SOURCE: Addison, Catherine. “Once Upon a Time: A Reader-Response Approach to Prosody.” College English 56, no. 6 (October 1994): 655-78.

In the following essay, Addison discusses the impact of reader-response theory on prosody, noting that prosodic critical interpretations would benefit from an expansion of criteria beyond studying just the text to include the point of view of readers and their environment.

One would expect the study of literary prosody, of all disciplines, to focus on the phenomenon of reading. Its ostensible subject is the rhythms and patterns of sound in poetry, and these cannot be conceived without the prior notion of a reader perceiving or reproducing them. It may be possible to imagine an idea existing in free space, independent of any thinker, since ideas are often envisaged as static entities, able to be “packed away” in spaces of memory or in books; but rhythm depends essentially on movement and must...