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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