Reader- Response Criticism and TTOTS

Reader- Response Criticism and TTOTS

1. What is reader- response criticism?

   • Raises theoretical questions about whether our responses to a work are the same as its meanings, whether a work can as have as many meanings as we have responses to it, and whether some responses are more valid than others.
   • Two of the basic goals are to show that a work gives readers something to do and to describe what the reader does by way of response
   • Wayne C Booth: ‘Though no one reading can ever triumph over all others, there are better and worse readings. In short ‘my’ readings, like yours, are inherently corrigible, improvable.’
   • Rabinowitz argues that society’s ideological assumptions about gender, race, and class determine the way in which artistic works are perceived and evaluated. Reader response critics stress on what pages do to minds, and what minds do in response.
   • It is a theory, which blurs the boundary between reader, text and object.
   • Holland has argued that as readers we use ‘the literal work to symbolise and finally to replicate ourselves. We work out through the text our own characteristic patterns of desire.’

2. Dependent on whether you believe in ghosts or not at the beginning of the novella changes your whole view of the book- i.e. if the Governess is mad or not.

3. Straight Readers

   • Take seriously what is said in the prologue
   • These readers find themselves responding to a horrifying story of how Jessel and Quint have corrupted the two helpless children.
   • They justify the death of Miles through arguing that the Governess is saving his soul from being possessed by the devil.
   • ‘The straight reader is invited to be courageous in the face of intense danger and to be a tough, honest defender of decency and justice.’
   • Many consider this response to be ‘conventional, demanding little of us except intense emotional response.’

4. Ironic readers

   • ‘This reader may or may not believe that Henry James intended us to mistrust one or another of the three, but all of part what they say happened did not happen as they report it’
   • Ironic readers will look for every due that betrays the untrustworthiness in the Governess’ account. Such readers usually report pleasure in the ways in which James deliberately misleads the innocent into taking things straight.
     • ‘They also have the fun of becoming shrewd detectives, deciphering increasingly subtle clues that only the cleverest readers can catch.
   • If we become convinced that James intended an ironic reading we cannot claim that to read the story straight is ethically superior.
   • 'The Governesses courage is entirely deceptive '

5. Mazed readers

   • These readers see TTOTS as a maze with many intentionally deceptive false turns and dead ends.
   • Regardless of what James intended ‘mazed’ readers see the story as a ensuring constant frustration.
   • 'There is only one truth, that there is no truths'
   • If TTOTS is read carefully it confirms that anti-truth-truth that only mazed readers discover.

6. Wayne C Booth

   • The straight, ironic and mazed readers come from him
   • 'I can think of no other work of art that has stimulated as many contradictory readings.'
   • Does responding to this story, whether we read it as we think Henry James would want us to or read it looking for interpretations he would have never dreamed of, enhance our lives?
   • How does it ask me to respond, and will that kind of response be good or bad for me?
   • ‘Though some critics have seemed to be merely playing trivial self- promotional games, most have been engaged in the activity Henry James himself most honoured: constructing, or in our case re- constructing with his help, a complex, challenging story that becomes, almost miraculously, theirs.’