Reader Response and Hypertext – Part II© Jessica Laccetti
Apr 1, 2005
In pointing to the different types of readers required by these texts one can only open up a series of questions on reading and readers. In addition to the crucial question, "what is the narrative about," each hyperfiction also engages other questions. Who is the "you" who chooses which character to follow and who is the "you" who must choose between the path of pins and the path of needles? Who must select "stranger," "woman," "street corner," or "waiting?" Before attempting to broach these questions it is necessary to go back to the beginning. As Iser suggests, where a "literary text draws from two different systems which exist outside the text itself: the system of its historical situation and social norms and the system of previous literatures and literary norms," so too must a subjective reading draw both from its position in time (the year is 2005), and the specific experiences of the feminist reader (a young Italian/South African/Canadian woman reading in the light of academia, which as Showalter explains, is a male-centred "interpretive community").
Beginning with Rosenblatt's rejection of the New Criticism of the late 1930s through the 1960s , her advanced study focused on describing specific readers' processes of engagement and involvement for composing their own "poem - or construction of a text," and began what is currently known as reader-response criticism. Ahead of her time, Rosenblatt argued against critics (like Wimsatt et al.) who assumed that the texts themselves were central and that teachers were to teach solely skills of close, concise, and attentive analysis while systematically discouraging individual expression and subjective reading responses. Rosenblatt's erudite reconfiguration of reading focussed on each student as an individual and independent reader resisting any overarching claim of a singular meaning in the text,
The special meaning, and more particularly, the submerged associations that these words and images have for the individual reader will largely determine what the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the peculiar contribution of the text.
Following on from Rosenblatt, (almost forty years later), critics and theorists such as Iser, Fish and Riffaterre argue that questions of the literary text and its meaning cannot be detached from the role the reader takes. Although under the umbrella term of reader response theory or reception theory (the latter most accurately refers to the German school of Receptionkritik represented by Jauss) there are many critics who offer drastically different views and approaches to texts, there is one thing they share in common. They all agree that the meaning of the text is created through the reading act. Countering the New Criticism conception where the only meaning resides under the surface of the text, like a wisdom tooth, "waiting patiently to be extracted," reader response theorists recognise that varied interpretations of texts are possible and depend on the dynamic co-operation of the reader, the text, and the author whose presence in hyperfictions is tangible as clearly as the links themselves.
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