Reader, Readability And Relativity In The Criticism Of Propp, Barthes, And Fish Literary Analysis

The context of the plot found in “The School” presents the readers with the timeless question of the meaning of life. However, this question does not seem to present itself immediately to the reader. In order to appreciate Barthelme’s work in this piece, it is crucial that one utilizes the New Criticism’s approach to reading. New Criticism was first developed in the 20th century and it makes reading and interpreting literature a systematic activity. New Criticism as an analytical tool helps the readers to understand and gain insight into all forms of the written works through sheer understanding and by reading closely. This means that our focus

The important thing in the reader response theory is the interpretive of the readers itself, rather than the author or even the text. The theory gives the competence to the reader to critic the text, however with the condition the readers have the evidence or research from other people toward the critic. The way of their interpretation may reveal their identity, because the reader gives the critic depends on their knowledge and experience (Philip Goldstein, 2005). Everyone has their own perspective toward anything, especially for the literary works. Each of people perspective is unique. That is why reader response was created. The theory is about the transaction between the writer and the reader. The writer composed a meaningful text, whereas the reader composed an interpreted meaning of the text. Reader response is not about destroying the writer’s idea, but it is more constructing the work itself (Louise M. Rosenblatt, 1988).

Many people believe that material things will bring you peace and happiness. That is not always that case though.Everyone at some point in their life had gone through something that they thought would have a major positive impact on their life, but ultimately, it affected them very negatively. These can include anything from money, to power, even to women. Bernard Malamud explains these example in his book, The Natural, with his character, Roy Hobbs. Roy is the Knights star baseball player, when all goes wrong. He starts to chase different women, believing that those people will lead him to happiness in the end. Roy Hobbs is the main character in the book, The Natural, who finds himself in tough situations, and finally discovers that what he wanted from the start, won’t actually make him happy in the end.

Literature is such a beautiful thing because it does not give us an answer to it's questions. There are so many iffy spots that leave us to develop our own thoughts and feelings toward the piece of work. This is an interesting factor because at many times it affects us in a different way and can develop us as an individual. When reading a piece of literature, one person can interpret it in different ways than another person reading the same piece of work. I remember analyzing poems with my English class in the previous years and when we were asked to interpret it, we all had different answers. Sometimes what I got out of the poem didn’t even go close to the direction that my classmate

In the process of writing, regardless of the form it takes, thesis or narrative for example, the purpose of the piece has several lenses that shape how the reader perceives the material. Of the less important lenses that shape the piece, mood, word choice, and rhetoric are only a few. These elements of the work, while minimal in a relative sense, accomplish the same as other, more important components, they influence how the reader perceives the material, how it is understood. If one is to effectively convey the message of the piece, one must first look at how the any reader perceives any text. This idea of how the reader perceives is a culmination of all the devices employed by the author. The idea is for the author to craft an aggregate

The deconstruction school of literary criticism is different from the formalist and new critics, as well as the reader-response

When a novel is revealing, witty and whimsical it unlocks the hidden truths about literature as discussed in the book How To Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster. This book is written in second person so the reader can experience Foster’s personality that is directed towards them. A reader is given a fresh and clear perception on literature to understand what is being read. Foster clarifies the way writers uses symbols and themes. He believes by analyzing the deeper meaning in literature will help foster a better reader.

Throughout my educational career, I was taught to be critical, but not analytical to a great extend. In high school, I was never taught to think about why an author writes the way he or she intended. Rather, I was only to focus on the analysis of the novel, itself. However, this course has extended my knowledge in that it allows me to think how and why a novel is written the way it is. I also learned that every author has their own ways of communicating to the intended audience. They do so by manipulating pathos, ethos, and logos, which is the Rhetorical Triangle.

A text can be defined as a collection of ideas and the communication of these ideas to the audience. The seen from the film Inside Llewyn Davis is an example of this. The first way we can examine this text for clues to give us context. In this seen Llewyn becomes upset and loudly heckles an older woman playing a song on a stage at a small music venue. This text can be examined in numerous ways. In this seen opening we see a group of what look to be Irish folk singers just fining there set they introduce an older woman from Arkansas who is a American folk singer. She starts by saying “Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Yer so nice. Thank you. This is my first show in New York” The language that is used to heckle older woman from Arkansas can be

When reading a text, there are many ways to gain a deeper understanding of the text. One of the methods a reader can use to increase their understanding is rhetorical reading. Rhetorical reading “involves more than ‘agreeing’ or ‘disagreeing’ with the text. Instead, readers must read thoroughly and think critically to understand how an argument is working.” (Heasley et al. 89). Rhetorical reading requires the reader to focus on the text and pay close attention to the rhetorical situation. The rhetorical situation consists of the writer, reader, text/purpose, and context. “When you think about these elements and pose questions about the options available to you as a writer, you are analyzing your rhetorical situation” (Ede 51). Gaining an understanding of each will enable students to recognize if a text is or is not responsive to its rhetorical situation.

Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor and critic. He is mainly known for his trilogy that investigates, using fiction, the history of Nigeria. The trilogy begins with Things Fall Apart, followed by No Longer at Ease and ended with Arrow of God. Furthermore, in this critically analytical essay, through a feminist perspective, a chapter of his second novel, No Longer at Ease, published in 1960, will be discussed. The setting of the novel is Lagos, Nigeria and Umuofia, Nigeria during the 1950s, before Nigeria attained independence from Great Britain. The novel, No Longer at Ease begins with Obi Okonkwo on trial, charged for accepting a bribe. However, using flashback, the author takes us back to the point before Obi’s departure

According to Iser, any literary text which is a product of the Writer’s intentional acts part-ly controls the response of a reader; however, this includes an abundance of gaps. In order to comprehend more clearly, the reader must take action in active participation in attempting to cre-atively fill these gaps with the given information of the test put before him; Thereby allowing the Reader and the text to undergo a transactional process.

the whole novel: “the linguistic pattern of choices realizes a primitive pattern of cognition, which in turn is the key to the tragic vision of the novel.”(Leech & Short, 2001: 32) Halliday being the widely acknowledged precursor of functional stylistics, the eminent German linguist-critic Leo Spitzer (1887-1960), is likewise father of literary stylistics. In his insistence that the smallest detail of language can unlock the “soul” of a literary work, he maintains the task of stylistics is to provide a hard-and-fast technology of analysis: I would maintain that to formulate observation by means of words is not to cause the artistic beauty to evaporate in vain intellectualities; rather, it makes for a widening and deepening of the aesthetic taste. It is only a frivolous love that cannot survive intellectual definition; great love prospers with understanding. (Leech & Short, 2001: 2) A question which is often asked in this connection is “At which end do we start, the aesthetic or the linguistic?” The image used by Spitzer of the “philological circle”, the circle of understanding, however, seems to suggest there is no logical staring point. Spitzer argues that the task of Linguistic-literary explanation proceeded by the movement to and fro from linguistic details to the

Any literary work is unique. It is created by the author in accordance with his vision and is permeated with his idea of the world. The reader’s interpretation is also highly individual and depends to a great extent on his knowledge and personal experience. That’s why one cannot lay down a fixed “model” for a piece of critical appreciation. Nevertheless, one can give information and suggestions that may prove helpful.

Fish’s Reader Response Criticism is composed of two interdependent ideas: first, that the meaning of texts is shaped by the reading experience itself, and second, that these meanings cannot be judged to be correct or incorrect, but merely belonging to one “interpretive community” or another. The first idea may be identified as the executive aspect of Reader Response Criticism because it analyzes the act of reading, while the second idea is the epistemological aspect of the theory because it circumscribes the knowledge we can acquire about a text to the merely relative. Studied independently, each aspect of Reader Response Theory offers by itself strong arguments countervailing the formalist stance of the New Critics. But as we will see,