The section on psychological reader response was my favorite section due to my status as a former psychology major. According to Normand Holland, we respond to literature the same way we respond to real life events. The transaction that occurs between us and the text works to satisfy our needs, which are dependent on our individual psychology. Holland uses the example of Pecola in The Bluest Eye (a young abuse victim), and how a reader who had been abused would have to "cope" with the emotions that Pecola's character stirs up. This type of criticism reveals more about the reader than the text, because depending on the person you analyze, the results will always be different, even if you use the exact same text.
Interpretive communities are groups of people who use the same techniques when responding to texts. They are formed from institutions such as colleges, religions, cultures, and philosophies. Readers might not even realize that they belong to an interpretive community. We are predisposed to use the techniques of the community we belong to. Fish's experiment with his two classes shows how simple it is to guide people's interpretations by doing something as simple as giving them one bit of false information.
Reading in the efferent mode means that we focus on the facts that the text tells us. When we read in the aesthetic mode, we are reading in a more personal way, as well as looking for the meaning behind the text. The efferent mode depends on determinate meaning, which refers to what we can know from the information provided to us. This type of meaning isn't really negotiable, because it comes from facts clearly stated in the text. Indeterminate meaning is more subjective, because is depends on on our own interpretations, or what we "read between the lines".
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