| A Clockwork Orange is a masterpiece of the British writer Antony Burgess,which is considered as the first “experimental fiction” after the “anti-experimental”wave of the twentieth century British literature. In1998, it was listed in “The HundredEnglish Novels of The20st Century” in American library. The novel tells a storyabout an unscrupulous juvenile offenders, who was forced to take the “Ludovico”treatment and became a conformist “clockwork orange” without hisself-consciousness. This thesis attempts to interpret the novel from reader’sperspective, which aims to present that the reader does not act as a passive object, buta subject which is actively involved and plays a creative role in the process ofmeaning construction.As the third transform of the Western Literary Criticism, Reader-responsecriticism against the traditional way, focuses on the roles of the reader in the processof analysis, creating a new horizon for the research of the western literature.Reader-response criticism advocates that there is no the only correct meaning, nor theonly correct reading. The consensus to the text merely exists among certain readerswith certain conditions.This thesis contains six parts. The first chapter, the introductory part, includesthree sections: an overall study of Anthony Burgess and his work A ClockworkOrange; Literature Review of existent studies on A Clockwork Orange and thesignificance and structure of the thesis. Chapter two is about the methodology. Thehistorical development and the basic theories of reader-response theory as well as theimportant concepts advocated by Jauss and Iser are depicted in this part. Chapter threefocuses on the reader’s active role in literary interpretation, including various modelsof the reader like “historical reader” by Jauss and “the informed reader” by Fish. Itfurther analyzes the disagreement concerning the twenty-first chapter of the novelbetween the author and readers, and also illustrates the actual reader’s negative andpositive interpretation of A Clockwork Orange. Chapter four consists of two parts.First, as one of the main domain in reader-response criticism,“the implied author”provides the textual analysis of A Clockwork Orange with a unique angle. Thenegation of the temporal social circumstance and tradition of novel reflected in the text is another line in this chapter. Chapter five concentrates on the mute interactionbetween reader and text. This kind of interaction is elaborated through two mostimportant concepts of reader-response criticism, which is reader’s horizon ofexpectation and the appeal structure. In virtue of its appeal structure within, and thepresent of blanks and uncertainty, the text manages to appeal readers to take theinitiative to fill in the blanks and gaps and thus complete the interaction. Reader’shorizon of expectation is another way to fulfill the interaction. Based on their pastexperience of life and reading, the readers continue to predict the development of theunfinished part of the text during their reading process while all the expectationremains to be broken and reshaped along with the actual development of the text.The last part is the epilogue of the paper, that is: the readers, according to theirown experiences, constantly fill in the gaps of the text and take an active part in thecreation of the novel. Without reader’s interaction, A Clockwork Orange is merelysome hundreds of thousands of words in some papers. Through reading the text, thereaders achieve their aesthetic practices and form their ideas towards the text. So itconcludes: in the process of interpreting a text, the reader is involved as an activesubject. The abundant interpretations of the novel are just gained through thesevarious reading processes and experiences, which is just the charm of reader-responsetheory. |
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