{"id":4563,"date":"2013-12-31T11:11:27","date_gmt":"2013-12-31T10:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pregonero.de\/?p=4563"},"modified":"2020-06-17T18:49:24","modified_gmt":"2020-06-17T16:49:24","slug":"the-incomplete-sculpture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/pregonero.de\/?p=4563","title":{"rendered":"The incomplete sculpture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reader-response criticism does not ask “What does a text mean?” but rather “What does a text do?”. What does a text do to the reader’s mind, that is, which ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations does in trigger. Needless to say, this allows a great deal of subjectivity. Individual readers may react differently to a text. This subjectivity has been the target of criticism from formalist scholars who think meaning is to be found in the text itself. They see as fallacious the notion that a reader’s response is part of the meaning of a literary work. Such an idea has been condemned as the Affective Fallac<\/em>y. Both approaches, it seems to me, are appealing, though incompatible. Both approaches also beg at least one important question. For the formalists: How can different interpretations to one and the same text be explained if meaning is embedded in the text? For the reader-response critics: Why do individual readers come up with such similar interpretations if meaning is not embedded in the text? A rather nice image, which allows for different interpretations but at the same time curbs subjectivity is the one proposed by Adena Rosmarin. According to this view, a text is like an incomplete sculpture. In order to see it fully, we must complete it imaginatively.\u00a0(Schwarz, Daniel R.: James Joyce: The Dead.<\/em> Boston and New York: Bedford\/St. Martin\u2019s, 1994: 125-129)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reader-response criticism does not ask “What does a text mean?” but rather “What does a text do?”. What does a text do to the reader’s mind, that is, which ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations does in trigger. Needless to say, this … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[745],"tags":[1664,1663,1662,755],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pregonero.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4563"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/pregonero.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/pregonero.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pregonero.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pregonero.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4563"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/pregonero.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10856,"href":"http:\/\/pregonero.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4563\/revisions\/10856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pregonero.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pregonero.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pregonero.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}