«In this essay, I shall describe what I think happened to the discussion that surrounded a group of texts - Louise Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration and The Reader, the Text, the Poem, David Bleich's Reading and Feelings and Subjective Criticism, Wolfgang Iser's The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading, Stanley Fish Is There a Text in This Class? and Norman Holland's Poems in Person and Five Readers Reading - collectively known as reader-response theory. With the exception of Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration, originally published in 1938, these works appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s.» p.411
«To begin, I need to discriminate reader-response theory from reception study [...]. I use the term "reception study" to refer to an inquiry into a text's effect on specific classes of readers (women, members of the working class in Liverpool, and so forth). [...] Reader-response theory, by contrast, is properly an effort to provide a generalized account of what happens when human beings engage in a process they call "reading".» p.411
«Iser's The Act of Reading, a phenomenological account of the processes that occur in consciousness when human beings encounter literary texts, is an example.» p.411
«We no longer even expect different readers to arrive at identical readings.» p.412
«Iser's elaborate descriptions of the processes by which consciousness constructs meaning as readers encounter gaps and build consistencies in literary texts.» p.412
«text of all kinds - stories, poems, plays, buildings, films, TV ads, clothes, body piercings - are received by their audiences not as a repository of stable meaning but as an invitation to make it.» p.413
«I need to show that reception theory has declined because it was populist and that the other theories survived because they were not. / Theories survive in a competitive academic marketplace in part as a consequence of the degree of difficulty ascribed to them, the extent to which they give their adherents the sense of power that comes from understanding a discourse other people don't understand. Theories disappear - as theories - when they become naturalized - when they become (apparently) so easy to understand that they no longer serve to demarcate their adherents as more knowledgeable or more intrinsically intelligent than the average person.» p.415
«Unlike Fish, I do not see "teachability" as disqualifying Iser from further serious consideration.» p.416 (Harkin vient de rappeler que l'article de Fish, "Why No One's Afraid of Wolfgang Iser", 1981, reprochait à l'approche phénoménologique d'Iser de n'être qu'une série d'instructions enseignables.) «Far more interesting, however, and important for my purposes here, is the implicit assumption in Fish's title that generating fear is an appropriate function of theory.»
Il faudrait que j'enquête un peu du côté du Fish, on en connaître davantage sur ce que Harkin appelle «Fish's affective stylistics [...] calling attention to the effects of language on readers.» p.416
«In its radical theoretical effort to include feminist readings, postcolonial readings, Latina readings, and so forth, reader-response theory (in its liberatory aspect) called on us to accept them all.» p.416 «By contrast, Fish's own account of reading presumed careful training and superior intelligence.» p.417
«the extent to which a theory of reading is perceived to be teachable can help to explain how it can actually disappear from curricula. Reader-response theory was and is eminently teachable - and teachable in a way that was (in the language of the eighties) "empowering". / It was in the mid- to late eighties, I believe, that persons in English studies divided in their use of reader-response theory. The literary studies community largely abandoned its explicit use. The composition community - at least at first - embraced it. Compositionists liked reader-response precisely because it allowed us to "empower" our students.» p.417-418
«My essay "Reading Theory and the Teaching of Writing" (1982) invoked the pedagogical possibilities of Iser's work.» p.418 / «reader-response came to be associated, almost exclusively, with pedagogy.»
«It is of course important for students to realize that their readings are shaped and even constrained by cultural and economic conditions. Readers make meaning, but not in conditions of their own choosing.» p.419
«the relatively young and untenured teachers of the theory boom generation [...] sought to professionalize themselves on the principle that relatively few people could read Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, and Deleuze. Professionalization is, by definition, exclusionary.» p.419