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Contexts for Criticism, 4/e
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Reader-Response Criticism: Audience as Context

Chapter Objectives

1.

Based on an affective theory which locates meaning in the response of the reader (rather than the author or the text);

2.

Encompasses Freudian, Jungian, and other "myth" criticism which seek to explain why certain works of literature elicit deep responses within the collective consciousness of a community of readers;

3.

Some more recent reader-response critics argue that a text can hold objective "clues" to its own reading and that meaning is produced through interaction between text and reader.