Reception Theory: Reader-Response Criticism

READER – RESPONSE THEORY: A THEORETICAL PROJECT
“There are no facts, only interpretations”
“The conspiracy of silence surrounding the supposed impersonality of critical reading is now gradually being unmasked.”
Do various responses to literary works produce the similar interpretations? ; Are some interpretations more valid than others?; Are all interpretations produced by the readers of a particular text applicable to it? Reader-Response Criticism as a theoretical paradigm explores these questions; it not only marks a shift from text to reader but serves as a self-reflective activity which first scratches the conscious, unconscious realms of a text and then questions its very own judgement which further makes it a mode of its own criticism,

Similarly, Reception theory explores the dynamics of the process of reading as a complex movement and its gradual unfolding through time.
Wolfgang Iser, of Constance School of Reception Aesthetics, discusses in THE ACT OF READING (1978), the techniques, the allusionary skills and the themes which a text put to work to illustrate the point that to read at all, one needs not only to know the conventions and literary techniques inherent in a specific work but must also be conscious of rules that govern its production of meaning otherwise the domain of criticism would become completely chaotic and any text would end up becoming a collage of various inconsistent readings.
However, American critic, Stanley Fish argues

On one hand, the former is reinforces pre-existing analyses of reader’s judgements of a particular text, the latter, on the other hand, compels readers to establish their own meaning for literary works. He conceives reader essentially as an “actively meditating presence” (S. Fish 384) and “meaning as an event, something that is happening between the words and in the reader’s mind, something not visible to naked eye, but which can be made visible by the regular introduction of a “searching” question” (S. Fish 389), as this kind of process he believes, allows merging of experiences of readers with one another and meaning then becomes a matter of amalgamation rather than of individual’s emphasis and significance. In his work, Surprise by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1971) his ideas of dialectics of meaning were first surfaced as he maintains that the ‘uniqueness’ of Paradise Lost is not solely due to writerly imagination of Milton but also due to mind of the reader who simultaneously participated in poem as a self-reflective critic of his own performance as he is involved in the action of the