Interpretive Conventions

In Interpretive Conventions, Steven Mailloux provides a general introduction to reader-response criticism while developing his own specific reader-oriented approach to literature. He examines five influential theories of the reading process—those of Stanley Fish, Jonathan Culler, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, and David Bleich. He goes on to argue the need for a more comprehensive reader-response criticism based on a consistent social model of reading. He develops such a reading model and also discusses American textual editing and literary history

Thinking with Christian Existentialism: Freedom in Burke’s Logology and Berdyaev’s Dostoevsky

Kenneth Burke’s logology is a way of thinking about how to understand the use of language—what he calls “symbolic action”—and how to use language to make sense of various human practices, including interpretive acts. This is a dialectic in thought between rhetoric as language-use and interpretation as making-sense. In The Rhetoric of Religion Burke’s theotropic logology uses theology to interpret symbolic action and symbolic action to interpret theology. Burke extends to other interpretive projects this same rhetorical-hermeneutic strategy of analogically translating words from one domain into another, from one meaning into another. This strategy is one way Burke thinks with other authors and their texts. The present essay uses some of Burke’s published and unpublished work to show how he thinks with the Christian Existentialism of Nicholas Berdyaev and Fyodor Dostoevsky, especially on the topic of freedom. In his thinking with Berdyaev, Burke agrees with the Russian theo-philosopher about the importance of freedom. Indeed, the act of freedom, dramatized in Dostoevsky and described by Berdyaev, forms the very center of Burke’s theory of symbolic action, his Dramatism and ultimately his Logology. Freedom is the condition of possibility for human action as opposed to mere motion, and free will is the necessary product of the cycle of terms implicit in the idea of hierarchical order presented in Burke’s The Rhetoric of Religion

Evaluation and Reader Response Criticism: Values Implicit in Affective Stylistics

The reader is the central concern of reader response criticism, especially of the Iiterature-in-the-Reader Approach of Stanley Fish. Fish claims that his Affective Stylistics is only a descriptive method, and he disavows any evaluative potential for its description of the structure of the reader\u27s response. However, on several levels Affective Stylistics contains implicit values: definitional, prescriptive, comparative, and ethical. Therefore, an evaluative tendency is inherent in the method. In fact, an examination of the premises and practice of Affective Stylistics shows that disorientation during the reading process is seen as both a literary and an ethical criterion of evaluation. This disorientation is valued because of its consequences for the reader\u27s growth (the ultimate concern of Affective Stylistics). Far from being the evaluatively-neutral methodology that Fish claims, Affective Stylistics is a moral approach to literature in and of itself