Reader-response criticism
Bart Ehrman
behrman at email.unc.edu
Mon Dec 6 08:19:44 EST 1999
The two best introductions, in my opinion, are the collections of
essays first by Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman, _The Reader in the Text:
Essays on Audience and Ingterpretation (Princeton, 1980) and Jane
Thompkins _Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Structuralism_
(Johns Hopkins, 1980). These give a range of ways of engagint in reader
response (most of the people doing it in biblical studies are simply
derivative of a rather low-level form of reader response, which often
involves little more than giving new names to traditional exegetical
categories and pretending that something different is being done now; the
books I've mentioned, though, are by people outside of biblical studies
with a variety of ways of understanding the reader's relationship to the
text).
Still the most interesting collection, though (and challenging and
brilliant and -- in the later essays, most radical in a good sense), in my
opinion, is Stanley Fish, _Is There a Text in This Class_ (Harvard 1980)
-- Bart D. Ehrman
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
On Mon, 6 Dec 1999, Kevin Smith wrote:
> Dear friends
>
> Could someone recommend a good source describing reader-response
> criticism (underlying ideology and methodology)? Something online would
> be ideal, but a journal article or short book would also be fine.
>
> Thanks,
> Kevin Smith
> Port Elizabeth, South Africa
> kgs at iafrica.com
>
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