Phenomenology and Reader-Response

                During the last classes we have been working in the topics of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. First of all, it is important to know that in phenomenology the important matter is the relation between phenomena and consciousness, all factors like the historical context, conditions of production and all external facts of the literary text are not taken into account. Moreover, it is focus on the conscious of the author that is manifested through the work itself, and the reader experience not only the stylistic and the semantic aspects that are given by the text, but also it is concerned with the deep structures that are impregnated by the world perception of the author. Furthermore, Hermeneutics is very similar to phenomenology but focusing in historical interpretation.

                Then, the second topic that we were working on was the reader response criticism. Which states that all the believes and experiences of the reader cannot be omitted from the literature, and taking that into account it analyzes how is the reader response when he or she reads the text.  It has different categories or kinds of reader response. Some of them focus on the meaning which is created through the relation between the text and the reader, other focuses more in the cognitive process that the reader has when he is reading each part of the text. Another focuses in that there is not text, but the text is created by the reader response to it. Other kind of reader response is centered in what the readers’ responses reveal about themselves. And the last one states that there is not a subjective response but just social conventions created by interpretative communities. But as a conclusion of this paragraph, there is not possible separation of all the experiences, and all what we are from the text that we are reading and how we see and understand it.

References:

Tyson, L. (2006). Reader Response Criticism, In Critical Theory Today. (pp. 169-208). Routledge. New   York.

Eagleton, T.  (1996).Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory. In Literary Theory (pp. 47-78). Oxford: Blackwell  publishing.

What is literature?

Eagleton exposed different ways of seeing what literature could be; but, he also gave arguments that showed that those different ways of seeing what literature is could be wrong or at least mistaken. This could be mainly because sometimes it is hard to tell whether a text is literature or not; and actually, despite it is very hard to distinguish when a text is literature or not, the real difficulty is not to say if a text is literature, because the real difficulty is not to tell whether it is literature or nor, but to know why it is literature or why not. Eagleton gave to the reader some examples in which sometimes different perspectives of seen what literature is works perfectly, but others in which those definitions do not work. And finally, Eagleton do not show a clear definition of what literature is, because there is not such definition.

There are different examples that are given to the reader have both strengths and weaknesses. And there is one that specially caught my attention which summed means that anything you think is literature is literature. This sets the definition to something very simple and very subjective. But, that also means that if two people have different opinions of whether a text is literature or not there would be like a shock. However, I actually found this definition very interesting because we could vary it a little and say that literature is what most people think is literature. And actually I think that is the way it had worked for a while. Obviously, it is not a perfect definition, but it is an idea that came to my mind and actually it caught my attention.

Eagleton, T.  (1996). What is literature?. In Literary Theory (pp. 1-14). Oxford: Blackwell              publishing.