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The only character is the spectator.
Alain Resnais
One of the major developments in literary criticism over the past decade has been a growing concern with the role of the reader in actualizing and creating meaning. The rise of the reader correlates with the decline of the text as a stable, decipherable entity. Whereas the American New Critics, influenced by the Romantic, organicist view of the text, searched for unifying themes and patterns of imagery, meanings embedded in the text, response critics analyze the production of meaning through the act of reading. The New Critical methodology of retrospective close reading spatialized the text; most response criticism emphasizes the dynamic, temporal aspect of the interaction between text and reader. By redefining the critical enterprise as the description of a process, rather than the discovery of a product (meaning), response critics try to evade the major pitfalls of interpretation.
Another likely reason for the shift of critical perspective is the increasingly intense and self-conscious reader involvement demanded by the texts themselves. Just as the New Critical approach offered a way of coping with the intricate, self-referential texture of Modernist writing, so response criticism is itself a response to the "ludic" emphasis in much contemporary literature. Epitomized by Nabokov's novels, such works are primarily constituted, not as representations or criticism of life, or as self-contained artifacts, but as elaborate games with their readers. Their challenge is not so much to our ideas about life as to consciousness itself, to the conventions by which we structure and apprehend "reality." Response critics are particularly attracted to such works, not only because they engage their readers so directly, but also because they dramatize the constructive nature of perception.
The relationship between response criticism and developments in hermeneutics and contemporary literature is fairly evident; less obvious, but just as important, are its connections with cinematic experience. In this essay, I propose to examine the work of two of the most influential response criticsStanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser- in relation to film. Although neither critic deals directly with film, the conception of literature underlying their methods is strikingly cinematic, while the methods themselves are often explained through film analogy. Their work is another indication of the extent to which our experience of films...