Unlike such rigorous theoretical approaches to literature as deconstruction, psychoanalysis, or Marxism, reader-response criticism is less a single, unified method of literary analysis than a collection of varied approaches with one special interest in common--namely, the role of the reader in interpreting--or experiencing--a work of literature.

Philosophers from Plato to the nineteenth century recognized the central importance of the reader in their theories of art or poetry. Plato's banishment of poets from his Republic was due as much to the unhealthy influence that poetry had upon the reader as to its suspect ontological status as an "imitation of an imitation." Horace, on the other hand, saw the legitimate purpose of poetry as "to please and to instruct" the reader. In both of these cases, however (and for most of the two thousand years since) the reader is viewed as an essentially passive recipient of the work of art.

With Shelley's declaration that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century shifted the focus of literary criticism from the reader to the author. But it was not until the advent of New Criticism, with its focus solely on the formal elements of the text (to the exclusion of authorial intention and cultural or historical significance) that a consideration of the reader's role in literary interpretation was condemned as the "affective fallacy."

Once a consideration of the reader's role had been identified as a critical heresy, those who chose to focus on this aspect of the literary endeavor, whether from a structuralist, psychoanalytic, or phenomenological perspective, were grouped together under the umbrella term of reader-response theory.

Unlike their predecessors, however, contemporary reader-oriented theorists view the reader not as a passive recipient, but rather as an active participant in the construction of meaning. Regardless of the differences between the various approaches, however, a concern for the reader's role in the process of literary interpretation can be remarkably--and uniquely--fruitful in the study of science fiction.

Structuralism - The Reader in the Text

The various approaches to reader-response can be distinguished from one another according to where they place the locus of meaning--in the text, in the reader, or in the relationship between the two. While some reader-response theories presume that a text possesses a fixed, determinate meaning that the reader may or may not correctly discern, others regard the individual reader as the source of meaning, while still others see meaning as a transaction between the reader and the text.

Even the most traditional of reader-response approaches can cast new light upon a literary work by acknowledging that the text itself calls upon the reader to be actively involved in the production of meaning, even if that meaning is assumed to be identical for everyone.

Amidst the plethora of different types of narrators that can be found in a literary text--first-person, omniscient, fly-on-the-wall, and so on--critic Gerald Prince calls attention to the easily-overlooked existence of the narratee. This is the figure within the text to whom the text is addressed, as opposed to the actual reader of the text.

Sometimes this figure is more obvious than others--in "Story of Your Life," for example, Ted Chiang foregrounds the narratee by writing the story in second person. But even when otherwise invisible, the narratee shapes the story by means of the knowledge, experience, class, gender, and beliefs that the author attributes to him or her.

The unique relationship between the narrator and the narratee in science fiction makes this form of analysis especially interesting. While it is often easy to overlook the role of the reader in a contemporary realistic novel, the very impossibility of a present-day narratee for a futuristic narrative forces us to pay attention to this figure. As Samuel R. Delany explains in The American Shore: "With the reader located firmly at the only real present, and the subject and the speaker organized out from that present, we see that the fictivity of the science fiction story is structured differently from the fictivity of the mundane fiction story."

The opening line of Jules Verne's Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (to choose just one instance) provides an example of this: "The year 1866 was marked by a bizarre development, an unexplained and downright inexplicable phenomenon that surely no one has forgotten." Since Verne's narrative is purely fictional, the reader--even Verne's contemporary reader--finds him or herself in the position of that "no one" who has, indeed, "forgotten" the events of the novel.

Reader-response theory can also shed new light on a literary work through its capacity to view the text not as an object in space but as an experience in time. The "affective stylistics" of Stanley Fish is based, in part, on the fact that readers don't defer their interpretation of a story, a poem, or even a single sentence until the end, but constantly create meaning based upon limited knowledge. As new information is gathered, prior interpretations must be modified or rejected. While other critics might ignore this process, Fish sees the modification of prior interpretations as an inherent part of the text's meaning.

One example of this from science fiction is Joanna Russ's "When it Changed," in which the reader is led to assume that the narrator (who has a wife, goes hunting and fights duels) is male, only to discover later that she is female. The experience of correcting this error is an essential part of the story, and one that can be more easily achieved in a science fictional narrative than a work of contemporary realism.

Psychoanalysis - The Reader as the Text

While the reader-response approaches of Prince and Fish (in his early work, at least) uncover aspects of the reading experience that are invisible to or ignored by more conventional critical tools, they assume that the reading experience should be identical for all readers. Subjective critics such as Norman Holland and David Bleich, on the other hand, begin with the fact that different readers inevitably produce differing interpretations of a single text.

Bleich concentrates primarily on the social and linguistic processes by which readers make their subjective textual experiences communicable and meaningful to others. In a classroom setting, according to Bleich, readers take their personal and idiosyncratic responses to a text and, through negotiation with others, produce a collectively meaningful interpretation that accords with the aims of the social group. In this model it is not necessary for readers to "correct" their initial response to the text, merely to bracket off those aspects of that response that are irrelevant to the group as a whole.

Holland, on the other hand, is more concerned with the individual reader's personal response to the text than he is with negotiated meaning. He accounts for the variety of interpretations produced by different readers through the principle that "identify re-creates itself." Borrowing the concept from Heinz Lichtenstein, Holland asserts that every reader brings a unique "identity theme" with him or her into the reading of a text, and it is this identity theme that will shape the reading experience.

Holland goes on to describe this process as one of defense, fantasy, and transformation, or DEFT. "Each reader," argues Holland, "re-creates the work in terms of his own identity theme. First he shapes it so it will pass through the network of his adaptive and defensive strategies for coping with the world. Second, he re-creates from it the particular kind of fantasy and gratification he responds to." Finally, the reader transforms "raw fantasy into a total experience of esthetic, moral, intellectual, or social coherence and significance" (Holland, "Unity Identity Text Self").

Science-fiction, perhaps more than any other genre, brings the two elements of unbending reality and wish fulfillment into conflict, making Holland's approach especially promising for the genre. If, as some critics have suggested, Tom Godwin's well-known short story "The Cold Equations" satisfies a male reader's suppressed desire to punish a woman, then the scientific laws that demand the stowaway's sacrifice become a means of overcoming the reader's defensive strategies, or of transforming the raw fantasy into an experience of "social coherence and significance."

Holland finds the most difficult part of the DEFT process to be the initial encounter of a new text with the reader's psychological defenses: "First, adaptations must be matched; and, therefore, we interpret the new experience in such a way as to cast it in terms of our characteristic ways of coping with the world." If readers are unable to process a text in such a way that their fears can be subdued by their own characteristic coping mechanisms, they will reject the text altogether. The perennial debate concerning plausibility in science fiction is perhaps a covert means of rejecting a troubling text.

The greatest difficulty raised by Holland's reader-response approach, however, lies in the fact that it foregrounds the reader, and his or her own identity theme, to the point that the text itself becomes invisible to the critic. A third approach, one that acknowledges the roles of both the text and the reader, may resolve this difficulty.

Phenomenology - The Reader and the Text

Occupying the middle ground between the structuralist and the psychoanalytical models of reader-response criticism is what may be the most promising reader-oriented theory for the analysis of science fiction: the phenomenological approach of Wolfgang Iser.

Developed by Edmund Husserl in the early twentieth century, phenomenology was intended to be a "science of consciousness" founded on the study of phenomena, or the world as it is actually perceived, rather than of an objective world that we suppose to lie beneath our perceptions of it. Needless to say, phenomenological criticism is more concerned with the reader's perception of a literary work than with the formal elements of the text itself.

The phenomenological method was applied to literary criticism by Roman Ingarden and Hans Robert Jauss in an attempt to account for changing interpretations of literary texts from one historical era to another. Their approaches were applied to the individual reader and introduced to the United States by Wolfgang Iser in The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading. Iser views the written text as a kind of blueprint from which each individual reader produces his or her own "concretized" experience of the literary work. This is achieved by filling the interpretive openings or "gaps" that all texts inevitably contain.

Like Fish, Iser also emphasizes the temporal aspect of reading, noting that in the process of reading a text "we look forward, we look back, we decide, we change our decisions, we form expectations, we are shocked by their nonfulfillment, we question, we muse, we accept, we reject." Each sentence in a literary text "opens up a particular horizon, which is modified, if not completely changed, by succeeding sentences" (Iser, The Implied Reader).

But Iser departs from the affective stylistics of Stanley Fish in his acknowledgment that different readers will fill the "gaps" in a written text in different ways. Iser describes the relationship between the written text and the reader's realization of the text by likening the literary work to the sky at night: "The 'stars' in a literary text are fixed; the lines that join them are variable."

In Iser's theory of reading there is no conflict between the different interpretations of various readers; there is, however, a tension which exists between the polysemantic nature of the text as it exists on the page and the consistency which we, as readers, require. According to Iser, although a text invites any number of readings, we as readers seek but one at a time. Because of this, there is a tension between the numerous possibilities which the text has to offer and our own desire for consistency.

Iser's phenomenological approach is particularly useful for the study of science fiction due to the fact that the gaps in a science-fictional text can exist not just on the level of plot and character, but in the setting itself. In a contemporary realistic text the reader must fill the gaps between specific plot points, or perhaps in the psychological motivations of the fictional characters, but the fictional world itself often has no such gaps--or, more accurately, it is often left as one vast gap to be filled by the reader's own world, a generic or "everyday" background to be ignored. In a science-fictional text, on the other hand, the contextual gaps in the setting must be filled by the reader as much as the narrative gaps in characterization and plot.

In the opening paragraphs of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, the reader listens in on a telephone conversation between Mr. Tagomi, a Japanese bureaucrat, and Robert Childan, a San Francisco antique dealer. In addition to using the clues from the conversation to construct images of the characters and their relationship to one another, the reader must also recognize the fact that, in this fictional world, the United States has lost the Second World War, and the west coast is occupied by the Japanese. Rather than simply filling in the narrative gaps against a passively assumed and familiar background, then, the reader must construct an entire world from the center out, based upon the textual clues provided by the author.

Interpretive Communities

In recent years various reader-response theorists have turned to the concept of what Stanley Fish terms "interpretive communities" to more fully account for the diversity of readers' interpretations of literary texts. Fish has moved away from his early belief that all "informed readers" will arrive at similar interpretations of a single text, and now recognizes the fact that various interpretive communities will shape their members' reading experiences in different ways.

Ironically, while Fish uses the concept to account for diversity of interpretation, Holland sees membership in a particular interpretive community as a means of accounting for similarity of interpretation between individuals with different identity themes.

Perhaps more than any other genre, science fiction cultivates its own interpretive community of readers through conventions, letter columns, and e-mail discussion groups. The effect of this community on the reading, as well as the writing, of science fiction, is one more area in which reader-response criticism and science fiction offer a promising field for further inquiry.

Bleich, David. Readings and Feeling: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1975.

Delany, Samuel R. The American Shore. Elizabethtown, New York: Dragon Press, 1978.

Fetterly, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Holland, Norman N. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Prince, Gerald. "Introduction to the Study of the Narratee." Poétique 14 (1973): 177-96.

Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.