the understanding of reader response. So, Wimpsett and Bardsley had said in the essay the intentional fallacy that the design or intention if we look into the intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literature or the author. They had argued cannot be reconstructed from a writing the text is the only source of meaning and any details of the author's desires of life are purely extraneous. This view is extremely useful in a postmodern relativist from work as it successfully makes the reader or the consume of the story the only going against this where the reader becomes the only authority on this meaning as opposed to the author or creator of the work. Back to the concept of effective fallacy and intentional fallacy we have to see how it refers to the supposed error of judging or evaluating a text on the basis of emotional effects on a reader. This term was coined by Wimpsett and Bardsley as a principle of new criticism which argues that a reader's response to a poem is the ultimate indication of its value. No doubt it is the antithesis of effective criticism which is the practice of evaluating the effect that a literary work has on its reader or audience. First defined in an article published in the C1A review the concept of an effective fallacy was most clearly articulated in the verbal icon. Wimpsett used the term to refer to all forms of criticisms that understood a text effect upon the reader to be the primary root analyzing the importance and success of the text. Well, so now we come to reader response and the reception of reader response theory in English studies going back in the background of new criticism we will have to see it was a antithesis of what new criticism had said. So, reader response was a part of two movements the elitist theory boom of the 1970s and the populist political movement of the 1960s and 70s. If the theory boom was to remain elitist very very you know exclusive it had to deauthorize reader response. If reader response was to remain populist it had to consent to and participate in that deauthorization where we have to see that it has to remain populist. In the 1980s reader response was popular among specially in the pedagogical discourses among compositionists even as it began to lose currency among theorists. Later however compositionists professionalized themselves by deemphasizing or even ignoring reading this is what Patricia Harkin had written in her essay. Reader response theory arose in Ler's measure as a reaction against the new criticism which we had just mentioned about intentional fallacy about effective fallacy or formalistic approach which dominated literary criticism for roughly a half century which regards a piece of literature as an art object with an existence of its own independent of its author, its readers, the historical time it depicts or the historical period in which it was written. Formalism then focuses on the text. So, new criticism its emphasis was the paradigm shift was on the text, finding all meaning and value in it and regarding everything else as extraneous. To rely on readers as a source of meaning precisely what reader response criticism does is to fall victim to subjectivism, relativism and other types of critical madness. This is what those who have gone again reader response emphasize well. So, this is where the shift has come to the readers. So, it is not the text which opens up its meaning it is the readers which make meaning of the text. So, there may be many readers the same reader reading the text at different intervals or there may be the process of reading itself which will be doing later and will see that it has different meanings which are associated with it. Therefore, reader response concentrates on the reader as well as on the meaning that it generates. Readers and not only authors engage in an active process of production in use in his text of all kinds stories, poems, plays, building, films, TV ads, clothes are received by the audience not as a repository of stable meaning, but as an invitation to make it. So, there is room always for expansion. So, it is a dynamic process the text opens up for more meanings. The premises of reader response were promulgated first by theorists who offer generalized accounts of a universalized reader. First they gave a very general account of who the reader is. It is of course, important for students specially all of you must understand this to realize that their readings are shaped and even constrained by cultural and economic conditions. Well, who are this reader response critics? They take a radically different approach therefore, they feel that readers have been ignored in discussion specially in literary criticism in theory when they should have been the central concern. The argument goes something like this. A text does not even exist in a sense until it is read by some reader. This brings to mind one interview between Einstein and Tagore and Tagore have said that the concept of beauty cannot exist if there was no beholder. So, man after all is the source of beauty. It is not landscape or the phenomena which exist by itself. There has to be a beholder. The same thing can be said about a text. It does not even exist in a sense until it is read by some reader. Indeed, the reader has a part in creating or actually does create the text. So, the whole shift has gone to you students. You are the ones who can read a text. You are the ones who can find meaning to a text. You should not be conditioned by biographical data or by the cultural, literary, whatever environmental causes which make the text. It is somewhat like the old question posed in philosophy classes. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Well, so reader respond critics are saying that in effect if a text does not have a reader, it does not exist or at least it has no meaning. It is readers with whatever experience they bring to the text who give it its meaning. Whatever meaning it may have in hers in the reader therefore, and thus it is the reader who should say what a text means. We should perhaps point out here that reader response theories by no means a monolithic critical position. It can includes in itself many other lenses. Those who give an important place to readers and their responses in interpreting a work come from a number of different critical camps. They may come not excluding formalism. Even formalism will come in which is the target of the habeas reader response attack. Readers response critics see formalistic critics as narrow, dogmatic and it is certainly wrongheaded in essentially refusing readers even a place in the reading. Conversely, reader response critics see themselves as Jane Tomkins has put it, willing to share the critical authority with less tutored readers. So, it becomes almost like you are coming from the high pedestal to the grassroots and at the same time to go into partnership with psychologists, with linguists, philosophers and other students of mental functioning. All the reader responses are present in critical writing. We have seen that it was present. We will go back to the Greeks again later when we do rhetoric as a form of persuasion, which is a part of again the systematic reading of a text. We find that in the 1920s, most notably in that of I. A. Richards, we had done in liberalism and also in new criticism and in 1930s in D. W. Harding's and Louis Rosenwald's work, it was not until the mid 20th century that they began to gain currency. Similarly, phenomenology of Ushral, hermeneutics of Gadama and Ricca, reader response criticism are closely related levels. So, what is phenomenology? It is the philosophy of consciousness, where subjective responses come in, hermeneutics is something where you find interpretive tools in looking at any text, whether it is traditional, the Bible or any other text and reader response are closely related levels, all of which attempt a psycho philosophical analysis of how a reader encounters and interprets a text. Therefore, you have so many different strengths in going into reader response theory, the philosophical, the psychological and also the literary. Specific schools and figures include the Geneva schools, the Constance school, George and Iser's reception theory, Iser's reception theory and more recent scholars such as J. H. Miller and Stanley Fish. And while the general philosophical origins of this approach was mainly continental, British critics such as William Empson and I Ritchards were doing a form of reader response criticism before the label itself became common. Making sense of what happens when we read, what is this creative process, what is this reading process? A group of texts have, we have just mentioned Louis Rossamble's literature exploration and the reader, David Blaise's readings and fillings and subjective criticism we have Ulfgang Iser's, they implied reader and the act of reading. We have Stanley Fish's is their text in the class, very interesting and Norman Holland's poems in person and five readers reading collectively they were known as reader response theory and this works appeared in the late 1970s early 1980s except Louis Rossamble's which appeared in 1938 well another special feature of reader response theory is that it is a base of on rhetoric which we had just mentioned earlier the art of persuasion which goes back to the Socratic origins and to the Greeks now the strategist devices how rhetoric and prosody are the devices where you get a reader to respond to the literary work. Wayne Booth in his rhetoric of fiction has talked about the interpretive act the effective fallacy, the critical fallacy. I Ritchards in principles of literary criticism had also talked about it before the label took on this power and this term and form of criticism and interpretations of students viewpoints how he collected all the data of the responses of the students and made it into practical criticism. Louis Rossamble's literature exploration advances a transsectional theory what was that a poem comes into being only when it receives a proper aesthetic reading that is when readers come come penetrate a given text it is almost as if the text takes in meaning only when the reader reads it and then it receives a proper aesthetic reading. So some of the more radical permutations lead to an almost complete reader subjectivism no doubt about it this is not objective text which we are talking of in liberal humanism about the objective self the meaning of this interestedness when you look into a text, but here this is the complete reader subjectivism that means every individual or every reader has its own way of finding meaning to the text. However absurd it may be while other versions analyze the means by which various readers arrive at a consensus regarding the meaning. So in reader response therefore, the shift comes to the reader to the subjective viewpoint to the understanding of what is meaning which can then be assumed to be a pretty much correct interpretation by the ideal reader. This is Eiser's implied reader. So it can be implied reader it can be a passive reader it can be a informed reader. Reader response theory was applied to non-literary as well as literary text. So this was applied in all disciplines a reflection of the theoretical awareness both that the tenants used were as applicable to essays, newspaper articles as they were to stories or to creative work. This of course, we directed at helping students. So it is a very student friendly response a literary criticism where the whole emphasis goes into the students responses and the students evaluation or reading of the text. And therefore, you are encouraged to read more to find meaning more in a text and by the end of the day maybe you will be the one who will be defending reader response more than the other formalistic approaches. As a consequence I believe in spite of its very considerable theoretical sophistication more often than not reader response came to be associated almost exclusively with pedagogy naturally because it deals with instruction it deals with teaching. Therefore, the students are the ones who should understand the text more or should read the creative work more. So this reading the profession. So the shift is from writing of the author the text to the reading process. The reading process itself becomes a sophisticated tool it becomes a specialized sort of activity. Let us review once again the basic premises of reader oriented theory realizing that individual reader response theorist will differ on a given point. It may differ to the point that a single reader the same reader reading a text his versions may differ from any time to follow. First in literary interpretation the text is not the most important component here the text fades into the background the reader is. In fact, there is no text unless there is a reader and the reader the text does not exist at all if there is no reader at all and the reader is the only one who can say what the text is in a sense the reader creates the text as much as the author does. So, he is as much the creator of the text this being the case to arrive at meaning critics should reject the autonomy of the text and concentrate on the reader and the reading process the interaction that takes place between the reader and the text well I hope it is clear by now. So, we have to discriminate here reader response theory from reception theory which are completely different at the same time they merge in some areas. The term reception study refers to an enquiry into a text effect on specific classes of readers while reader response theory by contrast is properly an effort to provide a generalist account of what happens when human being engage in this process they call reading what is this reading process. Ulfgang Isers the act of reading it is a phenomenological account of the processes that occur in consciousness when human beings encounter literary text is an example. I had remarked a while earlier phenomenology is that discipline where you find that it deals with consciousness it deals with different responses to the subjective area of study. The premise perplexes people trained in the traditional methods of literary analysis. So, this was something which the theorist absolutely the formalistic theories, theoreticians and critics did not accept and it perplexed them. It declares that reading response theory is subjective and relative it is almost close to science where you cannot come to a final conclusion the text opens and it is always there for you for possible meanings whereas, earlier theory sought for a much objectivity as possible paradoxically the ultimate source of this subjectivity is modern science itself even though it has no connection we can find this the theory of relativity where you find that things always there is a gap in the understanding of the text. When a literary text must be conceived in such a way that you will increase the reader's imagination in the task of working things out for himself this is what Igelten had said for reading is only a pleasure when it is active and creative. In this process there should not be any conditioning there should not be a conditioning in that who writes the text or who is the author it is the reader who goes into the reading of the text. In this process of creativity he calls it the reading process it is a creative process or may go too far. So, we may say that boredom and over strain form the boundaries beyond which the reader will leave the field of play. Reception theory examined the role of the reader in literature he writes, that was really part of a wider political concern with popular participation. Literature is therefore, becomes a performative art and each reading is a performance it is a creative area, analogous to playing, singing, singing, a musical work, enacting a drama. Literature exists only when it is read meaning becomes an event by itself. The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning or value there is no one correct meaning literary meaning and value are transactional dialogue created by the interaction of the reader and the text. According to Louis Rosenblatt a poem is what the reader leaves through under the guidance of the text yes very true do not you think so. So, this reader response theory therefore, brought in a complete you know concentration on the reader on the meaning and the way that the whole reading process becomes a very interesting very dynamic form of activity. This theory of literature associated mainly with Stanley Fish later will be doing him and in slightly different form Wolfgang Euser. The central tenets of all varieties of reader response theory are that meaning is something that is contained within a text meaning is produced by readers and according to Stanley Fish there is this meaning the readers also form a community called the interpretive communities and they put them in possession of an internalized literary competence that allows them to respond appropriately to the text they encounter. Reader response theory is in many ways a response to the access of both the new criticism with the vision of text as a self contain monad and structuralism with a stretch on the impersonal laws and structures that govern text this was what David Messi had said. Well just as we had mentioned the phenomenology because Wolfgang Euser will be stating mostly the phenomenological approach to the reading process. Therefore, let us be clear what is phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience or consciousness and literally phenomenology is the study of phenomena appearances of things or things as they appear in our experience or the ways we experience things. So, there is a subjective slant to the way that we look at experience thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenologist studies conscious experience as experience from the subjective or first person point of view well. So, the phenomenological theory of art lays full stretch on the idea that in considering a literary work one must take into account not only the actual text, but also in equal measure the action involved in responding to the text well. So, thus Roman ingarden confronts the structure of the literary text within the ways in which it can be concretely realized. The text as such offers different schematized views through which the subject matter of the work can come to light, but actual bringing to light is an action of concretization. If this is so, then the literary word has two poles one is called artistic and the other is the aesthetic. And the artistic refers to the text created by the author and the aesthetic realization accomplished by the reader. So, coming to the dominant critic of the school Ulfgang Ezer is known for the reader response theory in specially when he formulated it in 1967. He describes the reader's contact with text and the author. Ezer describes the process of first reading the subsequent development of the text into a whole. So, there is this process of reading and how the dialogue between the reader and text takes place. Ezer's work has affinities with the so called Geneva school of phenomenological criticism though Ezer is less mystical more scientific than the Geneva critics well, but like them he privileges the experience of reading. So, reading itself takes on a beautiful experience as a uniquely valuable consciousness raising activity. Reading literature gives us the chance to formulate the unformulated well. So, this reading process argues that in analyzing literary works the reader's response to a literary work is just as important as the text itself. All readers interpret yes and react to any given text differently no uniform response would be there which will be the same all throughout. And this different reactions to the same piece of writing combined to shape the overall meaning of the literary work this is very interesting. In addition when a single reader interprets a text and later revisits the same piece of writing the reader often emerges with two different interpretation of the text and its overall purpose and meaning. There was an incident which one of our professors had told us in class that he had bought a book in a second hand book store and all of a sudden he found that it was his own copy which he had sold some 20 years back it was also a dispute. So, the text took on different meanings when he as he had read it in the first half how it had covered so many different hands and again a reinvention of the old text which comes into his hands when he rediscovers it. So, is also stretches the importance of the imagination of the reader. So, therefore, the reader is the implied reader or the authentic reader or the informed reader it reads rest upon that in reading one is forced to imagine within the mind the information being read and so once perception is simultaneously richer and more private. So, therefore, we have so many dimensions to the reading process it is not only the philosophical the phenomenological, but it is also psychological. So, either in this reading process a phenomenological approach this essay he said that when considering only three work one must examine not only the text, but the response it evokes in the reader. A text has the artistic pole which is the text and it has the aesthetic pole which we had already done a work of literature is thus inherently dynamic it cannot be static which is being conditioned by some reading or some approach. It changes depending on the reader the text allows the reader to imagine for himself some of the components of the narrative. This is important in holding the attention of the reader. Well, from this polarity let me quote from phenomenological approach from this polarity follows that a literary work cannot be completely identical with the text or with the realization of the text, but in fact music like halfway between the two the work is more than the text for the text only takes on life when it is realized and further more the realization is it is almost like music by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader though this in turn is acted upon by different patterns of the text. The convergence of text and reader this is an important point brings the literary work into existence and this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed. So, next time you read any drama or any novel please take it into mind that you become the creator itself you in the reading process the way that you read the text will bring fresh meaning to the text. So, you become the author of the text or you become give fresh meanings to the text. So, it is the virtuality of the work that gives rise to its dynamic nature and this in turn is the precondition for the effects that the work calls forward. As the reader uses the various perspectives offered him by the text in order to relate the patterns and the schematized views to one another. So, there are patterns which are going there he sets the work in motion. So, this concretization which takes place and this very process results ultimately in the awakening of responses within himself. Thus reading causes to literary work to unfold its inherently dynamic character that is new no new discovery is apparent from references made even in the early days of the novel. As he gives example from Laurence Stern's remark on Tristan Sandeep no author who understands the just boundaries of Decorum and good reading would presume to think all the truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding is to half the meta amicably and leaving something to imagine in his turn as well as yourself well. So, a literary text must be conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader's imagination in the task of working things out for himself. Two people he gives an example 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 flower and the other will make out a dipper right is not it so. So, the extent to which the unwritten part of a text stimulates the reader's creative participation. So, this is almost like a creative process is brought out by an observation of Virginia Woolf in a study of Jane Austen. Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. So, stimulates us to supply what is not there what she offers is apparently a trifle yet it is composed of something that expands in the reader's mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which was outwardly trivial. So, you see how the reader when they read Jane Austen this is what Virginia Woolf had said takes on different dimension always the stretches laid upon character the turn and twist of the dialogue keep us on the tenterhook of suspense our tension is half upon the present moment half upon the future here indeed is this unfinished and in the main inferior story are all the elements of Jane Austen's greatness where the reader creates his own story. We have seen that during the process of reading there is an active interweaving of anticipation and introspection. So, we go back as well as go look forward which on the second reading may turn into a kind of advanced retrospection. The impressions that arise as a result of this process which is a combination of retrospection and anticipation vary will vary from individual to individual, but only within the limits imposed by the written as opposed to the unwritten text. So, I do not think you had really taken so much of given so much of importance to the reading process. So, by this reader response theory you will understand the reading itself is something which is a dynamic process which gives meaning to a text and ultimately the whole stretch is upon the subjective consciousness of you yourself or any other reader who reads a text. Well, continuing with Isser's statement of the reading process we find what he says. The picturing that is done by our imagination is only one of the activities through which we form a gestalt of a literary text that is the environment that we create. We have already discussed the process of anticipation and retrospection and this gestalt is not the true meaning of the text at best it is a configurative meaning. Comprehension is an individual act of seeing things together and only that with a literary text such a comprehension is inseparable from the reader's expectation and where we have expectation there to we have one of the most potent weapons in the reader writer's armory which is illusion. In our analysis of the reading process so far we have observed three important aspects that form the basis of the relationship between reader and the text. The process of anticipation retrospection then the consequent unfolding unfolding of the text as a living event and the resultant impression of likeliness. Well, if reading removes the subject object division that constitutes all perception it is only subjective it is not object at all the division is completely obliterated. It follows that a reader will be occupied by the thoughts of the author and this in their own turn will cause the drawing of new boundaries. Text and reader no longer confront each other as object and subject but instead the division takes place within the reader himself. So, it is almost as if he goes into the text himself. Issa argues that this different ways in which a reader interprets and makes sense of a literary work all combined together to create overall meaning and purpose of the text. Well, so you read Shakespeare and after all it is you who give meaning to Shakespeare. You read Thomas Hardy and after all it is you who give meaning to his novels. So, reception theory while we were talking about reader response which had close affinities with reader response. One of the most greatest exponents was Hans Robert George is yet another kind of reader oriented criticism which documents reader responses to authors or the works in any given period. Such criticism depends heavily on periodicals magazines etcetera. There are varieties of reception theory but most important recent time was by Hans Robert George. He was a German in his toward an aesthetic of reception. George speaks to bring about a compromise between that interpretation which ignores history and that which ignores the text in favor of social histories. He talks about the horizons of expectations. These are terms which will become very very familiar with reception theory. He describes the criteria he would employ has proposed the term horizons of expectations of a reading public. This result from what the public already understands about a genre and its convention. So, there is a background to the understanding of the genre of the text in which he reads. For example, Pope's poetry was judged highly by his contemporaries who valued clarity, decorum and width. But the next century had different horizons of expectations and thus actually called upon question. Pope's claim to being considered a poet at all. Yes. So, the importance of psychology now we come to another end from philosophy, phenomenology, communetics. We come into psychology in literary interpretation has long been recognized. We have seen Plato Aristotle Aristotle how he talked about catharsis of emotions, how he talked about those that ought to be stringently controlled. Conversely Aristotle argued that literature exerted a good psychological influence. Commit to Freud, Sigmund Freud has had an incalculable influence on literary analysis. Yes, which is theorist about unconscious and about the importance of sexing explaining much human behavior. Well, but we are talking now of the unconscious of the readers not of the writers. If however, followers of Freud have been more concerned with the unconscious of literary characters or of the writers or of their people, their creators more recent psychological critics have focused on the unconscious of readers. Norman Holland is one of them. One such critic argues that all people inherit from their mother an identity theme of fixed understanding of the kind of person they are. Holland illustrated this as is in an essay entitled Hamlet My Greatest Creation. Holland's theory for all its emphasis on readers and their psychology does not deny or destroy the independence of the text. So, here even the reader response brings forward, intervenes that the text is of secondary importance. However, Holland says that it exists as an object and as expression of another mind. We come to another scholar, a critic David Blis in subjective criticism who denies that the text exists independent of readers. Blis accepts the arguments of such contemporary philosophers of science as schoon who deny the objectives fax exist. He even denied that there is anything which is called objective. Such a position asserts that even what passes for scientific observation or something or anything is still merely individual and subjective perception incurring in a special context. So, we are coming into this perspective of subjective and objective. Subjective is your own individual reaction response and objective is something which is general and not connected with individual responses. Blis claims that individuals everywhere classify things into three essential groups, objects, symbols and people. Literature he thinks a mental creation because it is a mental creation would thus be considered only as a symbol. Well, so now we come to the last theoretician of reader response Stanley Fish and that really two kinds of reader response criticism. One is the phenomenological approach which we had done with Wolfgang Ezer and also Stanley Fish also was he characterized much of Fish's earlier work on the phenomenological approach. The phenomenological method has much to commend itself to us as it focuses on what happens in the reader's mind as he or she reads. Fish applies this method in his early work which was surprised by Saint Derrida in Paradise Laws. There is much change in his looking at the text in his reader response theory. In his early work he had said specially this book surprised by Saint Derrida in Paradise Laws. The supposed intent what he had said of Milton was to force Derrida to see his own sitfulness in a new light and be forced back to God's grace. Fish's thesis is a rather ingenious approach to Paradise Laws and to Milton's misleading of the reader. Surprised by Saint he had brought about the thing called effective stylistics meaning in a literary work is not something to be extracted as a dentist might pull out a tooth meaning must be negotiated by readers align at a time surprised by rhetorical strategies meaning is what happens to readers during this negotiation. It cannot be extracted all of a sudden or suddenly but it has to be negotiated by the readers through time and by rhetorical strategies. His famous work is there a text in this class brought in new dimensions to reader response a form of criticism this is something like what you study in the classroom itself alright. A form of criticism that rejects the authors intentionally and places meanings only within the arena of those receiving the text. Thus his theory is sometimes called reception aesthetics or effective stylistics this is what he says. Derrida of whose responses I speak is complex and informed reader neither an abstraction nor an actual living reader but a hybrid a real reader like me who does everything within his power to make himself informed including suppressing what is personal and idiosyncratic and 1970ish in my response. In this book is there a text in this class what is really happening is in the act of reading which defines his own phenomenological approach as an analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time one line at a time one another in time. His concern is with what the text does as opposed to what it means. The context for the discussion is the question of whether formal features exist prior to an independently of interpretative strategy. As one might imagine fish eventually offers a negative response to this question when he says is there a text in this class there is no text at all. He possesses that rather than having a text that contains formal features and places that it is the reader that project this features into the text thereby also answering no to the question is there a text in this class. So, now he talks about the interpretive community that creates its own reality it is the community that invests the text it is not an individual but an individual who forms an interpretive community or for that matter life itself with meaning. He possesses that meaning in hers not in the text but in the reader or rather the reading community. In the procedures I would urge the reader's activities are at the center of attention where they are regarded not as leading to meaning but as having meaning. He can hold this because he believes that there is no stable basis for meaning there is no correct interpretation that will always hold true meaning does not exist out there somewhere it exists rather within the reader. So, fish denies the text as objects and which are so important to himself and bird sleigh and the new critics. So, the objectivity of the text is an illusion and moreover a dangerous illusion because it is so physically convincing. So, the text does not contain meaning despite being written upon it is a open tabula rasa you can say a blank slate utter unto which the reader in reading actually writes the text yes that is remarkable is not it and that you are the one who is writing meaning giving meaning to the text. For fish the text can only function as a mirror that provides a reflection of its reader. So, this prepositions of the community is the socially conditioned individual right which all individuals are this culture is referred to by fish as an interpretive community and the strategies of an interpreter are community property. So, the interpretive community share interpretive interpretive strategies and readers belong to the same interpretive communities which shared reading strategies values and interpretive assumptions they may differ, but yet we find that they belong to a group well. So, there have been therefore, various approaches of reader responses to literary text we use the psychoanalytic lens we use the feminist lens we even use the structuring structuralist and lens. Tyson explains that reader response theory said to believes that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from understanding of literature. So, it is close to pedagogy that readers actively make the meaning define in literature. So, it is the that of the author in the post structural area when they talk of her or his displacement as the authoritarian figure in the text. So, the various responses according to John Ly that the question of in what senses a text or electrons on a screen exist the extent to which knowledge is objective or subjective how the gap historically culturally and semiotically between the reader and the writer is bridged and the extent to which it is bridged the question of what the process of reading is like what it entails and so forth. So, the interpretations at the same time the value of literary reading is conferred by kind of contract that the reader makes with a text. The reader comes to redefine some significant aspects of experience during reading the reader treats the text as a whole thing. So, literature is about human experience when you read the text it is a human experience that you find in the text. It is your own subjective response and you give meaning to the text, but whatever happened to read a response theory uses elaborate description of the processes by which consciousness construct meaning as readers encounter gaps and build consistences in literary text provided perhaps the most elaborate account of reading processes to emerge during that period. Yes, even Rosenberg's distinction between aesthetic readings provides both students and teachers a useful way of discriminating kinds of reading activities while at other times we read for the pleasurable experience of generating interpretations. On the other hand they could simultaneously hold that equally common sensical notion that authorial intention is unknowable and that constructed meanings are disparate and contextualized very true. Today it is fair to say that a reader response conceptions are simply assumed in virtually every aspect of our work. Bleaches emphasis on the subjectivity of criticism indeed of all reading has become commonplace by now we no longer even expect different readers to arrive at identical reading. The new cultural ideas had their roots deep in the age of at the same time what is happening sociologically in the political sphere the portal to the land of boundless possibility notwithstanding that it is now a theoretical commonplace that readers make meaning that notion no longer feels very liberating yes, but a genealogical look at how reader response theory has been celebrated or rejected in English departments all over the world can tell us much about conflicted relations. So, sometimes you will find those who are the people who are supporting the theorist will say that reader response theory does not stay cannot hold. So, this is between composition studies and literary studies and between research and pedagogy during the past two or three decades. What become of the populist excitement that surrounded it twenty five years ago or more than that I will assume that the disappearance of reader response theory by a comparison with high theory is consistent with an explicable by its having been part both as a liberatory political movement and an elitist theory boom. In his on the deconstruction Jonathan Coller had made a series of the observation that helped explain the profession's uneasiness with reader response. Traditional literary studies privileges what the intelligible over the sensible meaning over form and the invisible over the visible. Compositionist like reader response precisely because it allowed us to empower a student. So, students become empowered with meaning and the questions that we will be doing dealing with today will be how does the interaction of text and reader create meaning. What does the phrase by phrase analysis of a short literary text or a key portion of a longer text tell us about a reading experience pre-structured by that text or do the sound shapes of the words as they appear on the page or how they spoken by the reader enhance or sense the meaning of the word or how might we interpret a literary text to show that a reader's responses or is analogous to the topic of the story. What does the body of criticism published about a literary text suggest about a critic who interpreted that text and or about a reading experience produced by that text. Well, works cited most of them are from I. A. Richard's principles of literary criticism. We have Stanley Fish and we have Peter Barry Eagleton, Terry Eagleton, Wolfgang Isser and Balmer is Harry. Harry Balmer is thanks.