Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide

The chapter opens with a definition of reader-response criticism as a mode of analysis that, as the name implies, focuses on the reader’s responses to a literary text. This often incorporates other modes of critical theory. For instance, a psychoanalytic approach to reader-response criticism would assess the “psychological motives” behind readers’ textual interpretations. Reader-response criticism emerged in reaction to the new critics’ stance that extrinsic criticism is not valuable. 

In contrast, reader-response critics argue that the reader should not be “omitted” from literary analysis and that readers “actively make meaning” as they read (150). This implies that even the same reader will come away with different understandings of the same text when read multiple times because they will have learned from the first reading and/or they may have changed in the intervening time.

“The House Passage”: A Reading Exercise

Tyson proposes a reading exercise to illustrate how readers create meaning of a literary text in practice and how those responses can be analyzed. She directs readers to read a short fiction passage about two boys, Mark and Pete, skipping school and going to Mark’s house. She instructs them to circle the positive and negative details about the house described in the passage from the

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