reader-response critic Norman Holland من محاضرات الدكتور بشار

reader-response critic Norman Holland:
P125: A very different emphasis appears in the work of Norman Holland, who usually operates at a considerable distance from the textual end of our line. More q' accurately, he has operated at different distances over the years as his focus has moved ever closer to an exclusive concentration on the responses of actual readers (he is closer to
the reader; moreover, while Iser believes in the implied reader, Holland believes in actual readers). In his 1964 book Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, Holland applied to Shakespeare's plays the terms and concepts of Freudian analysis. While he granted the usefulness of these concepts in the genetic and mimetic contexts, he thought their application in the reader¬ response context held the greatest potential كامن, مرتقب, احتمالي, محتمل, ممكنfor literary criticism, a potential (force) that, aside from a few studies such as the pioneering work of S. O. Lesser, had remained largely unexplored (another difference between him and Holland is that Holland believes in psychoanalysis while Iser believes in phenomenology). Holland continued to explore that potential with reference to a variety of texts in The Dynamics of literary Response, (1968). Here the text itself was seen as embodying various fantasiesتَخَيُّل ; تَصَوُّر ; تَوَهُّم ; مُخَيِّلَة1 and their transformations. Readers "participate" in these to the extent that their own psychic imperative أمريّ . إلزاميّ . ضروريّ allow, and to this extent the poem can "work" for them.

The poem does not exist until this kind of participation happens when the 'poem welcomes the reader and the reader enjoys the journey of reading.
In his later writings, though, Holland has been more impressed by the reader's share in the transaction. In Poems in Persons (1973), in 5 Readers Reading (1975), and in several later works, he has argued that an individual reader's psychic needs - more specifically, his or her "identity theme" - dictates that reader's perception of the text: (for Iser the text
I controls the reader's response, but for Holland the response of the actual reader controls - the text)
P126: By now the reader's share in the transaction has become almost total (because of the psyche of the reader), and we are very close to the view that a new poem is created with every reading. If two or more readers should happen to agree about an interpretation; this agreement could only arise because their "identity themes" were so similar, to begin with that they created very, similar poems as they read (it is difficult to
• have two , identical identity themes). All that remains, then, is to study readers reading.
Holland is not alarmed by this conclusion, but he is occasionally nagged by the difficulty of talking about a largely one-sided transaction (Holland is interested only in the role of the reader, that's why it seems like a one sided transaction). "The literary text may be only so many marks on a page - at most a matrix (framework) of psychological possibilities for its readers. Nevertheless only some possibilities truly fit the matrix" (12). (only certain readings should be accepted and others should be eliminated; in other words, creating meanings as well as eliminating them) This comment suggests that the text does set some boundaries to interpretation (some ignore the role of the text). But as soon as
., we try to measure these boundaries (the limits that the text sets), the problem returns from the other direction (we become very close to the text and we ignore the reader). A reader reads something, certainly, but if one cannot separate his 'subjective' response from its 'objective' basis, there seems no way to find out what that 'something' is in any impersonal sense (when this happens, this means that this reader cannot distinguish between subjectivity and objectivity). It is visible only in the psychological process the reader creates in himself by means of the literary work" (40) (so, Holland depends on psychology). But neither is there any compellingقهرى ، إضطرارى need to find out what that "something" is, for the focus of study now is precisely بدقّة . تماماً this psychological process (who thinks that the text is the determiner of meaning is wrong, it is the psychological process of reading). As we study readers reading and see the various defenses and adaptations they adopt as they confront (read and encounter) the text, we can hope to learn something about defenses and adaptations in general in all Rinds of situations.
Now, let's move to Holland's essay:

The Miller's Wife and the Processors: Questions About the Transactive Theory or Reading
Norman Holland
In contrast to Wolfgang Iser, who puts much of his emphasis on the ways the text controls the readers responses, Norman Holland is more concerned with the ways actual readers control the text (the major difference between Iser and Holland is that Iser' is interested in the implied reader whereas Holland is interested in actual readers). Thus, while Iser. offers a reader-response theory that explains why we should have similar reactions to the
I same text.. Holland offers one that explains why we very often do not .Basing his literary. theory on a psychoanalytic view of readers rather than on a phenomenological! view of reading, Holland claims that each reader will impose his or her 'identity theme" on the text, to a large extent recreating that text in the readers image (the reader's mind). And this process can be illustrated, Holland argues, even when the readers are professional literary analysis. This argument inevitably حَتْمًا . حُكْمًا raises questions about the relative weight of, "subjective" and "objective" data, about the possibility of "misreading," and about the need to account for a readers changing interpretations, questions that Holland undertakes to answer as he sets forth his own "Transactive" theory of reading and defines his position with reference to several other reader-response critics.
P126: Although we seem at this point to be very near the reader's end of the line,
we are not quite near enough to suit David Bleich. While Bleich agrees in most respects .. , with Holland's emphases (and ideas) (though not necessarily with his psychoanalytic
;. terminology), (Bleich doesn't agree with his psychoanalytic theory) he complains that Holland's refusal to distinguish between the "objective" and the "subjective" merely confuses the argument (he accuses him of being unable to distinguish between objectivity and subjectivity), and he suspects that Holland is really trying to find his way back to "objectivity." (to go very close to the textual terminal) In Bleich's view, criticism has labored too long on the mistaken assumption that the poem can be profitably considered as an "object" independent of the perceiving "subject": (He is criticizing formalists)
The assumption derived from the objective paradigm1 (pattern) that all observers have
. the same perceptual response to a symbolic object creates the illusion that the object is
real and that its meaning must reside مكث in it (formalists accept this and here he accuses Holland of accepting this). The assumption of the subjective paradigm is that collective similarity of response can be determined only by each individual's announcement of his response (the identity theme) and subsequent لاحِقٌ . تالٍcommunallyجَمَاعِيّ ; مُشَاع ; مُشْتَرَك motivated negotiative comparison ... The response must therefore be the starting point for the study of the aesthetic experience (Subjective Criticism 98).
(The point is that) By honestly and tolerantlyإِمْكانِيّ ; اِحْتِمَالِيّ exchanging information about our responses to literature, we might begin to understand our own psyches, and this self-knowledge (of our psyche), for Bleich, is the larger and more important goal, for "each person's most urgent motivations are to understand Himself' (298).
How can we understand the poem if we don't understand ourselves?! So, understanding one's self is the way to understand a poem.
P127: Finally, then, though he endorses no particular school of psychology, Bleich shares with Holland a psychological emphasis and a nearly exclusive focus on the responses of actual readers (though Bleich disagrees with Holland, but he still shares with him two points: actual readers and the psychological emphasis). Assuming, as both critics do, that the poem as independent object: is beyond our reach (because they reject the notion of determinacy of meaning i.e. the poem on its own is meaningless, so we need the psyche of the reader), they argue with some force that no other focus is really available. Even so, the wary reader may wonder why their extreme skepticismالشُّكوكيّة . الشَّكّيّة about our ability to understand poetic objects should seem so relaxed when it comes to our ability to understand perceiving subjects. For in such studies, readers must become, in turn,
I perceived objects, and objects quite as complex as poems (this refers to the transaction I and interaction between the reader and the text).
A last representative critic, and one who threatens to undermine أَفْسَدَ ; خَرَّبَmy scheme of placing affective critics at neat أنيق . دقيقintervals on the line between text and reader, is Stanley fish When fish first displayed his "affective stylistics1," his position seemed to be somewhere near Iser's. Like most recent reader-response critics, he was rebelling against the formalist's doctrine that the poem "in itself' provided an objective standard of meaning (Iser is close to the text, but he is not far from the reader), but he was rebelling more strongly against the formalists' view of the poem as a static object, something to be grasped as a whole (in relation to a work of art as an independent, ontological entity or the notion of determinacy of meaning; the whole idea is rejected by Fish). Instead, he argued, we really experience the poem as a sequence of effects (responses). (For example,) Analyzing Paradise Lost and several other seventeenth-century poems on this premise (that the poem is a sequence of effects), Fish sought to show how the poem worked on (affected) the reader, setting up a pattern of responses or a set of expectations that it later violated or undercut (when the reader reads a text he brings with him his conventions, but the poem will undercut and limit them to those conventions that are only related to it). Our experience (reading) of the poem was sequential and dynamic.
It is the opposite of static; so Fish is not a formalist; while for formalists the poem is a static object, while for Fish it is a sequence of effects. We might read a sentence in a poem then we have a certain response, but that response is not going to be final because we have another line and it is an ongoing process of reading i.e. a process of responses or sequence of effects.
The focus here was clearly on the reader, but Fish was careful to point out that he had in mind a specially qualified reader (informed reader), someone trained, as Fish himself was, in the conventions of seventeenth-century poetry. Such a figure is in some ways like Iser's "implied reader," the reader the text seems to require.
Fish's idea of informed مطلع ، ملم بموضوعة reader is similar to Iser's implied reader.
.But as Fish continued to explore the problems of interpretation, he came to feel it was really inaccurate to speak of the text as directing the reader's response (Fish seems to move up and down along the text-reader line). It would be more precise to say that the reader creates the poem in the very act of perceiving it (understanding it), and what we call "interpretation" is a more elaborate process of creation in which the formal features the reader claims to "find" in the text are "(illegitimately) assigned the responsibility for producing the interpretation which in fact produced them" (because those formal qualities are in the text and the reader reads the text; so, it is a process of interaction and interaction (is there a text in this class? 163) Fish is willing to push this argument to it's logical conclusion: each reading is a new creation and the poem that results is the creature/ of whatever "interpretive strategies" the reader has employed. The poem "in itself' has quite disappeared.
The reader's interpretive strategies are responsible for creating the meaning. Then the poem as a static object disappears,
What, then, is the interpreter interpreting? (if the text disappeared) "I cannot answer that question," Fish admits, "but neither, I would claim, can anyone else." The illusion that we are reading the "same" poem seems to derive support from the fact that many readers can agree about the texts meaning (when some readers agree on the text's meaning, this gives us the illusion that we are reading the same poem, but in fact it is not the poem alone, it is the poem but in relation to the interpretive strategies), and even more support from the fact that some readers will allow their readings of a poem to be "corrected." (by another person or by the text) But this support is itself illusory, argues Fish. Readers can agree when they are members of the same "interpretive community" (related to the same community); that is, when they share the same "interpretive strategies." And when readings are "corrected," they are simply brought into line with those agreed-upon strategies, not with the poem "itself." In Fish's later view, then, his own "affective stylistics," a way of reading that would place him nearer the textual end of our line than either Holland or Bleich, is simply one more arbitrarily chosen method, a method no more authorized by his theory than any other.
Most reader-response critics, though, continue to hold that they have very sound reasons for placing their focus where they do (some focus on the text and some focus on readers), or both combined dictate where the critics' emphasis should be if they are going to do justice to the literary experience (for example we cannot say that Rosenblatt is wrong because she is very close to the text or Fish is close to the reader or he moves up and down the line). They differ in their placement of that emphasis. (Reader-response critics can be divided into two groups:) 1-Some see the text as considerably restricting the range of readings they will accept (like Iser who believes that the text controls the responses of readers). So these critics must construct some hypothetical reader whose responses will be in conformity with the text's clues, and they show, consequently, little interest in the responses of actual readers. 2-Other reader-response critics largely reverse this emphasis. (Stating that) We must start with the responses of actual readers, they argue, because that is all we can directly discover (like Holland). $0 they complain that the first group is often practicing a type of disguised formalism and giving the text an illusory "objectivity." The first group, in turn, complains that the second, while showing us what some readers do, can never show us what they should do. So the various Rinds of reader¬ response critics find much to argue about. But they agree on one main point: since the "poem" exists only when the reader (however defined) encounters the text, literary criticism must focus on that encounter.
So, the poem exists only when the reader experiences or encounters the text