The New Imperative in Literary Criticism

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is in the first instance to situate the relative importance of the reader and the text in contemporary literary criticism. The basic tenets of the New Criticism are explored and illustrated, and the doctrine of the reader response criticism which has followed it is examined through the work of two of its leading proponents, Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser. It is argued that the decline of the New Criticism and the rise of reader response criticism can be explained in terms of a diminished notion of public verse and the ascendancy of a countervailing notion of private verse. Reader response criticism is then assessed in terms of its contribution to an understanding of the process of reading literature. It is concluded that there is a need for a new imperative in literacy criticism which conceives literary understanding in terms of a communication process in which both text and reader are granted importance.