Reader-oriented Theories and Their Application to Ernest...

Reader-oriented Theories and Their Application to Ernest Hemingway’s Hills like white elephants From the very beginning of the literature people tended to criticize the literary works according to some certain criteria. Some critics claimed that the text itself is important and some other said the author and his style is the thing that should be focused on. Form and content were the other significant elements in the history of the literary criticism. In addition, the social and political influences of the time that the work was written were also considered as important. However the reader who reads the work and his thoughts and his interpretations were not as valuable as the other criteria until late 19th and early 20th century. From†¦show more content†¦So there is another new term in the criticism, subjective perception, that is to say how a reader understands and reacts to a work. There are many approaches about how people perceive the real world, they have different results but the only thing they agree is that the perceiver is active and not passive in the act of perception. Here the perceiver, the reader, is the center of the literary criticism. According to Formalist critics a poem is about itself (its form, its imagery, its literary meaning) before it is about the poet, the reader, or the world. However, if we reject formalism and adopt the perspective of the reader, we can say that the poem has no real existence until it is read, its meaning can only be discussed by its readers. Every reader can find different things in a work because our ways of reading differ. Walker Gibson can be claimed as one of the first critics of this New Criticism. His view of literature is text-centered. It assumes the value and uniqueness of the literary work of art. In his essay, the concept of the reader is introduced as a way of unlocking further treasures in the text. Shortly, the text is still important but the reader is there to achieve some certain tasks. Here we see a new term, mock reader. As its name suggests, it is not a real reader but is a role that the real reader is invited to play for the duration of the novel. As for Gibson, the concept of the mock reader is a property of the text and not a