SOURCE: Wright, Terence R. “Reader Response Under Review: Art, Game, or Science?” Style 29, no. 4 (winter 1995): 529-48.

In the following essay, Wright compares and contrasts a number of texts that address issues of reader response and interpretation, noting that work by such authors as Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur can also be classified in this genre of critical theory.

One of the problems of the label “Reader-Response Criticism” is that it covers a multitude of different approaches. Jane Tompkins's anthology, Reader-Response Criticism, originally published in 1980 but reprinted many times since then and still used as a course textbook, includes essays that could equally well be labelled New Critical, Phenomenological, Structuralist, Psychoanalytic, or Deconstructive. Her introduction claims that Reader-Response Criticism “could be said to have started with I. A. Richards's discussions of emotional response in the 1920s or with the work of D. W. Harding and Louise Rosenblatt...