Is Reader-Response Criticism One School or Four?

“So this variability gives rise to one set of problems: How can reader-response critics avoid the conclusion, and the total relativism it entails, that a new poem is created with every reading?  How can they establish a standard to measure the adequacy of any particular reading without assuming the stability of the text and importing that standard from some other context—in other words, without grounding meaning in the text or the author, or the structure of language?”

- From Donald Keesey’s Context for Criticism, Chapter 3 Introduction: “Reader-Response Criticism: Audience as Context,” page 133

I think that Keesey presents an interesting point here that we have been making all along in class—how can the different types of criticism be used purely on their own?  I thought that Formalism was difficult to use alone; however, Reader-Response criticism seems even more difficult.  Based on the way that Keesey sometimes attributes its descriptions to various critics, it seem as thought this is the closest criticism can get to us being able to write, “I liked this story because…” 

At first, this idea appealed to me, but then I remembered, of course, that we cannot simply write the above statement in an academic paper, nor should we want to write it.  Now I am thoroughly confused.  Do we follow the advice of “some reader-response critics” who believe “this goal is neither attainable nor even especially desirable,” who “contend that our responses to literature are in themselves a subject of sufficient psychological interest as to require no further justification” (133)?  Do we follow critics such as Wolfgang Iser who has “a strong interest in phenomenology, a philosophy that stresses the perceiver’s role in perception and insists it is difficult to separate the thing known from the mind that knows it” (134)?  Do we follow critics like Norman Holland “who usually operates at a considerable distance from the textual end” much nearer than Iser to the psychoanalytical area (136)?  Do we follow David Bleich who sees no “‘object’” separate from the “‘subject’” (136-137).  Or, do we agree with Stanley Fish who after moving along the line from text to reader, seems to have decided “that the reader creates the poem in the very act of perceiving it” (137)?  Reader-Response criticism seems to be even more like Philosophy than any of the other schools of critical thought we have thus far discussed. 

Keesey seems to be as confused as I am, concluding that these major reader-response critics “agree on one main point: since the ‘poem’ exists only when the reader (however defined) encounters the text, literary criticism must focus on that encounter” (138).  There never is a straightforward answer for us, is there?

Click here to see if my classmates understand Reader-Response Criticism better than I do.