The Reader in the Text: Implications of Objective and Subjective Theories of Interpretation for the Teaching of Literature.

Abstract

This study focuses on the problem of establishing the location of literary meaning and the consequences (theoretical and practical) of this determination for university students and teachers. Does meaning reside solely or principally in the art object, the writer, or the reader? If it inheres in each, what are the proportions of the mix? and how does or should the location of meaning affect the presentation of and response to literature in the classroom? These difficult questions are always implicit in my investigation of the critical systems of three very good and influential critics: E. D. Hirsch, Jr., David Bleich, and Wolfgang Iser. Hirsch is an objectivist whose two important claims are that meanings are stable, determinate, and outside the reader's consciousness, and that interpretations may be corrected and validated. I maintain that Hirsch's objectivist attitude is inherently reductive and subjectively realized. As a subjectivist, Bleich relies extensively on such authorities as Freud, Kuhn, and Polanyi to argue against the determinacy of meaning and for the proposition that the literary text is an empty, uninteresting container until a reader infuses it with meaning and value. For Bleich, the fulness of response is all. However, in this system the literary text, as a source of pleasure and information, tends to shrink from view. Against the Hirsch-Bleich background, I posit Iser's theory of aesthetic response as neither objective nor subjective, but a creative blend of both. While affirming the central place of the reader's subjectivity and the indeterminacy of meaning, Iser nevertheless restores to prominence the text as an artful fusion of form and subject matter. I value especially Iser's shift in emphasis from the results of reading to the acts of reading, and I use that emphasis finally as a basis for establishing a critical stance which advocates self-reflexivity in order to gauge the very range of the indispensable assumptions we all must make whenever we try to pass judgment on works of art.