Reader's Response

This is what I did in my group for Reader's Response:


Hans-Robert Jauss

Hans-Robert Jauss was a German academic born on December 21, 1921. He is known for his work in response theory, and medieval and modern French literature. Jauss “defined literature as a dialectic process of production and reception (Rezeption--the term common in Germany for "response")” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response_criticism).

In 1932 to 1939, Jauss studied in Esslingen and Geislingen. In 1944, he began his studies in Prague. At Heidelberg, in 1948, at 27 years old, Jauss studied Romance Philology, Philosophy, History and Germanistik.

As for the reader’s response theory, Jauss and Iser focus the attention on the text and reader relationship which is associated with the term “horizon of expectations”. This means that “reader-response criticism establishes these horizons of expectation by reading literary works of the period in question” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Robert_Jauss). This theory deals with several social and historical environments. Jauss pointed out that when reading, the critic must study how the text was acknowledged by its current readers therefore the text’s social history must be thought about to understand it completely. At any given time in the past, readers have created the criteria on how they will judge a text.

Throughout his career, he was a guest professor at many Universities which included: the University of Zürich, the Freie Universität, Berlin, at Columbia University, New York, at Yale University, and many more.


Norman Holland

Norman Holland is an American literary critic and theorist. He focused on the response from humans on literature, film and other arts. Holland was born and raised in Manhattan. He received a B. S. in electrical engineering and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Nevertheless, leaving behind the law, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard. He taught at M.I.T.’s in the humanities department, and turned into chair of the literature section. Holland also trained at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute where he became chair. He also became chair at the English Department at the State University of New York and he accepted the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar's chair at the University of Florida.

He is known for helping with the reader-response theory. His other works are psychoanalytic psychology, using The Dynamics of Literary Response as a model. He says that each reader has a different fantasy “in” the text and then changes it into an analysis. On the other hand, having witnessed responses from real readers, Holland found differences too vast to fit his model in which responses were similar but show slight individual distinctions.

In 1973, Holland published Poems in Persons, and 5 Readers Reading, books displaying his major shift from the formalist and Dynamics theory which states that texts characterize responses. He concluded that it is readers who influence literary experiences and he now believed that we establish identities when we are born. This identity changes as life evolves into “identity theme” and Holland assumed that when figuring out a text, it was working out our personal fears, desires and needs. He agreed with Rosenblatt when she said that when reading there’s a transaction between the text and reader but he also thought that there was no such thing as an “accurate or right” interpretation.

Holland wrote 13 books which include: Death in a Delphi Seminar, which is a mystery story based on the teaching of reader’s response, The I, a book that develops a model of human nature itself, Poems in Persons, and Meeting Movies which combines interpretations of eight classic movies with the relations and memories that explain why Holland perceives the movies as he does.

References

"Reader-response criticism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 09.09.08.. 27 Sep 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reader-response_criticism&oldid=237273300.>.

"Hans Robert Jauss." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 15.08.08. 27 Sep 2008. <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hans_Robert_Jauss&oldid=232192557.>.
"Norman Holland." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 02.09.08. 27 Sep 2008. <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Norman_Holland&oldid=235815029.>.