ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Reader-Response Criticism asserts that a great deal of meaning in a text lies with how the reader responds to it. Deals more with the process of creating meaning and experiencing a text as we read. A text is an experience, not an object.

Detailed explanation-2: -Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or “audience") and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.

Detailed explanation-3: -A formalist critic examines the form of the work as a whole, the form of each individual part of the text (the individual scenes and chapters), the characters, the settings, the tone, the point of view, the diction, and all other elements of the text which join to make it a single text.

Detailed explanation-4: -One can sort Reader Response theorists into three groups: those who focus upon the individual reader’s experience (“individualists”); those who conduct psychological experiments on a defined set of readers (“experimenters”); and those, who assume a fairly uniform response by all readers (“uniformists”).

Detailed explanation-5: -Reader-response theory is based on the assumption that a literary work takes place in the mutual relationship between the reader and the text. According to this theory, the meaning is constructed through a transaction between the reader and the text within a particular context.