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"Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism" collects the most important theoretical statements on readers and the reading process. Its essays trace the development of reader-response criticism from its beginnings in New Criticism through its appearance in structuralism, stylistics, phenomenology, psychoanalytic criticism, and post-structuralist theory. The editor shows how each of these essays treats the problem of determinate meaning and compares their unspoken moral assumptions. In a concluding essay, she redefines the reader-response movement by placing it in historical perspective, providing the first short history of the concept of literary response. This anthology remains an indispensable guide to reader-response criticism. -- From publisher's description.
Argues for a method of biblical interpretation that allows for multiple legitimate meanings, providing examples from popular literature and movies while considering in length the story of the Magi and the impact of Scripture on human truth. Original.
Genre-bending experiments that appropriate, impersonate, and speak through already-created literary characters in order to offer fresh interpretations of well-known literary works.
This invaluable guide by Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack offers an accessible introduction to two important movements in the history of twentieth-century literary theory. A complementary text to the Palgrave volume Postmodern Narrative Theory by Mark Currie, this new title addresses a host of theoretical concerns, as well as each field's principal figures and interpretive modes. As with other books in the Transitions series, Formalist Criticism and Reader-response Theory includes readings of a range of widely-studied texts, including Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, among others. Transitions critically explores movements in literary theory. Guiding the reader through the poetics and politics of interpretative paradigms and schools of thought, Transitions helps direct the student's own acts of critical analysis. As well as transforming the critical developments of the past by interpreting them from the perspective of the present day, each study enacts transitional readings of a number of well-known literary texts.
First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. ‘New Accents’ is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.
Robert Fowler's groundbreaking method—reader-response criticism—as a strategy for reading the Gospel of Mark invites contemporary readers to participating in making the meaning of the Gospel. Now available in paperback.
In Interpretive Conventions, Steven Mailloux examines five influential theories of the reading process—those of Stanley Fish, Jonathan Culler, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, and David Bleich.
This book describes a nontraditional, non-authoritarian method for teaching students how to think and write about literature. It elucidates contemporary critical theories concerning the reader's role in creating literary experience, and it explains how to use activities such as journal writing, composite interpretation, and stop-action reading to elicit original responses from students. Statistical measures and case studies document the effectiveness of this approach.
Style and Reader Response: Minds, media, methods profiles the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches in reception-oriented research in stylistics. Collectively, the chapters investigate how real readers, players, audiences, and viewers respond to, experience, and interpret texts. Contributions to the book investigate discourse types such as contemporary literature, poetry, political speeches, digital fiction, art exhibitions, and online news discourse. The volume also exemplifies the variety of empirical approaches in reception research, with contributors drawing on a range of methods including discussion groups, interviews, questionnaires, and think-aloud protocols with data analysed from both online and offline sources. Style and Reader Response makes an important contribution to an emerging paradigm within stylistics in which verifiable insights from readers are used to generate new models and new understandings of texts across media, with each essay demonstrating the centrality of empirical research for theoretical, methodological, and/or analytical advancements within and beyond stylistics.