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Essay about Reader-Response vs. New Criticism

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New Criticism vs. Reader-Response A piece of work can be evaluated in plenty of ways. Critique methods such as Reader-Response, Deconstructive Criticism, New Criticism, and many others act as examples of literary evaluations. All of the critique methods share similarities, but differ in other ways. Reader-Response and New Criticism, for example, share characteristics but they are also two very opposing things. Reader-Response focuses on attention towards the text influenced by the reader’s thoughts. New Criticism aims towards the text with no influence, but the text alone. The two methods share the same features such as excluding the author’s intentions and recognizing details from the texts, and they also contrast by having a different …show more content…

The criticism encourages the reader to explore his thoughts while reading a text. A person may read something over and over again and interpret a different meaning every time. For Reader-Response, the type of focuses required comes from the reader. Personal experiences and opinions are what trigger the message of the text. They help the reader understand the text better because now they have involved themselves within the text, not just the content by itself, like New Criticism, for example. These factors are what make the responses subjective. For example, the quote from The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien says, “He should’ve carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long,” (618). The quote can be interpreted in a few ways. “ . . .And touched that left knee all night long,” could be comparing the action of ‘touching’ to sexual relations. The quote could also be taken in a literal sense, having the knee actually touched by the character’s hands. Another part of the quote, “ . . .tied her to the bed . . .” could possibly mean that he wanted to keep her in bed all night and spend time with her; however, in a literal sense, he probably truly could have wanted to tie her to the bed. As stated earlier, defining the meaning of a text for reader-response criticism requires the reader to state what they probably thinks the words mean. Furthermore,

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