SOURCE: Spurlin, William J. “New Critical and Reader-Oriented Theories of Reading: Shared Views on the Role of the Reader.” In The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities, edited by William J. Spurlin and Michael Fischer, pp. 229-45. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995.

In the following essay, Spurlin presents a comparative analysis between reader-oriented theories of criticism and the New Critics, theorizing that although the New Critics did not address issues of gender, race, and other subjective positions as clearly as reader-response critics do, they were not indifferent to the context a reader brings to a text.

Contemporary critics and theorists often repudiate the New Criticism as narrowly formalistic because of its primary focus on the text, which allegedly precludes discussion of any social, historical, political, or existential contextualization in the act of reading. Indeed, the reflective and compelling arguments of more recent reader-oriented, feminist, New...