Reader Response Criticism Essay

The term reader-response criticism means not only a theory but also a range of approaches in which the focus of critical attention is how a reader responses to a text. Its development was a reaction in which there is an emphasis on the text and the reader gives an ultimate source of meaning. In literary criticism, reader- response theory means for the first time, the reader began to come into focus as the determiner of meaning. The canon of reader-response criticism was depicted by a series of retrospective collections, overviews and reading lists of the early 1980s and the texts included in the canon. The authors of the text were-

David Bleich, Norman Holland, Wolfgang Isher, Stanley Fish and Jonathan
Culler. These five critics gave emphasis
The narrate is the same thing as the implied author. The narrate is a full-fledged fictional person, whether or not “he” is a name referred to in the text. Another important Germen reader-response critic was Hans Robert Tauss. For Tauss, readers have a certain mental set, a “horizon” of expectations from which perspective each reader at any given time in history reads.

Thus Reader-Response criticism allows for variegated types of readers ranging from the subjective Reader of Holland or ‘informed’ reader of Fish, the competent reader of Culler and the super reader of Riffature, each with his individual (subjective) or transactive (inter-subjective) modes of reading.

In the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the admixture of past and present tense keeps the action or progress of the poem in “temporal limbo”- Fergusson argues that rime creates a kind of apparent relation between cause and effect for the reader to discover a kind of clear sense in the rime which is actually the moral value of the
Edited by Paul H. Fry, Yale University.)

Here the reader is also discussing the crime of the Mariner simultaneously. The first voice asks what makes the ship move and the second voice speaks of harmony between the ocean and the moon. When the first voice asks a question, the second voice answers that the air is “cut away” in front of the ship and it closes behind it. (18171.428).

He is mesmerized by the crew where the ship sails into the harbour and the illuminated dark-red shadows rise out of the calm water. When the ship advances, a boat appears and its Pilot shouts. The Mariner watches the Pilot and the Pilot’s boy is approaching and sees a Hermit abroad and the Hermit sings religious songs. Now the reader probably wants to know who is the Hermit and what is the real identity of the Hermit? But now the reader gets no answer.

In the concluding part of the poem Hermit is described as a woodland dweller. The Hermit marvels at the decrepit appearance of the Mariner’s ship and the pilot thinks that it looks “fiendish.” A sound is listened under the deep water and the ship sinks-as did the Albatross-“like lead” (1817 1.553), spewing the Mariner up to the surface of the