“A specific reader and a specific text at a specific time and place: change any of these, and there occurs a different circuit, a different event—a different poem.” (14)
The central importance of this factor of the reader’s focus on attention is assumed in Coleridge’s famous statement about poetry: “the reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasure activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself.” Buy the ticket, take the ride, in other words. (Thanks Doc) 28)
“The reader responds to the verbal stimuli derived from the text, but at the same time he must draw selectively on the resources of his own fund of experience and sensibility to provide and organize the substance of his response. Out of this the new experience, the literary work, is formed (43)
“The writings of a Hitler might arouse powerful emotions of hate in a reader, but this would still be an efferent reading, which might, for example, lead him to rush out and engage in mob action.” (45)
“We are not vicarious or substitute Juliets…we are living in the world of the work which we have created under guidance of the text and are entering into new potentialities of our own natures.” (68)
“In our schools, the emphasis in the teaching of reading is almost entirely on the efferent stance. Comprehension in reading tests is assumed mainly to be of this type. It is not possible here to detail the methods of the teaching of literature in school and college that tend often to develop an efferent attitude, even toward the literary work of art." (79)
“We must recognize that the reader brings to or adds to the nonverbal or socio-physical setting his whole past experience of life and literature.” (81)
“Impressionist critics were charge with forgetting the poem itself as they pursued the adventures of their souls among masterpieces” (102)…"given the fact that a poem is re-created each time it is read, can we validly speak of anything as being the poem itself?" (104)
“Probably no work of art can suffice as interpretation of another work.” (136)
“The solution, as I see it, lies in rejecting the preoccupation with some illusory unspecifiable absolute or correct reading or ideal reader. Let us look at the reality of the literary enterprise, or “literature” as a certain kind of activity of human beings in our culture…we need to stress the basic affinity of all readers of literary works of art. The general reader needs to honor his own relationship with the text.” (140)
“The solution, as I saw it, is the education of a reading public that would appreciate aesthetic values and accord the serious artist freedom and support." (142)
In light of some illusory unspecifiable absolute or ideal reading, all readings are failures. The emphasis should be rather on a creative transaction, a coming-together of a human being (with all that implies of past experience and present preoccupations) and a text (with all that implies of potentialities for participation)."(144)
“Literary judgments—on, say, “Byzantium” or “Middlemarch”—are actually judgments on the potentialities of those texts to enable readers to evoke an aesthetic transaction.” (153)
“Another consideration: the reader undertakes to see the work as a whole, yet in actual literary transactions it may sometimes be some minor part that had intensely personal reverberations. A poem may live in the memory through only one phrase that suddenly embodies for us the ‘joy’ and the ‘juice of life.’” (160)
Hopefully by ending on this note, the method of this particular post becomes clear. I’m also ending with this last quote in hopes that it will generate a bulletin board of sorts—what pieces of text, phrases of books, lines in movies, have sparked you? For me, one of the strongest was from "The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides: We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."
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