Psychoanalytic criticism- part 3

In continuation

Reader Response criticism

Meaning of the text lie in the reader’s experience of the text.

Readers import into their reading, their personal experiences.

Norman Holland- The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968)- said that readers use literary texts to fulfill their fantasies. The reader make connection with all the parts of the text. These connections are related to the reader’s secret ‘fears’ and ‘desires’.

1975 essay- Reading and Identity

5 Readers Reading- every reader has a ‘core’ identity that generates a particular kind of reading when it interacts with the text.

Wolfgang Iser- Creative Process

The literary text activates our own faculties, enabling us to recreate the world it represents. This is what Iser terms as a Creative Process. Iser thus locates the meaning in the interaction between text and the reader’s imaginative- creative faculties.

Stanley Fish- Interpretive Communities

It is not only the individuals mind or psyche that generates meaning of the text. Meanings are generated through a consensus among a group of readers called Interpretive Communities.

Fish is interested in knowing about what happens when the text opened and consumed by the reader or what the text does to the reader.

C.G. Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Jung rejected Freudian theories of libido as restricted to the sexual and said that libido was energy that could be channelized into any field.

Secondly, he departed from Freud and gave his ideas of archetypes.

Freud say the dreams as proceeding from unconscious. Jung said that the self was also influenced by social norms and the world around it. Jung suggested that human imagination draws upon images and ideas from myths and legends that occur across cultures and time – spans. These images is what he termed – archetypes and they emerge from ‘collective Unconscious’, common to all mankind.

Northrop Fry developed Jungian theories to study literary texts.