A style of literary criticism that focuses on the process of reading as a sequence of mental experiences, seeks to anticipate what those experiences (or responses) will be for some sort of "typical" reader, and aims to describe how all those individual responses "roll up" into a reader's overall experience.
There are many variants.
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Stanley Fish was a proponent of a style of reader-response criticism that took off in the 1970's. Here's a quote from his "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics":
> I would like to begin with a sentence that does not open itself up to the questions we usually ask. > > That Judas perished by hanging himself, there is no certainty in Scripture: though in one place it seems to affirm it, and by a doubtful word hath given occasion to translate it; yet in another place, in more punctual description, it maketh it improbable, and seems to overthrow it.
> Ordinarily, one would begin by asking, "What does this sentence mean?" or "What is it about?" or "What is it saying? – all of which would preserve the objectivity of the utterance. For my purposes, however, this particular sentence has the advantage of not saying anything. That is, you can't get a fact out of it which could serve as an answer to any one of these questions. Of course, this difficulty is itself a fact – of response; and it suggests, to me at least, that what makes problematical sense as a statement makes perfect sense as a strategy, an action made upon a reader rather than as a container from which a reader extracts a message.
Fish arrived at this opinion in his first book, *Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost*, in which "the difficulties one experiences in reading the poem are not to be lamented or discounted but are to be seen as manifestations of the legacy left to us by Adam when he fell. Milton's strategy in the poem is to make the reader self-conscious about his own performance, to force him to doubt the correctness of his responses, and to bring him to the realization that his inability to read the poem with any confidence [...] *is its focus*." (emphasis mine)
see also
Fish's main book on the topic is *Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities*. It has problems of two sorts:
* As someone or other noted, in Fish's account of *Paradise Lost*, the reader is kind of a dumbass: she keeps falling for the same Miltonian trick again and again. You'd think she'd learn.
* I said above that the response is for a "typical" reader. Fish never, in my opinion, came up with a good answer to the problem that different readers respond differently. For ideological reasons, I suspect.
But he's an engaging writer, with an *enfant terrible* vibe that he was fond of taking to extremes.
For an edited anthology, see *Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism*, Jane P. Tompkins (ed.)
My own approach to how communication (dialogues, monologues, nonfiction essays) works is, roughly, the "reader-response attitude" combined with One Associationist Theory of Thought.
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