Reader-oriented Theories and Their Application to Ernest Hemingway’s Hills like white elephants

Reader-oriented Theories and Their Application to Ernest Hemingway’s Hills like white elephants

From the very beginning of the literature people tended to criticize the literary works according to some certain criteria. Some critics claimed that the text itself is important and some other said the author and his style is the thing that should be focused on. Form and content were the other significant elements in the history of the literary criticism. In addition, the social and political influences of the time that the work was written were also considered as important. However the reader who reads the work and his thoughts and his interpretations were not as valuable as the other criteria until late 19th and early 20th century. From then on we come up with a new approach, reader-response. The aim of the present paper is to give some basic tenets of the reader-oriented theories and their application to the work “Hills like white elephants” by Ernest Hemingway.

We can say that Reader-oriented theories have no single or predominant philosophical starting point. There are quite different writers that commented on the reader response and they belong to different traditions of thought. They seriously challenge the predominance of the text-oriented theories of New Criticism and Formalism. As for them it is impossible to talk about the meaning of a text without considering the reader’s contribution to it. We see an interesting explanation about reader-response criticism by Tompkins. She claims that “reader response criticism is not a conceptually unified critical position, but a term that has come to be associated with the work of critics who use the words reader, the reading process, and response to mark out an area for investig...

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...n and fertile part of the country was a symbol of the productive part of the woman and the barren part is the symbol of the man who did not want the baby. And the other readers stated that these two different parts of the land were a reflection of the inner part of the woman. The reason for the man not to want a baby was considered as an obstacle for him to travel. It was observed that the woman readers were supporting the woman in the story and the man readers were supporting the man’s part of the argument...

Finally we can say that the discussion in the class and the differences in the interpretations showed us clearly the differences between the perceptions of the readers on the same work. In the lights of the reader-oriented theories one can claim that there is no single truth or meaning derived from the text, the responses will change as the readers change.