Reader-response criticism

as they “wits” more than poets (Emerson 634). In response to Emerson’s call for an American Poet to express the continent’s particular beauty, Poets emerge. Walt Whitman specifically sets out to respond to Emerson, and begins working on and finally submits his poetry collection Leaves of Grass in 1844. In particular, Song of Myself was an attempt to craft the American epic poem desired by Emerson that would stand contemporary to Homer. Modern readers are likely to know the collection from John…

In an interview with Chris Dickens (Editor of Shaun Of The Dead) Dickens states that when an editor is choosing shots they are choosing the shots they like. It is a matter of taste, but what creates that taste is the understanding of the meaning and purpose of that film in such detail that your choices are made with purpose that aids the film effectively (HDFilmtools, 2009). Dickens statement summarizes the importance of the knowledge behind filmmaking and how the editor needs to do research on…

Wolfgang Iser’s essay The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach, delineates the author-reader relationship in completion of a literary work, where the author plays the ‘artistic’ role, which is that of the creator of the text, and the reader plays the ‘aesthetic’ role, which, he mentions is the process of the ‘realization’ of the text . (Iser 279) He refers to Roman Ingarden’s “Intentionale Satzkorrelate” (Intentional sentence correlatives), where the interaction of the otherwise…

The short story chosen was taken from the book titled Malaysian Short Stories (Fernando, L. (Ed.), 2005). I chose to write on K.S. Maniam’s short story- The Dream of Vasantha. The Dream Of Vasantha depicts a hardworking widow and her dream of seeing her son be a humble yet successful person. Maniam plotted the story with an introduction of Vasantha’s daily routine of washing clothes at the houses of Mr. Pillai and Mr. Ganda Singh. Vasantha reminisces the death of her husband too. As Vasantha…

Amit Chaudhuri is a versatile writer of contemporary Indian English Literature. He depicts domestic life, gender roles and social relations. His works reflect the Indian values and Bengali sensibility. Chaudhuri’sFreedom Song is about the family afflicted by old age. The young people are doing all kinds of things that are perceived as idiosyncratic. It deals with ordinary people’s consciousness. The old couple, Khuku and Shib live in Calcutta. The novel chronicles the lives of Bhola and his…

There is currently a growing body of research in postcolonial criticism and analysis of Renaissance literature. Inspired by efforts to decolonize the canon, I am interested in studying the roots of colonialism in the Renaissance and its influence on the modern world. In my second year of undergraduate study, I was introduced to postcolonial literature and theory in an introductory course with Dr. Stanka Radović. Reading polemic texts, as well as ‘subalterns’ writing back or breaking away from…

My initial experience with being a reader began with a Dr. Seuss book when I was a very young boy, a colorful book with walking-talking cats and dogs, treehouses, and a party. I am not incredibly confident that I indeed am able of correctly recalling the details of the book that got read to me or by me when no one else would just about every day for what might have been a whole year or just a few short months of obsession, either way the memory of reading that Dr. Seuss book stuck in such a way…

In her scholarly article “Why I’m Still Writing Women’s Literary History”, Professor Devoney Looser astutely asserts that women’s literary history is a field that is alive and thriving and therefore deserves to be treated as such. Her argument centers around addressing concerns expressed by various colleagues of hers that the academic field of women’s studies is now “passe” due to taking a “separatist” approach. Looser explicitly states that her article is therefore “a credo that has its origins…

I am going to summarize and analyze the novel named ‘’The Crying a Lot’’. This novel belongs to Thomas Pynchon who is one of the best in postmodernist literature. I will explain 1960s period, short summarize of book and communication problem in the novel. Firstly I want to start with short entrance about the period when Thomas Pynchon wrote this novel. He is an American postmodern novelist. His novels contains lots of question. It was written in the 1960s. In this decade there were lots of…

In C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis attempts to distinguish how good and bad readers interpret books. 'Let us try to discover how far it might be plausible to define a good book as a book which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read in another” (1). Although Lewis’s essay is primarily dominated by “the many and the few,” the paramount message of the book pertains to the ego; moreover, how the literary experience heals the wound without undermining individuality.…