My Second Crack at Trying to Understand Reader-Response

For this blog, I couldn't just pick one quote, but instead two series of quotes.  I think that this article held so much useful information that it is important to pause on it a bit longer than some of the other articles.

From Wolfgang Iser's article "Readers and the Concept of the Implied Reader" which appears in Keesey's Contexts for Criticism:

1) "The ideal reader, unlike the contemporary reader, is a purely fictional being; he has no basis in reality, and it is this very fact that makes him so useful: as a fictional being, he can close the gaps that constantly appear in any analysis of literary effects and responses" (142).

This first quote made me think of the earlier quote that said, "Although the critic's judgement may well have been honed and refined by the many texts he has dealt with, he remains nothing more than a cultured reader--if only because an ideal reader is a structural impossibility as far as literary communication is concerned" (141-42).  After reading the quote that appears on 141 and continues on to 142, I wrote that the idea reader is a literary myth like a minotaur or unicorn.  Then when I read the quote that said the ideal reader is "a fictional being" I had to laugh out loud.  I guess that reader-response is a bit of a fictional entity itself because it depends upon something that does not really exist.  The best we can do then is to construct our own "best" representation of that ideal reader by using the "different perspectives represented in the text, the vantage point from which he joins them together, and the meeting place where they converge" (145).  The meeting place is the "meaning of the text" which is what we are striving to get.  This leads me into my second quotation.

2) "The reason for this is that although the textual perspectives themselves are given, their gradual convergence and final meeting place are not linguistically formulated and so have to be imagined" (146). 

My note in the margin says, "Great!" because it means more guess-work for the reader.  I guess that we need to look at the ideas from 145 to create a kind of simulation.  This simulation is then what reader-sesponse is all about.  I think I may get it, but I'm not so sure that I'll be able to do it myself.  I guess I'll see in a few days when I write my paper.For further help in understanding reader-response click here.  This site really helped me to see that a lot of reader-response is psychological, which I should like because I love trying to read people.

I guess I kind of answered my own question with this entry.

The course webpage will open your mind to more reader-response possibilities.