SOURCE: Weele, Michael Vander. “Reader-Response Theories.” In Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Appraisal, edited by Clarence Walhout and Leland Ryken, pp. 125-48. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991.

In the following essay, Weele presents an analysis of reader-response theories, tracing the beginnings of this critical approach to the earliest interpretations of scripture.

Literary criticism has always involved three inescapable elements: the author, the work, and the reader. Reader-response criticism regards the third of these elements as the most crucial for criticism, for criticism always begins in the first instance with reading. The current interest in reader-response theory derives not only from this fact, however; it also comes from contemporary skepticism about our knowledge of authors' intentions, from philosophical problems with the formalist view of the autonomy of artworks, and from the diversity of interpretations that cluster around individual works. If the meaning of a work cannot...