Reader response theory - Louise Rosenblatt, Roland Barthes, Wolfgang Iser

This week I have been researching literary theory, I am interested in how we read words and interpret story and what this means when we come to create something that is ultimately for someone else. Who is this audience? What is their role? How can we fulfil that? How can a work create expectations? Or meet expectations? What are the expectations?

I came across Reader Response theory when I was looking for discourse on the role of the audience in literary works and I think its constructive to think about making work with this in mind. 

Reader-Response is a literary theory, that says that the reader is just as important as the author in the making of literary meaning in literary works. Reader-Response theorists think that readers are active participants who create a work of literature in the process of reading it. Contrasting theories and schools of thought focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. 

The meaning of a text, according to Response Theorists, exists somewhere between the words on the page and the readers mind. The interpretation each reader has will be similar, but each will be slight different. Reader response theory isn't just about understanding a text better; its also about understanding yourself better. Some of the main contributions of this theory came from Louise Rosenblatt, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser and Roland Barthes, you can read Barthes 'Death of the Author' in full here. 

The literary work exists in a live circuit set up between reader and text; the reader infuses intellectual and emotional meanings into the pattern of verbal symbols and these symbols channel his thoughts and feelings. Out of this process emerges a more or less organized imaginative experience.

(Rosenblatt, 1978)

‘At the heart of the reading experience is the gap in the text which has to be filled by the reader. It is the gaps, the fundamental asymmetry between the text and reader, that give rise to communication in the reading process’ (Iser, 1978).