Theory

I definitely enjoyed reading the theories of Reader-Response Criticism more than I enjoyed New Criticism. I really liked reading the Psychological Reader-Response theory because I also relate what I have read back to myself.

Our psychology affects our interpretations of text because our personal experiences give the text meaning. We project ourselves into the texts we read and we identify ourselves through them. Norman Holland said that reader interpretations revel more about themselves than about the text, I believe this, because I am a victim of sexual assault, so reading text about sexual assault for me brings up emotional moments and memories compared to someone who is reading the same text and has never been sexually assaulted.

An interpretive community is a community of people who share the same interpretive strategies of analyzing a text. Stanley Fish believed that everyone’s “individual subjective” responses to literature were just products of an interpretive community. They condition our reading because we learn to interpret a text based on the way someone else interprets theirs. An example of this can be seen in school.

Discovering an author’s identify theme means to discover their thoughts, feelings, fears, etc based on their personal experiences that they project into their own writings.