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R e a d e rs approach prefaces expecting to find out how authors want their texts to be read. Such expectations and readings are what this book is all about. T h e following chapters present a general introduction to current reader-response criticism, a critical perspective that makes the reading experience the central concern in talk about literature. These chapters also propose a specific reader-oriented approach to the study o f Am erican fiction. I develop this approach while exam ining the activities making up the discipline: literary theory, practical criticism, textual scholarship, and literary history.Chapters i and 2 analyze five influential theories o f the literary reading process: those o f Stanley Fish, Norm an Holland, David Bleich, W olfgang Iser, and Jonathan Culler. It turns out that none o f these literary theorists provides the kind o f reader-oriented approach most useful for studying Am erican fiction. Only a reader-response criticism based on a consistent social model o f reading can supply the required approach. Social reading models are based on sociological categories such as communities and conventions rather than psychological categories such as individual selves and unique identities. C hapters 3 through 7 develop such a social reading model, which owes more to the theories o f Fish, Iser, and C uller than to the psychological reader criticism o f H olland and Bleich.Chapter 3 moves the discussion from theory to practice. A reader-response analysis o f a H awthorne short story tries to demonstrate the consequences o f taking the reader's interaction with the text as the prim ary focus o f practical criticism. T h e most

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 130.240.43.43 on TueWhat happens when we read literary texts? This seems to be a naive, simple question which most critics and literary theoreticians have mistakenly ignored. But a shift in literary theory from speculations concerning the structures and meanings of the text to an analysis of the reading process puts into question the assumptions of the major recent theories of literature, from structuralism, functionalism and New Criticism to poststructuralism, since they have generally bracketed the reader and the reading process in their endeavor to provide frameworks for "objective" descriptions of structures and meanings.We may well ask ourselves why the reader was so long neglected in favor of "objective" descriptions of literary works. Two major reasons seem to account for the suppression of the reader: drawing attention to the reader and the reading process is believed to endanger the "objectivity" which we gained through numerous battles against subjectivism, and which we have to protect in the literary establishment if we are to be considered as working in a respectable field of study. Critics fear that emphasizing the reader's activity will again lead to uncontrollable subjectivism and ultimately to anarchy in literary studies. Secondly, any analysis of the reading process is frequently dismissed as a hopeless undertaking, since the idiosyncracies of each reader seem to lead away from useful generalizations concerning either the activities of the reader or the nature of the literary work. Paying attention to the reader is therefore often regarded as a subversive activity which re-opens Pandora's box and undermines our hard-earned "certainties" concerning literary texts. Indeed, a reader-oriented theory exposes our "objective" analyses as sophisticated "subjective" readings. Iser therefore considers his analysis of the reading process as promoting "reflection on presuppositions operative both in reading and interpreting" [p. x]. Since every critic bases his analysis on his own reading, "the would-be objective judgments rest on a foundation that appears to be every bit as 'private' as those that make no claims to objectivity, and this fact renders it all the more imperative that these seemingly 'private' processes should be investigated" [p. 24].Recent attempts to deal with the role of the reader (, and others) have emphasized the importance of the reader for literary theory and criticism,

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