SOURCE: Mailloux, Steven. “The Turns of Reader-Response Criticism.” In Conversations: Contemporary Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature, edited by Charles Moran and Elizabeth F. Penfield, pp. 38-54. Urbana. Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1990.

In the following essay, Mailloux presents a brief overview of reader-response theories prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s.

The goal of reader-response criticism is to talk more about readers than about authors and texts. During the last twenty years such talk has involved a diversity of tropes and arguments within the institutional activities of literary criticism, history, theory, and pedagogy. In this brief essay I analyze early forms of this diversity in the 1970s and suggest some new turns reader-response criticism has taken in the 1980s.

Rhetoric as trope (figurative language) and as argument (persuasion) provides the framework for my discussion of reader-oriented criticism. Rhetoric presents a useful conceptual bridge from the...