The Function Of The Reader As Subject In Literary Activities

The role of the reader was strikingly elevated with the emergence of reception theory in the late 1960s and the development of its later form reader-response criticism in the 1970s. Literary meaning, in traditional literary criticism, is either related to the author or to the text, and the reader is but a receiver of the message the text delivers and the meaning the author gives in it. For Hans Robert Jauss, the German critic of reception theory, literary meaning, as an essential part of literary history, depends on the effect of the reader's reception; for Wolfgang Iser, another German literary critic, literary meaning is produced in the concretization of the text via the reader. When it comes to reader-response critics, literary meaning is equal to the reader's experience in reading or the discovery and confirmation of his identity theme. The subjectivity of the reader is thus acknowledged and strengthened. Scholars at home and abroad and those who are interested in literary theory and literary criticism have studied, from different angles, the role of the reader in literary activity, however, as far as I know, few studies have been conducted by basing the focus of the research on the reader's active role and the significance of active reading to the pursuit of literary meaning of a text. This thesis attempts to make a comprehensive study of the reader's reading activity, by taking reception theory and reader-response criticism as its theoretical fundament and employing a good number of well-known literary works in the world for its analysis, discusses the recognition and the confirmation of the reader's role in literary activity in recent literary criticism, the variety of the manifestations and levels of the reader's subjectivity and all the factors affecting the play of this subjectivity so as to explore the reader's creative participation in the production of literary meaning and its significance to the realization of literary value. The thesis falls into five chapters. Chapter One is a survey of the reader's role in the history of literary criticism. A brief introduction is given first of the role of the reader in the long literary history to show that the recognition of and the stress on the reader's role can be traced back to the early classical period, and the reader's role is expounded respectively in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Dryden, and Johnson. With the rise of romanticism, the focus of criticism was centered on the author and the audience gradually receded into the background. Formalism in the middle of the 20th century displaced the creator only to focus on the text itself. The New Criticism and structuralism were mainly concerned with the text, and the New Critics cut the text off from the author and the reader with "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy". However, even under such environments the reader did not disappear completely, but appeared in the works of I. A. Richards and William Empson. As a reaction against formalism, the New Criticism and structuralism, in a sense, reception theory emerged in Germany in the 1960s. Its representative critics, mainly Jauss and Iser and the representatives of reader-response criticism, mainly Stanley Fish, David Bleich, and Norman Holland, all emphasized the subjective role of the reader. Jauss holds that the past literary history ignores the role of the reader and declares that literary history should be a reader's reception history; Iser claims that literary meaning is produced in the interaction between the text and the reader. Reader-response criticism exalts the reader to such an important position that the objectivity of the text is erased. The various models of the reader are proposed in order to stress the reader's active participation, including Gibson's the "mock reader", Iser's the "implied reader", Riffaterre's the "superreader" and Fish's the "informed reader". Chapter Two deals with the significance of reading in contemporary literary theory. Literary meaning is determined by the reader's...