Roberts, Appendix A: Making your own meaning
While reading Jen's blog entry about the usefulness of the reader-response critical approach to literature while examining Flannery O'Connor's texts, I realized that perhaps "sophisticated" critics are too hard on it as a method of study. After all, in order to understand some works, a reader is expected to fill in the blanks on his own, and the information he or she chooses to put in those gaps usually comes from personal experience.
Even more important, the reader-response method gives readers the opportunity to imagine the story's visuals, audio, and other sensory details, drawing from their understanding of whatever the author describes, which is founded upon their ability to imagine such things in their own minds.
Really, when you think about it, author's actually depend upon readers to be able to think for themselves and draw their own conclusions from works of literature; if they didn't, authors would simply come right out and deliver the meaning of the work to the reader in the conclusion.