The reader-response criticism of literary theory places a significant emphasis on the response of the reader to a given text (literary or otherwise). The interpretation of the text varies from reader to reader due to various reasons. What could those reasons possibly be?
I would suggest that you read the works of Umberto Eco.
I am no expert, but I can list a few basic reasons why different people would interpret what they read differently.
Before I do, I would like to mention that words and concepts people don't fully understand tend to create blanks of understanding within their mind. What I mean by this is that if you are reading a paragraph and half way through you see a word that isn't in your vocabulary, you will potentially have a difficult time comprehending the rest of the paragraph, and perhaps, even worse, material later on in the work. I would guess that this might be one of the biggest reasons why people respond differently to a work. If words that relate to economics, politics, or science are used, and you don't know those words, your mind will have difficulty making sense of the information that follows, and the consequence is likely a complete loss of that information you read because the brain does not like to store and compartmentalize information it can't make sense of.
Ok, with that out of the way, here are some reasons for individual responses:
1. As mentioned above, reading comprehension.
2. The ability to identify symbolism in a work.
3. The ability to follow complicated plots and characters.
4. The ability to summarize the plot of the book and be able to identify the key points, actions, and situations.
5. The reader's life experience and how that relates to the book.
6. The reader's intellectual education. Also, their literary sphere of knowledge and how that relates to the book.
7. The author's life and education and how that relates to their work and how that relates to your reading of their work.
Here are a few examples relating to points 1-6:
1. There are books that I read as a teenager that literally do not appear to be the same book I remember reading because I do not remember whole swaths of the books' contents. This was due mostly to reading comprehension issues and the encountering of words I did not understand and concepts related to fields that I had no knowledge of.
2. One example of symbolism could be a character in the story that represents a philosophical point of view or an emotion or a virtue or vice. Perhaps one character represents anger. Another character embodies piety and so on.
3. In order to grasp a work you need to know the key characters and what happens in the story. If you don't know these then you will not have a full grasp of the book.
4. Being able to summarize the basic plot of the book and identify the main actions, key points, and ideas indicates that you generally understand the book and what it says.
5. Your life experience can cause you to relate to the story or characters better. If some of your life experience parallels a character's story, you will likely embrace and relate to the character and story more than if you didn't share similarities.
6. Your education and reading background play a large part in interpretation. If you read Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" without having read The Iliad and The Odyssey, your appreciation and understanding of the poem will not be on the same level as someone who has read those works. If you read a book like Moby Dick without having any knowledge of some of the fundamental pillars of western thought and literature, then you will miss many things in the book that otherwise would have presented themselves to you. This is part of the reason that some classic works are re-readable, because as your knowledge grows you will understand more that you previously missed in the work.
7. The author's life and education can mean alot in relation to their work. The experiences they had and the political, theological, and philosophical thought of their time can have a major impact on the themes they use and the stories they tell.
That's all that comes to mind at the moment, and this is in no way a comprehensive list, but these are some basic reasons why two people will respond to a work differently.
Last edited by Vota; 04-14-2014 at 03:43 PM.
This sounds like an English 015 question. Detailing all the possibilities seems unnecessary. Safe to say it depends mainly on the education of the reader, the life experiences of the reader, and lets not forget, the effort of the reader!
I suggest everyone read 'The Name of the Rose'... I enjoyed it so much I actually purchased the Folio Society edition.Originally Posted by PeterL
Loved the book, and the movie was pretty damn good too.
I've got that Folio volume on my list of "must buy" books. Beautiful book.
A good cover is paramount. I have always found the color of a cover to sum up nicely the work inside, if chosen well. Hope that helps.
And don't forget the forward. I require an outstanding forward by an outstanding well known author. If I get by the color issues, that is.
You bring your own baggage to the text. A professor at my college harped on that one. I think a major reason would be readability of the novel. Also, whether or not the reader likes the book. I generally did not like Heart of Darkness, which may be a meaningful text, but its form of narration within narration distracted me from looking deeper. As for readability, while Ulysses may be the greatest novel of the twentieth century, it is hard to access with dense, intensive sentences and hard vocabulary. Sometimes I'm not sure of what I'm reading. Another thing is how connected things are--and apparent--toward a plot. Sometimes I have no idea what is going on in a novel until someone dies, for instance, and then I'm not sure why/what events led up to it.
I like Vota's ideas, but I would particularly like to emphasis that you bring your own baggage to the text, which affects how you interpret the text, often with your own life in mind. So that means an interpretation is likely to be subjective, not objective.
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