ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -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-2: -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-3: -Unlike text-based approaches such as New Criticism, which are grounded upon some objective meaning already present in the work being examined, reader-response criticism argues that a text has no meaning before a reader experiences-reads-it.

Detailed explanation-4: -The key component to reader-response criticism is the belief that the way a reader approaches a text-including their reaction to the characters, plot, and structure of the text-creates its meaning.

Detailed explanation-5: -For example, in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the monster doesn’t exist, so to speak, until the reader reads Frankenstein and reanimates it to life, becoming a co-creator of the text.